TOPICS: CLIMATE FICTION: WRITING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS in Fall 2024 (CL3091A)

The way we tell stories shapes the kinds of actions we take – stories carry the past over into the future, transforming us as they do. In 2016, critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh suggested that the major forms in which we have told our stories over the past couple of hundred years – the novel and then the feature film – are not well-designed to make us see and feel climate change: the combination of slow geological time-frames and sudden weather events challenges our capacity to represent realistically. But at least since the 1990s, writers and film-makers have been experimenting in the genre known since 2010 as ‘Cli-fi’, or ‘climate fiction’. We’ll look at American texts – probably including work by Octavia Butler, Ling Ma, Juliana Spahr, Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson – and texts from regions more directly exposed to the effects of climate change, and with different traditions of representation, probably including work by Tloto Tsamaase and Nnedi Okorafor, Arif Anwar and Saad Hossain, and Rita Indiana. How have these writers – and the documentary and feature-film makers we will also explore – experimented with form and incorporated and responded to growing scientific knowledge? How do these stories serve us as we try to organize our responses to environmental crisis?