This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climate change became a solidified discursive formation. Any discussion of climate presupposes a stable definition of the term within the scientific contexts that give it meaning, but the history of human activities that lead to human made climate change generally predates these discourses. Comparative work in the Environmental Humanities complicates dominant ideas about climate and interrogate the field’s tendency to focus on contemporary climate fiction. Therefore, the seminar is interested in historical (and regional) counterpoints: climate fictions “before” climate change.

The seminar operates under a broad definition of the term “fictions,” considering literary and non-literary texts of all genres. As such, it will also offer opportunities to think about the different affordances of different genres in rendering ideas about the climate and climate change.

How do our questions about climate and climate change change when we consider the long history of human entanglement with the climate? What specific role can literature play for such inquiries? What do we miss when we fail to consider the history of climate fictions?

Contributions to the seminar could consist of specific case studies of such “climate fictions” or of comparative interrogations of alternative literary formations of climate “before climate change.”

https://www.acla.org/seminar/f8b77eaa-873a-4d37-acdb-16c6a6effe0e