Sections offered SPRING 2023:
#10758 |
GARETH EVANS |
TuTh 11:30 AM–12:45 PM |
HU 111 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
Climate change is unquestionably the largest issue of the 21st-century. The issue is so large, in fact, that many people flee when it is named. Climate change is a difficult topic, and I’m not sure, to be honest, how effectively we’ll deal with that topic in my class. What we’re going to do, however, is read novels, essays, and a report that asks us to consider climate change. We will read excerpts from the Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in 2019 and thus already out of date (NCA). NCA is a representative climate pathway, and it makes predictions about what will happen at differing rates of climate change. Of the novels we read, only The Ministry for the Future takes up such a challenge, and we’ll measure its power—if that’s the word—against that of the report. Like The Ministry for the Future, Gun Island also has a global setting, while The Marrow Thieves is set in Canada, and Salvage the Bones takes place in Louisiana immediately before Hurricane Katrina. Kari Marie Norgaard’s essay discusses climate denial, while Ghosh’s “Stories” asks if it’s possible to write a realist novel about climate change. One goal of the class is to think about what difference, if any, the semester’s reading makes to your attitude to climate change.