Environmental Humanities Seminar: Climate Fictions

We’re pleased to kick-off the year’s first environmental humanities seminar focused on the theme of cultures and climates. These quarterly seminars will engage topics of narrative, speculation, visual representation, performance, and activism related to climate change literature, art, and theory. “Because it is such a far-reaching, fundamental transformation,” writes Carolyn Kormann, “climate change brings a full array of big, important issues for fiction to take on.” To what end? What can be said theoretically and pragmatically about this emerging genre, one that often negotiates the intersections of politics, science, human and non-human experience? In this first seminar on climate fictions, we will begin to think about the role of narrative in shaping our experience of climate change, and we will question how the politics and science of global warming changes art. The discussion will be joined by distinguished participant Professor of English Mark McGurl, an expert on American literature.