231136 Climate Fiction, Ecocritical Perspectives and Environmental Justice Approaches (S) (SoSe 2025)

STARTS: 16 APRIL

The normative problems associated with environmental problems have become a critical issue in particular for the poorest and most vulnerable populations, a phenomenon that has increasingly been included also in literary studies. In this seminar, we will discuss authors and texts that have in different contexts been reflecting on concepts of nature and on the relationship between nature and humans/culture. These range from Romantic and Transcendentalist representations in poetry and fiction by authors like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson to a more recent turn towards feminist ecocriticism such as Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler.
We also discuss environmental justice approaches that integrate knowledge from the sciences and the humanities for claiming the equal protection and rights of all people and of nature/the environment, regardless of race, national origin, or income from environmental risks. Decolonial environmental justice perspectives and postcolonial ecocritcism (Amitav Gosh) and ecofeminist approaches address and imagine alternative cosmovisions and new forms of relationality and kinship, but also conceptualizations such as the post-human (Donna Haraway), all of which are dedicated to thinking modes of production, sociability and cohabitation Otherwise. Making claims for the protection of all populations from the effects of climate change and natural disasters, the recognition for indigenous land rights, such approaches seek to provide alternatives to Eurocentric/Occidentalist notions of modernity and growth based on exploitative imaginations of nature and unequal social structures.

The seminar will provide students with basic knowledge about a number of primary texts addressing questions around nature, culture, humans and the environment from the 19th century to the recent trend in Climate Fiction, but also Anti-Environmentalism in fictions of the extreme right. Students are introduced to key concepts, arguments and theorizations of the broad emerging field of climate fiction, ecocriticism and environmental justice that contribute to and can be subsumed under the header Environmental Humanities.

Take part in and pass each of the 3 course requirements (active participation + in-class assignments, presentation/written outline of own project, term paper).
The course requirements will be discussed in detail during the first session.
The use of AI is not allowed, unless agreed upon with the lecturer for specific tasks.
Mindestanforderungen und Beurteilungsmaßstab

Input phases in combination with group work and in-class discussion.

Bibliography

– Adamson, Joni, Evans, Mei Mei, and Stein, Rachel, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
– Brooks, Paul. Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America. 1988.
– Buell, Lawrence.Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Harvard University Press, 2003.
– Gosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
– Hubble, Andrew J. And John C. Ryan. “1 Introduction to the Environmental Humanities: History and Theory “. Introduction to Environmental Humanities. Routledge, 2022.
– Murphy, Patrick. Ecocritical Exploration in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries and Fields. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
– Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (History of American Thought and Culture), 1989.
– Olson, Greta. From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect. Oxford University Press, 2022.
– United States Environmental Protection Agency. Learn About Environmental Justice. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/learn-about-environmental-justice