Literature in Focus: Environmental Science Fiction

After completing the course, students are able to

The course offers a thematic case study, that changes every year. This offers students the chance to get acquainted with classical and canonical works more in depth, learning how to do close reading as well as placing the text in its historical context. Students also explore different forms of critical receptions and evaluation through time, disciplinary contexts and scholarly traditions.

Summer 2025 topic: Environmental Science Fiction
In this course we will discuss works of literary and cinematic science fiction that explore the constructive, mutual relationship between humans and their changing environments. Whereas science fiction has mostly focused on technology, in an age of climate change we are witnessing the emergence of different, environmental science fiction narratives. These narratives show that we are human not just by virtue of being part of culture, but also in relation to the biological and physical bodies that compose our environments on all scales (notably, the human body is itself an environment for microbial life). In such stories, the environment is not merely a “background” to human action; rather, it is constitutive of the human. As scholars in environmental studies have argued, environmental fiction is important in making the often abstract complexity of environmental change imaginable—a prerequisite for moving toward more sustainable societies.
Alongside science fiction, we will read key theoretical texts from across the disciplines that discuss the topic of human-environment entanglement (e.g. theories of science fiction, posthumanism, symbiosis). Participants from any discipline will be encouraged to develop their own perspectives on the intersection of humanity, culture, and the environment in the twenty-first century, and to do so in a creative format.


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