This module deploys both film and literature to think about the unique disruptions to embedded narratives presented by climate change. The “after” in the title is meant in a highly speculative way, then, as a prompt to engage in thinking with and beyond the “Anthropocene” to ask about the relation of narrative, historiography and language in the fossil fuel and “decarbonized” eras. The texts we will read together might include some cli-fi or futuristic projections, but will mostly focus on works produced before climate change was in circulation in the general public with the aim of developing a set of tools and vocabulary to confront the particular disruptive threat that is living with 410+ ppm of C02 in the atmosphere. Students are encouraged to read texts in the original languages as appropriate.
The major topics will include:
- The archive, preservation and mourning
- Narratives, smooth and disruptive, Chronotopes
- Mitigation vs adaptation as ideas of narrative
- The model of “compound interest” and the future
A maximum of 12 students are permitted to take this module.
Before the start of class read the following foundational texts or essays:
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”
Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, “Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary forms of Coal” from their co-edited, Ecological Form. System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018
Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)”
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” In Illuminations
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
For basic background, The Rough Guide to Climate Change is useful.
Films may include:
Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train
Antonioni, Red Desert
Lang, Nibelungen
Literary texts may include work by:
Defoe, Zola, Verne, Calvino, Austen
Critical and secondary readings may include:
Menely and Taylor, Eds. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Imre Szeman et al After Oil
Ian Balcom. “History 4°
Lee Edelman, No future
Yaeger et al, “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of
Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline,
Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA
Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak