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Advanced seminar: HS "Disaster Without Event?" Climate Change in Literature - Details
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Lehrveranstaltung wird in Präsenz abgehalten.

General information

Subtitle S. Müller als Vertretung für Prof. Sarkowsky
Course number 022 100 0100
Semester SS 2022
Current number of participants 18
maximum number of participants 20
Home institute Amerikanistik
Courses type Advanced seminar in category Teaching
Next date Wed , 06.07.2022 08:15 - 09:45, Room: (D, 2006)
Online/Digitale Veranstaltung Veranstaltung wird in Präsenz abgehalten.
Hauptunterrichtssprache englisch
Literaturhinweise Please purchase the following books and start reading, as we will discuss them in this order:

Jenny Offil, Weather

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God



(Purchase any edition that works for you, as long as you can take notes in it and quote from it during discussion.)
ECTS points 8

Course location / Course dates

(D, 2006) Wednesday: 08:15 - 09:45, weekly (13x)

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Disaster Without Event? Climate change in literature


This past winter, the Netflix production Don’t Look Up has sparked a lively debate about the contributions of art to the discourse on climate change – or the limits thereof, depending on who was writing. The questions that this debate often turned on were questions of accuracy and realism, as well as ethics and genre. For example, critics asked: Should climate change be the subject of a satirical (i.e. not serious) film? How accurate was its depiction of the scientific facts? And sometimes: Was it a good movie? Assuming that most students have watched the movie, we will use it as a starting point to think about the relationship between literature (rather than film) and climate change: what is literature’s contribution to the discourse on climate change? What do we expect of literature? In this class, we will focus on realist fiction from the twenty-first century, and we will begin by discussing the work of critics such as Eva Horn and Amitav Ghosh who have pointed out that the greatest challenge for literary fiction is the representation of scale: very slow change over very long periods of time on a planetary level. How can literary fictions meet this challenge?

Admission settings

The course is part of admission "Beschränkte Teilnehmendenanzahl: HS "Disaster Without Event?" Climate Change in Literature".
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  • A defined number of seats will be assigned to these courses.
    The seats in these courses will be assigned at 20.04.2022, 18:00. Addional seats may be added to a wait list.
  • The enrolment is possible from 14.03.2022, 08:00 to 18.04.2022, 18:00.