The term and concept of the Anthropocene has come to represent the massive human impact on the environment which has introduced a new geological era in Earth’s history. The new geological epoch of the Anthropocene confronts human societies with profound challenges in their relationship with more-than-human life as well as with radically altered environments and environmental risks of our own making. Global warming, droughts, floods, migration, mass extinctions, and wars are some of these challenges. This course aims to explore the representations and observations regarding these phenomena in North American fiction. More specifically, we will attend to a diversity of genres and modes of narration – magical realism, the female Bildungsroman, apocalypse and post-pastoral – to study the ways in which these different genres and modes of narrations imagine the relationship between human and non-human life in the Anthropocene. Moreover, we will consider what these texts suggest as to survival and coping strategies as well as alternative future visions in the midst of far-reaching anthropogenic changes.
Please purchase and read the following (the novels are listed in the order in which they will be discussed; there is no preferred edition):
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012)
Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)