ENGLISH 7797 ''Cli-Fi: Fictions of Climate Change'' at Middlebury College - SPRING 2017 SEMESTER

ENGLISH 7797  ''Cli-Fi: Fictions of Climate Change'' at Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont - Summer 2017 SEMESTER

Taught by Professor Jennifer Wicke    /
M, W 2–4:45

[NOTE: Dr Wicke will be teaching a similar course at a university in California in the fall 2017 semester, according to media sources.]

Literature has always explored the nature of the world. With awareness that cataclysmic climate change of human causation threatens the environment worldwide, once apocalyptic visions of a drowned, blazing, denatured world are now becoming reality. Cli-Fi describes an important genre of fiction, film, and media that gives images and narratives to global climate change, as well as a way of reading, thinking, and acting in the world. Drawing on literature and film, with interdisciplinary materials from science, policy, poetry, indigenous movements, and activism, the course enters the environmental humanities conversation. We’ll see how ''Cli-Fi'' bears witness to the ecological emergency affecting the planet and our lives, and how it offers solutions for survival, healing, and even for a more just and resilient future. In the context of climate change, fiction tells us the truth.


Texts:

Mark Maslin, Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford);
I’m With the Bears: Short Stories for a Damaged Planet, intro. Bill McKibben (Verso);
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Oxford);
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest (Tor);
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (Grand Central);
Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (Anchor);
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (Harper Perennial);
Lydia Millet, Mermaids in Paradise (Norton);
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (Vintage);
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Vintage);
Monique Roffey, Archipelago: A Novel (Penguin);
Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead).