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Climate Imaginaries: Cultural Perspectives on Ecological Crisis

Simon Schleusener

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In recent years, anthropogenic climate change has become one of the most hotly debated societal issues in the US, whose level of carbon emissions is among the highest in the world. Besides the various ecological, economic, and political problems surrounding the necessary transformation of carbon-driven economies, the findings of contemporary climate science also raise epistemological and cultural-studies-based questions of aesthetics and representation, cultural framing and the performative force of language. On the one hand, this “cultural” dimension of climate change concerns the way in which global warming and its devastating repercussions are reflected and discussed in fictional literature and popular media (such as cli-fi novels, disaster movies, or dystopian television series). On the other hand, it also concerns the cultural discourses and attitudes that are mobilized in the political conflict about energy transition, ecocide, and the Anthropocene. Furthermore, the material implications of climate change have motivated practitioners in the humanities to rethink some of the premises of contemporary critical discourse and cultural theory.

In this seminar, we will reflect on a wide variety of cultural responses to climate change and ecological crisis, ranging from degrowth activism and “carbon guilt” to climate denial and apocalyptic catastrophism. With regard to environmental disasters in the US such as Hurricane Katrina, we will discuss the entanglements of ecology and economy as well as race and class. Moreover, we will read and discuss central theoretical writings on climate change and the Anthropocene by authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Amitav Ghosh, and McKenzie Wark. In addition, we will reflect on contemporary climate novels such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) and on Hollywood films such as Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).

In order to receive full credit, students are required to write a term paper and either give a short oral presentation or take part in a “group of experts” on a selected topic in one of the sessions.