HUAS80047 - Telling New Stories: Literary Imagination and the Climate Crisis

Course Description

In a lecture series given at the University of Chicago in 2016 titled “The Great Derangement,” novelist Amitav Ghosh argued for a need to respond to the climate emergency with “new stories” that would reflect a new understanding of our past as well as our future: we can only imagine solutions to this existential crisis by reimagining the stories we tell ourselves about our relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world. In this course, we will discuss contemporary literary works that search for these new ways of thinking and telling and consider how a more nuanced understanding of our planet and its history might help us work toward a more sustainable future. Our readings will include work by authors such as Octavia Butler, John Kingsnorth, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Rebecca Solnit.

Course Outline

Course Syllabus

Notes

Online registration deadline: Sep 19, 5 PM CT