APUC11014 - 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 closes Friday, March 15 at 5 pm CT.

You will receive an invitation to join the Canvas site for the course a week before the class begins. The Zoom link for the course will be in Canvas. For more information about Canvas, please see our Remote Learning Resources page.