LIT 3622.001 Fall 2023 Tran

In a contemporary moment that increasingly confronts us with the ecological consequences of global climate change, deforestation, pollution, and toxic drift, it is perhaps no surprise that a genre like climate fiction or “cli-fi” continues to gain public traction. Since it was coined in 2007 by American journalist Dan Bloom, the term cli-fi has been applied to a wide range of literature, film, and media that explore the effects of human activities on Earth’s ecosystems. This course offers an introduction to this growing body of work while also pressing us to examine the important texts and scholarship on environmentalism and ecocriticism that predate Bloom’s coining of the term and the genre’s accelerated growth in the 21st century. Reading across a wide range of mediums, including novels, short stories, poetry, film and comics, we will examine how various authors, artists, and activists respond to and narrate the effects of anthropogenic climate change. We will pay particular attention to texts that address how the ecological “crises” of the present are disproportionately distributed and experienced along varying lines of racial, class, gender, and geographic privilege. To supplement our discussions of the primary texts and cli-fi as a genre, we will engage scholarship in environmental humanities that supply us with critical vocabulary and theoretical frameworks around concepts like the Anthropocene, sustainability, posthumanism, and environmental justice.