Summer school in environmental humanities

For the last two decades, the concept of the Anthropocene has reverberated powerfully across the arts and humanities. Faced with the gravity of the unfolding planetary environmental crisis, scholars and artists have turned their attention to Paul Crutzen’s and Eugene Stoermer’s influential neologism. An inspiration for creative practice, the Anthropocene has also served as a transdisciplinary vector for the emergent framework that links comparative literature, critical theory and modern languages. Earth scientists and bioscientists have become increasingly attentive to political, economic and cultural structures, in a manner that cuts across established disciplinary boundaries. Similarly, artists have focused on natural processes that are affected by human activities and impinge upon them: extreme weather events, rising sea levels, pollution, mass extinction, and so on. In the literary domain, this has included a flurry of new genres and modes: ecopoetry, climate elegy, environmental satire, the New Weird, the cartonera movement and, of course, cli-fi, which has gained popularity as a commercial genre since 2013. As novelist Amitav Ghosh has famously pointed out, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. We will explore these issues in a virtual, intercollegiate and collaborative seminar and an intensive summer school in Rome.

Main topics addressed

• Literature since 2000: global production, translation and cross-cultural reception of genres and texts
• Early modernity and environmental concerns
• Ecological and ‘green’ issues in a historical perspective
• World literature and globalization
• World literature as a dynamic site of transdisciplinary inquiry and cultural and political activism
• Climate justice
• The apocalyptic imagination
• Ecopoetry and ecopoetics
• The planetary age and the global south

Learning outcomes

The course is designed to allow participants to gain useful background knowledge about the epistemological shifts involved in 're-thinking' human action in terms of sustainability for the future.

It calls attention to the vulnerability and value of human and non-human life on a warming planet, and suggests that the climate emergency must be understood as a dynamic opening: an invitation to re-think categories of place and space, not in terms of eschatological closure, but as a state of protracted uncertainty that necessitates and activates new political, artistic and epistemic modes.