This seminar focuses on a genre of literature that deals with one of the most important and pressing issues of our time and our future: anthropogenic climate change. Climate Change Fiction is not only a field for environmental communication, it is also an aesthetic field of experimentation that incorporates various referential genres (utopia, dystopia, science fiction etc.). In doing so, it often takes unusual paths to talk about the present, to imagine a possible future, or to mediate between fact and fiction, concrete and abstract, reality and imagination. Moreover, Climate Change Fiction asks us to shift our perspective. Instead of world domination, it calls for world responsibility; instead of national or continental orders, it postulates global and planetary consciousness; instead of human-animal differences, it emphasizes ‘co-evolution’ and ‘companionship’ (Haraway). But more than that, Climate Change Fiction also asks how to think about the climate crisis and its nature: Is this a crisis of competing environments or a crisis of faith/dogma? In opening up these horizons of questioning and understanding, Climate Change Fiction points not least to ourselves, to our weighting of solidarity versus individuality, our readiness for emotional, intellectual, and social engagement, and our willingness to take responsibility in spatial and temporal dimensions. We will first familiarize ourselves with key theories in the field of Environmental Humanities and then use selected examples to explore how literature (e.g., with particular narratives of risk or disaster) responds to and negotiates climate change. Our reading list includes contemporary literature that reflects on climate change, particularly in the context of animal welfare and species extinction: Amitav Gosh: The Hungry Tide (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are the Weather! (2019), and Charlotte McConaghy: Migrations (2020).

Literature: Amitav Gosh: The Hungry Tide (London, 2004); Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are the Weather! (New York, 2019); Charlotte McConaghy: Migrations (New York, 2020).

Preparatory Reading: Ursula Heise: Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species (Chicago, 2016); Antonia Mehnert: Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (New York, 2016); Eva Horn: Zukunft als Katastrophe (Frankfurt am Main, 2020; Chapter 3: "Das Wetter von übermorgen: Imaginationsgeschichte der Klimakatastrophe").