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Reader & Text: Climate Fiction Welles 219-B Spring 2019 Office Hours

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Reader & Text: Climate Fiction Welles 219-B Spring 2019 Office Hours Reader & Text: Climate Fiction Welles 219-B Spring 2019 Office Hours: MW 9:00-10:00, Ken Cooper M 2:30-4:00, ABA This course, along with its kindred sections, aims to develop your working vocabulary for analyzing texts and relating them to contexts; your understanding of the theoretical questions that inform conversations about textual meaning and value; and your competency, as writers, in the discipline of English. We will begin by analyzing some print and electronic texts from the emergent genre of climate fiction: renditions of the present & future inflected by anthropogenic climate change. The works vary widely in setting, tone, and form—but I promise at least one zombie apocalypse. We then will consider this defining issue of our times in relation to your own intellectual work, particularly regarding disciplinary knowledge and its boundaries. Approaching the culture of climate change via its narration, poetics, and latent metaphors may provide unexpected answers to the question “What do you do with an English major?” REQUIRED TEXTS Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012) Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009) Wagner/Wieland, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (2017) Kusch, Literary Analysis: The Basics Selected readings on Canvas Three film screenings EVALUATION Three critical essays (50%); a midterm exam (15%); a final exam (15%); participation in workshops and class discussions (20%). SYLLABUS Week 1: Course Introduction Jan. 23 Texts: Jetnil-Kijiner, “Dear Matefele Peinam” (2014); Wise, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); Forster World War Z (2014); BMW, “Hello Future” (2014); Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Readings: Wolf, “Skim Reading is the New Normal”; Portwood-Stacer, “How to Email Your Professor (without being annoying AF)” Praxis: Why are you taking a course about literature when you already can read books? Week 2: Textual Analysis Jan. 28, 30 Texts: Mackinnon, “California Dreaming” (2015); Emmerich, from The Day After Tomorrow (2004) Reading: Kusch, Literary Analysis (chapters 1-2); CCNMTL, “Film Language Glossary”: 180-degree rule, camera angle, camera movement, deep focus, editing, eye-line match, lighting, mise-en- scene, montage, point of view Praxis: What are some of the tools available for close reading of texts? Week 3: Prose Fiction I Feb. 4, 6 Text: Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (chapters 1-8) Reading: Kusch, Literary Analysis (chapters 3-4) Praxis: How do you find a topic for your critical essay? Week 4: Prose Fiction II Feb. 11, 13 Text: Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (to completion) Reading: Kusch, Literary Analysis (chapter 7) Praxis: How do you build an argument using specifics from a text? Week 5: Criticism Feb. 18, 20 Essay #1 due Friday, February 22 by 4:00 p.m. Text: Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) Screenings: Welles 134 February 13, 14 @ 7:00 Readings: Kusch, Literary Analysis (chapter 5); Mirzoeff, “Becoming Wild” (2012); Sharpe/Brown, “The Romance of Precarity, Parts I-II” (2013); Maclear, “Something So Broken: Black Care in the Wake of Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2018) Praxis: Why and how do you read a critical essay? Week 6: Science Fiction I Feb. 25, 27 Text: Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (chapters 1-22) Reading: Juris, “Q & A With Paolo Bacigalupi”; Irr, “Climate Fiction in English” Praxis: How does literary genre work? Week 7: Science Fiction II Mar. 4, 6 Text: Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (to completion) Reading: Bizup, “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing” Praxis: How do you make research more integral to your writing? Week 8: Midterm Checkpoint Mar. 11, 13 Integrative writing workshop March 11 Midterm exam March 13 Spring Break Week 9: Conferences Mar. 25, 27 No class meeting March 25, 27 Week 10: Art and Ideology April 1, 3 Text: Cuarón, Children of Men (2006) Screenings: Welles 134 March 27, 28 @ 7:00 Reading: Kusch, Literary Analysis (chapter 6); Zizek, “Children of Men Comments” Praxis: What’s your theory? Week 11: Literary Study and Other Disciplines April 8, 10 Essay #2 due April 10 by 4:00 p.m. Texts: Dunkerly, “The Retreat” (2014); Shell, “Shell Science Program Leads the Way in Arctic Ocean” (2010); Greenpeace, “LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome” (2014); NASA, “Arctic Sea Ice” (2014); RT Documentary, “Cold Rush: Drilling for Oil Amid Arctic Ice” (2016) Reading: Moran, from Interdisciplinarity (2001); Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning” (2012) Praxis: What happens when you don’t stay in your lane? Week 12: Climate Poetics April 15, 17 GREAT Day April 17 (no class meeting) Text: Art Works for Change, "Footing the Bill: Art and Our Ecological Footprint" (2018) Reading: Buss/Jost, “Rethinking the Connection Between Metaphor