32212

WiSe 21/22: The Post-Catastrophic Imagination in Recent Speculative Climate Fiction

James Dorson

Information for students

Please note: This class will be held in-person (on campus).

Comments

The emergency is now, as the climate movement tells us. Yet the global scale and unpredictability of the climate crisis, even as it unfolds around us, makes anthropogenic climate change and its consequences difficult to imagine. “How can we conceive of a threat that is so ungraspable and so vast that it eludes the scales of human experience,” as Eva Horn asks in The Future as Catastrophe. If the realist novel is inadequate for this task, the mantle of rendering climate change visible and conceivable has been taken up with increasing urgency and creativity by a number of writers of speculative fiction in recent years. The cultural climate has also changed in the past decade, shifting from a spate of dystopic climate novels and films in the first decade of the century to a number of novels imagining how to reorganize society after climate catastrophe has struck or how to live with a new climate reality. Rather than representing climate change in abstract terms as disaster striking out of the blue, these texts root the causes of environmental despoliation in the fossil economy and/or a lineage settler-colonial destruction. This is not demobilizing doom gloom but creative responses that light up the epistemological darkness of the climate future with tangible visions of survival, resistance, and alternatives. The first part of the class will contextualize the politics, theory, and cultures of climate. The greater part of the class will be dedicated to analyzing the following four speculative novels: Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future (2020). close

Additional appointments

Tue, 2021-10-19 10:00 - 12:00