Monday, February 1, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EST

John Sitter, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English Emeritus, Emory University, Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

“What is Climate Fiction Saying? And Should We Listen?”

Novels about climate and environmental change have emerged in our century as a major part of literary fiction. Both the fact and the prospect of climate change are shaping plots, characters, and innovations of the novels of our time. This emergence of "cli-fi" raises several interesting questions: What motivates climate fiction? How has it changed over the last two decades? How well does it reflect scientific thinking? How do serious novelists, working in a form traditionally well suited to record ordinary life and personal experience, broaden their artistic vision to include planetary time, space, and consciousness?  Are dystopias (one strand of cli-fi) inevitably fatalistic or potentially a means of grasping our moment and imagining better futures? What can we learn from climate novels, and eco-fiction broadly, that we might not learn from newspapers and journals and other non-fiction sources?