Teaching the Literature of Climate Change
- Editor: Debra J. Rosenthal
- Pages: 344
- Published: Spring 2024
- ISBN: 9781603296359 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603296342 (Hardcover)
Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans’ impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students’ understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues.
Contributors discuss speculative climate futures, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, climate anxiety, and the usefulness of storytelling in engaging with catastrophe. The essays offer approaches to teaching interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including strategies for team-teaching across disciplines and for building connections between humanities majors and STEM majors. The volume concludes with essays that explore ways to address grief and to contemplate a hopeful future in the face of apocalyptic predictions.
Introduction (1)
Part I: Principles
Climate Justice and the Literary Imagination (11)
Engaging Students and Global Weirding (20)
Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Pedagogy (29)
Changing Student Perceptions through Climate Literature (38)
Cli-Fi and Cultivating Cultural Agency (44)
Climate Change Stories: Living and Dying in the Anthropocene (57)
The Anthropocene as a Global Coming-of-Age Story: A Pedagogy in Transition (66)
Apprehending Climate Change through Fiction and Film (73)
Part II: Locations
Sea-Level Rise, Low-Lying Islands, and Caribbean Literature (87)
Decolonizing Climate Knowledge: Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s Poetry (96)
Sounding the Alarm of Climate Change in Caribbean Literature: Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness (105)
The Polymedial Aesthetics of Climate Change Drama (113)
Climate Change Narratives, Publics, and the Professional-Managerial Class (123)
Words in the World: The Work of an Environmental Literature Course in a Coastal Florida City (132)
Part III: Texts
Attention, Connection, Dialogue: Teaching Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior in the Climate Fiction Classroom (141)
Contemporary US Climate Fiction (150)
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood as Cli-Fi (158)
Cli-Nofi: Reading and Writing Creative Climate Nonfiction in a Prison Classroom (168)
Genres of Deep Time: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the Orbis Hypothesis (176)
Part IV: Courses and Interdisciplinarity
It’s the End of the World As We Know It: Utilizing Interdisciplinarity to Teach Anthropocene Literature (187)
“It Will Take Years for the Picture to Emerge”: Interdisciplinarity, Intermedia Strategies, and Climate Narratives (195)
Reading the Weather: Teaching the Literature of Climate Change at a Polytechnic University (203)
Imagining Just Futures: Teaching the Literature of Climate Change as Social Responsibility (212)
Cli-Fi Linked to a Climate Science Course (220)
Climate Fiction and the Global South (225)
Part V: Assignments
Tuning In to Climate Change: Podcasts in the Classroom (237)
The Literature of Climate Change and Information Literacy Instruction (246)
Noticing, Time, and Angling: A Climate Change Syllabus (255)
Possible Futures in a Warming World: Teaching Climate Models and Other Climate Fictions (263)
Part VI: Hopefulness and Beyond
Finding Hope in Climate Literature: Solastalgia, Twilight Knowing, and Unintended Consequences (273)
Ruin, Rebellion, Remaking: Environmental Justice in the Literature of Climate Change (281)
Now What? Moving Past Climate Change Anxiety in an Interdisciplinary Community College Classroom (291)
Creative Responses to Climate Doom: Lessons from the Void (300)
Stories from Our Future: Beyond the Binary of Climate Hope and Grief (309)
Afterword: The Urgency of Slow Teaching (321)
Notes on Contributors (329)
