Séminaire de littérature 1

Ruins of the future: how contemporary literature from the Global South addresses the issue of the End

In the second half of the 20^th century, the question of the End has emerged in fiction as well as in non-fiction and theory, partly as a response to the looming consequences of climate change. Yet the End angst, whose appearance is more recent in the literatures of countries of the Global North than in those of the Global South, is not entirely new in European literary history, as novelist Amitav Ghosh reminds us in his 2008 non-fictional work The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2008). The events of 1816, referred to some as the “year without a summer”, due to the release of over one hundred cubic kilometers of debris into the air as a result of the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815, are known to have led to the completion of four literary pieces including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Polidori’s The Vampyre, as well as a piece by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem “Darkness” by Byron. It remains the case, however, that authors from the Global South developed an awareness of the impact of climate change long before it came to attention in the humanities and in civil society at large.

In the course of the seminar we will reflect on how contemporary literature responds to the challenge of the exhaustion of resources, not only of aesthetic forms, but more largely of resources, through a focus on Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide, Elif Shafak’s novel There are Rivers in the Sky, as well as extracts from Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and  Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.

Syllabus: Students are required to have purchased hard copies of the two novels on the syllabus and to have read them before the start of semester.

GHOSH, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. Harper Collins, 2004.

SHAFAK, Elif. There are Rivers in the Sky. Viking: 2024.

session 1

2 devoirs écrits en classe basés sur des questions de recherche vues en classe

CD : 1 ecrit de 2h

session 2 : 1 ecrit de 2h

Dans le cadre de cet EC, l’usage de l’IA pour aider à la réalisation des travaux de contrôle continu soumis à évaluation est interdit. Vous n’avez pas le droit de faire appel à une IA générative à des fins de documentation, recherche d’idées, construction, rédaction ou édition.

The seminar proposes to help students develop analytic skills and rhetorical skills.

ALBRECHT, Glenn A. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.

GHOSH, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LEAR, Jonathan. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2022.

MORTON, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics : Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard University Press, 2009.

HEISE, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.