Environmental crisis in contemporary literature and culture

Beyond technical and scientific language, understanding environmental crisis is – as Amitav Ghosh writes – ‘also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination’. In this course, we will explore how contemporary writing and storytelling respond to environmental crisis. Beginning with Rachel Carson’s influential and lyrical writing of climate science in Silent Spring (1962), we will consider how recent works of ecopoetry (Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Alice Oswald), Aboriginal indigenous fiction and science fiction (Alexis Wright; Ellen van Neerven), and a satirical American film (Don't Look Up) engage with – and attempt to reframe – contemporary environmental issues through their aesthetic forms.

Aims

This course aims to:

• introduce a range of contemporary texts responding to environmental crisis
• encourage reflection on how literature, culture, and the humanities respond to and offer distinct perspectives on environmental issues
• facilitate discussion, exploration, and interpretation of contemporary literature and culture

Course content

This week-long course thinks about how contemporary literature and culture respond to environmental crisis. By attending to a variety of texts, narratives, and forms of storytelling, we will consider how climate, environmental, and ecological issues are addressed and represented in writing and storytelling. 

This course aims to think not just about nature or the environment as such but about a time of modern environmental crisis:where people, wildlife, and ecosystems around the world face urgent risks and decline. Across this week, we will think about the historical moment we are living through – the early twenty first century – by studying literary texts (and a film) from our own contemporary moment. Beginning with an influential science nonfictional book from the late twentieth century, this course will explore literary and fictional works created from the 2000s through to the 2020s. We will think about the kinds of reflections and responses such texts can activate in relation to a time of upheaval and the looming possibility of ecological catastrophe. 

Environmental crisis, climate change, global warming, the Anthropocene – these are just some (debated) terms for attempting to make sense of global environmental issues. The incredible advances of scientific knowledge are essential for seeing us through these large scale issues, but making sense of the underlying human effects, costs, scales, and politics of environmental issues is a task well suited to the humanities and particularly literature and culture. 

The scale and severity of these complexly interconnected issues defy simple categorisation and can feel distant from our cultural discourses and everyday understanding of the world. This course proposes that attending to storytelling, perspective, and language can provide new insights and ways of reflecting upon with environmental issues and global issues today.

What to expect on this course

In these immersive in-person seminar-style sessions, together we will attend to a variety of literary texts – including nonfiction science writing, poetry, genre fiction, an experimental novel, and a film – in a discursive and exploratory classroom environment (see below course structure for each session). 

These sessions will encourage and facilitate shared exploration and engaged discussion while introducing new ways of thinking about environmental issues from the vantage of literature, culture, and storytelling. The class will be guided by an expert/teacher to open these ideas to the responses, ideas, and unique perspectives of all participants. These sessions will be welcoming and aim to encourage a lateral classroom dynamic for shared interpretation and discussion of important global issues as these intersect with selected stories and writing where all perspectives are supported in a spirit of mutual respect and intellectual curiosity.  

Course sessions

1. Writing Science – Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

In the introductory session, we will open the course by discussing a groundbreaking book from the late twentieth century which changed how environmental issues were discussed and understood in America and around the world. Through writing the science of the destructive effects of DDT pesticides on wildlife and the environment, Rachel Carson’s lyrical Silent Spring paved the way for the US ban on the insecticide, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the global environmental movement as we know it today. We will explore Carson’s use of language and nonfictional writing to painstakingly document and testify to the urgency of pressing environmental issues.

2. Ecopoetry – Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner “Dear Matafele Peinem” (2014) and selected poems from Alice Oswald, Woods etc (2005)

Moving from the realm of the factual and documentary, we will read two poets whose works might be termed “ecopoetry” for their ecological and environmental concerns conveyed in poetic forms. Poetry may not seem the most obvious medium for tackling environmental issues, but we will think about what kind of perspectives or reflections poetry can offer at a time of crisis. Marshallese writer and activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinem” is addressed to her daughter but was notably performed at the Opening Ceremony of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit in 2014. Oswald’s acclaimed nature poetry – while less politically overt – considers crisis on the micro scales of perspective and self-questioning.

3. Cli-fi: Speculative Climate Fiction – Ellen van Neerven “Water” from Heat and Light (2014) 

Like science fiction (sci-fi), “climate fiction” or “cli-fi” is a genre of writing which responds to the effects of environmental issues in imagined presents and potential futures through storytelling. These works correspond imaginatively to scientific advances and debates but also politics and wider society. Cli-fi draws upon the resources of fiction to reframe and make sense of these issues on the level of narrative and speculative exploration. In this session, we will discuss Mununjali Yugambeh writer and poet Ellen van Neerven’s futuristic story “Water”, which is premised upon a near-future Australian government’s plans for Aboriginal reparations by displacing plant people from their own indigenous island habitat.

4. Crisis Aesthetics – Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (2023)

In the fourth session, we will turn to a contemporary novel which makes an awareness of twenty-first century environmental crisis a deliberate part of its storytelling and style. Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is an epic novel about the fantasies of outrage, obsession, and lament in a fictional Aboriginal town facing a hazy ecological disaster and coercive practices of assimilation. Written in rich and vivid language and with dark humour, this book engages with the difficulty of making sense of such a complex and information-loaded time. Wright’s novel demonstrates (in her own words) “true agency in writing epics on a scale to meet the scale of what’s happening in the world right now” (‘Writing in the All Times: An Interview with Alexis Wright.’ Wasafiri, vol. 39, no. 3, 2024). In this session, we will explore this original and exciting novel, and think about how (and whether) fiction and innovative modes of storytelling can meet environmental crisis head on.

5. Allegory and Pop Cultural Satire – Don’t Look Up (2021)

Following from Wright’s zany and parodic vision of environmental crisis, we will finish the course by examining how the film Don’t Look Up echoes the concerns of the course in a cinematic medium. The plot of astronomers discovering a comet which is on course to destroy Earth presents a darkly comic satire of contemporary discourses around environmental science. In particular, the film responds to the ways in which these issues are drowned out in an information and entertainment saturated media landscape. As such, this film highlights prevalent ways in which contemporary culture often fails to register increasingly urgent environmental crises. By ending on this film which critiques governmental, celebrity, and media indifference towards looming climate crisis, our final discussion will think about how effective we find this film’s particular storytelling and filmic aesthetics. We will also reflect on what we have explored on the course as a whole and the role of writing and cultural forms in attempting to change the narratives on these issues.

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• think creatively and analytically about the role of culture, language, and storytelling in relation to environmental crisis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
• analyse and discursively explore how contemporary texts engage with the idea of crisis and environmental issues across a range of genres and media
• closely read textual and narrative forms with attention to language and aesthetics alongside key historical, social, political, and ethical issues in contemporary society

Required reading

The below texts are required reading for the course. Please read Silent Spring in full (or as much as you’re able to) ahead of the first class (below is a suggested edition, from Penguin but there are many reprints of this famous book). 

Excerpts are indicated in square brackets and where possible scanned electronic copies of these will be provided in advance to those registered of the course. 

1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962 London: Penguin Classics, 2012)

2. Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “Dear Matafele Peinem” (2014): 

   https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/united-nations-climate-summit-opening-ceremony-my-poem-to-my-daughter/
3. Alice Oswald, Woods etc (London: Faber, 2005) 
   [Selected poems: “Sea Poem”, “Leaf”, “Walking past a Rose this June Morning”, “Another Westminster Bridge”]
4. Ellen van Neerven, “Water”, in Heat and Light (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2014), pp. 69–123
5. Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (Sheffield, London and New York: And Other Stories, 2023) [Chapters 1–9] 
6. Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay (Hyperobject Industries and Bluegrass Films, 2021) [available on Netflix or DVD]