LIT 5017 - FALL 2026 - BALLARD

This course examines the narrative dimensions of “the Anthropocene,” the term marking the historical period during which humans have exerted planetary-scale ecological and geological influence, with a focus on how climate inflects the shape and study of the novel in the 21st century. Both as ecological reality and as historical/cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is often described as a radically new period that upends fundamental assumptions of (particularly Western) modernity: the categorical division of “human” from “nature,” for instance; the belief in progress; the scale at which human life is staged. Naomi Klein puts it simply: “This changes everything.” In this course, we’ll take that provocation seriously even as we interrogate it, delving into a set of linked questions: What patterns of contemporary novelistic innovation—in content, form, style, genre—does the Anthropocene seem to prompt? What pressures do different material issues—disaster, debility, displacement, extraction—place on the conventions of literary narrative? What marks a novel as “about” the Anthropocene, and what are the competing definitions of an “Anthropocene novel” that might complicate the category? How do novels take up the philosophical questions of history, futurity, planetarity, coloniality, race, embodiment, and power that the Anthropocene concept activates? How do novels resist the totalizing force of Anthropocene imaginaries by narrating (to borrow from Jennifer Wenzel) “from below”? How has the Anthropocene affected the methods, objects, and stakes of literary criticism, and what do we make of these changes? In other words, at the broadest level, this course asks: what are the relationships among contemporary literature and contemporary life? Novels are likely to include Oryx and Crake, Cloud Atlas, Animal’s People, Salvage the Bones, Autumn, Future Home of the Living God, Exit West, and How Beautiful We Were, read alongside relevant scholarship drawn from contemporary literary studies, ecocriticism, genre theory, science studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as contemporaneous critical responses to each major text. Course assignments will be designed to give you familiarity with some of the fundamental “genres” of academic writing—the abstract; the conference talk; the article—with the hope that each of you leaves the seminar with an original project you can develop for publication.