EN2N4/EN3N4: Climate Imaginaries

Overview

What responses do literary and cultural texts afford in the age of intensifying climate impacts? What role, responsibilities and effective powers—might the Arts in general offer in the grand endeavour to confront the crisis and enact the kinds of transition that successful mitigation requires: transformations in culture, but also in politics, economics, infrastructure, habitat? As students will discover, the range and volume of cultural registrations of climate breakdown are considerable and diverse. We'll study climate fiction but also graphic novels, cinema, adverts, exhibitions and cultural forms of activism. The module will provide a curated selection oriented around the ‘climate imaginary’—realist, speculative, creative and performative envisioning of climate-affected presents and futures, from different spaces and times. Such imaginaries offer the means for a generative response to readers, audiences and publics charged with understanding and acting on climate issues. A variety of themes and concerns will be covered, from extractivism to conservation; from scenarios of catastrophic weather, resource depletion and radically transformed habitats to dystopian worlds of geoengineering and utopian forms of community such as solarpunk and post-oil lifeworlds.

Teaching

1 x weekly 1.5 hr seminar

Assessment

Intermediate:

• 1 x 2,000-word assessed essay (70%)
• Creative/Curative Project: 1 x 1000 word descriptive essay OR 1 x 5 minute video essay (30%)

Finalists:

• 1 x 3,000-word assessed essay (70%)
• Creative/Curative Project: 1 x 1000 word descriptive essay OR 1 x 5 minute video essay (30%)

Syllabus 2025/26

Week One: Introduction to Climate Change: Conditions, Causes and Effects; Cultural Theory on Climate; The role of “Imaginaries”. Please read: Mark Maslin, Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction (4th Edition).

Week Two: Learning the World—Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (2012)

Week Three: Fossil Fools? Petroculture and its consequences – Selection (shown in class) from Peter Mettler's Film Petropolis (Greenpeace Canada, 2009). Three Short Stories: "Rigland", by Suyi Davies Okungbowa; China Mièville, "Covehithe"; Mohammed Hasan Alwan, "Oilfield"; Edward Burtynsky Photographs (esp. "Oil").

Week Four: Climate Dystopia—Collapse (1)—John Lanchester, The Wall (2019)

Week Five: Denial and its Consequences—Adam McKay (dir.), Don’t Look Up

(2021)

Week Seven: Futuring (1)—The Museum of Carbon Ruins (2018-)

Week Eight: Collapse/Recovery (2)—War, Peace, Repair — Omar Al-Akkad, American War (2018)

Week Nine: Resistance—Activism in Song, Art, Performance

Week Ten: Futuring (2) Where Now? Renewability/Solarfutures/Geoengineering?—Ganzeer, The Solar Grid (1) The Wretched of the Earth; Cixin Lui, The Wandering Earth (2000); Wanuri Kahui, Pumzi (2009); After Oil Collective, Solarities; Andrew Dana Hudson, "On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk", Medium (2015); Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, "Anatomy of an AI System" (2018).