and Topos” (2006) Praxis: How do poetics inform texts not regarded as literary? Week 13: The Sunvault Project I April 22, 24 Sunvault reaping, April 24 Text: Wagner/Wieland, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (to completion) Readings: Whitson, “Steampunk in the Anthropocence” (2017); Owens, “What is Solarpunk?” (2016) Praxis: What is the state of ecopoetics at the present time? Week 14: The Sunvault Project II April 29, May 1 Research & Writing workshops Week 15: Climate Change and the Arkive May 6, 8 Essay #3 due May 8 by 4:00 p.m. Text: Stanton, Wall•E (2008) Screenings: Welles 134 May 1, 2 @ 7:00 Reading: Geiling, “From Lack of Diversity to Lack of Funding, Seed Banks Face a World of Challenges” (2016) Praxis: Where is the place of literature in the Information Age? Final Exam Tuesday, May 14 8:00-11:00 a.m. May 14 GUIDELINES FOR CRITICAL ESSAYS The following essays should be submitted as a hard copy, using some 12-point standard font, by 4:00 p.m. on the due date. Your page numbering function should be turned on. A separate title page isn’t necessary but an attention-getting title is—perhaps something more scintillating than “Essay #1”… All necessary citations of information and / or the ideas of other people should follow either the MLA or Chicago format described in Geneseo’s Writing Guide; if you’re unsure as to what’s necessary to avoid plagiarism in your essay, please consider attending one of the drop-in workshops held at Milne Library or speak with me. I welcome the opportunity to discuss provisional ideas or to read partial drafts of your works-in-progress, the earlier the better. ESSAY #1 Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior begins with a young woman sneaking out into the woods to have an affair, but Dellarobia Turnbow’s life swiftly becomes a lot more complicated—in fact, a major theme in the novel seems to involve our connectedness to other communities. The term “community” sounds so positive and uncontroversial (who wouldn’t want that?) and yet it becomes very complex as events unfold. Do we always want to be members of a given community? Do we belong to only one? Do our attachments remain stable over time? Are we always aware of our membership in a given community? You might want to consider whether Kingsolver, a biologist by training, also has in mind ecological conceptions of community—especially at a time when climatic warming is creating great disruptions. Your task in this essay is to identify some particular aspect of this wider topic you consider important, and to develop that via a focused analysis of Flight Behavior. This assignment presumes your familiarity with some of the techniques associated with close reading of literary texts: an attention to symbol, metaphor, and figurative language generally; an alertness to how characters & settings are represented; a mapping of the novel’s plot and the narrator as a distinct entity in that storytelling. All of these techniques might be drawn upon in your essay, but in the service of your own argument. Be sure to consider what readers of Kingsolver’s novel probably have noticed already, and therefore turn to the challenge of making visible things not evident from a first reading. Your essay, approximately 5 pages in length, is due on February 22 by 4:00 p.m. ESSAY #2 Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl is set in 23rd-century Thailand, and can be approached as an immersive, fully realized world—a dystopian future in which we probably would not want to live! This assignment takes as its point of departure a reminder that the novel was published in 2009, in other words our own times, and that its purposes probably entail a critique of things that have led “us” to a series of events concluding in “their” world. Part of your critical work still should focus upon careful analysis of Bacigalupi’s text, grappling with its strangeness and invented practices. The other part of your critical work, however, will involve making visible certain dimensions of our culture whose long-term consequences—economic, cultural, ecological—are not receiving adequate attention. By use of a carefully focused topic and targeted research (perhaps 2 or 3 well-chosen sources), help to create a critical interface between fictional and “real” worlds that will shed new understanding upon both. This essay, approximately 5 pages in length, is due on April 10 by 4:00 p.m. In order to help you with the work of focusing your topic & locating productive sources, I will schedule individual conferences during the period of March 25-29. ESSAY # 3 Think of your final project, due on May 8, as a companion to Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland’s anthology Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation. Although everyone will read the entire text, on April 24 each person randomly will be assigned a single story or poem as the starting point for an approximately 5-page essay. Careful analysis of that text is of course important; however, this assignment asks you to think of it as a springboard for an essay that reaches beyond the anthology.
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