During a time of ‘climate breakdown’, literary critics are increasingly asking how literature engages – or fails to engage – with the current environmental crisis. This module will explore how writers and filmmakers since the 1960s have imagined climate-changed worlds, often by using genres of speculative fiction such as dystopian fiction, Afrofuturism and cli-fi (climate fiction). Covering novels by writers such as Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood and films such as Black Panther (2018), we will consider which genres are best at portraying climate change and associated phenomena like hurricanes, drought, biodiversity loss and species extinctions. We will use a range of recent ecocritical approaches to help us to analyse the various novels and films, and will investigate the relationship between fiction and environmental activist movements, such as Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. Throughout, we will be asking some big political questions. How is climate change related to issues of gender, race and global inequality? How might fiction help us to understand the threat of climate change? And how might it help us to cultivate new forms of environmental care, and new forms of activism?

• assess a range of recent novels and films in the context of climate change and the current environmental crisis 
• examine these texts in relation to genre, and to the ways in which genre shapes our understanding of climate change 
• generate coherent, substantiated and sustained arguments about the texts in relation to relevant critical and theoretical contexts 
• articulate the relationships between fiction and environmental activism 

The module will be taught through a combination of in-person lectures and seminars: a one-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar each week.

Academic skills: this module will develop and practise skills in close reading, independent scholarly research and critical thinking. In studying the texts, students will be encouraged to contemplate the connections and tensions between them, and to formulate original arguments around that relationship. This requires careful scholarship, sensitivity to language through close reading and a broader historical awareness of social change.

Employability skills: these include the ability to synthesise information, participate in group-based discussion, to negotiate different and conflicting standpoints, to communicate ideas and to produce clear, informed arguments in a professional manner. Student-led research will encourage skills of information collation, selection and synthesis. 

Essay: 100%

Formative work to be submitted before the summative assessment: you can choose between submitting, as appropriate, an essay plan/structure, synopses of essay topic options (if undecided) or sample paragraph/s; for creative assignments, you can submit working drafts of parts of your composition, as arranged with the workshop convenor.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR REASSESSMENT IN THIS MODULE:
As with School policy, failed or unsubmitted assessments can be retaken during the August resit period.

Indicative Syllabus:

Dystopia 

• Anna Kavan, Ice (1967) 
• Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009) 

Afrofuturism 

• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) 
• Pumzi, dir. by Wanuri Kahiu (2009)
• Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix (2015) 
• Black Panther, dir. by Ryan Coogler (2018) 

Realism 

• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011) 
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (2012) 

Cli-Fi 

• Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (2015) 
• Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017) 

Content warning: please be aware that several of the books/topics discussed in this module deal with difficult themes (including graphic depictions or suggestions of sex and violence), which some students may find distressing. If you have any concerns about this, please contact the module leader for advice.