Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
The Cultures of Climate Change
Instructor(s): Timothy Wientzen, English
What role do the humanities have to play in addressing climate change? A warming world will require more than just better science; it will require fundamentally reimagining the structures that made the modern world possiblenew narratives of our future. Engaging with recent writing on climate change across disciplinesincluding texts by geologists, public policy experts, historians, filmmakers, visual artists, and fiction writersthis class examines the interface between the science and the culture of climate change. Among other things, we will ask how reading cultural texts might help us reassess the virtues and problems of our modernity, including the political and ethical problems native to life in the so-called Anthropocene. How might cinema, fiction, and art help us reimagine our relationship to commodity culture and the natural world?
Course Offered: