Instructor: E. Horn
This course will explore concepts and narratives of climate and climate change. We will focus on literary and theoretical texts ranging from the eighteenth century to today’s debates on global warming and the “Anthropocene”. While “climate” is currently tightly bound to the idea of its catastrophic destabilization, for centuries climate was seen as a principle of stability, as cyclic time and as a steady influence on culture. However, climate change is not a discovery of the past twenty years, but has been part of natural history and literature since 1800.
We will examine the historical and aesthetic responses to a wide array of questions revolving around the relationship between human life-worlds and their environmental and climatic conditions: How does climate affect different cultures? How do humans experience time through the medium of the seasons? How can we relate to the deep time of climatic change? How do extreme climates affect human bodies and minds? How can climate and climate change be grasped aesthetically?
Instead of focusing solely on present debates and genres (such as “Cli-Fi”) the course aims at a deeper historical understanding of a century-old discourse on climate and climatic change. The goal of such a historical perspective will be not only to re-assess concepts such as “global warming” or the “Anthropocene”, but also to open up a better understanding of how literature engages with the profound environmental transformations that we are facing today.
