Burning Worlds, Drowning Worlds: Oil Cultures, Climate Crisis, and Traumatic Desires in World Literatures

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the ways in which literature can act as an ecological force within culture
• the significance of economy, empire and ecology in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and culture
• how speculative and imaginative modes of knowledge (presented in literary works) can propose ways of critically thinking about and beyond the age of oil and fossil fuel more broadly
• ecocritical approaches to literary study

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• comprehend some of the main geo-political contexts of climate change and sustainability
• analyse novels, plays, and poems for their narrative, visual, aural, performative and literary elements
• Compose historically-informed analyses of texts
• evaluate the efficacy of key theories and critical methods pertinent to analysis of literary and dramatic texts
• present arguments about dramatic literature that place it in a broad historical, cultural and theoretical context.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• write in a range of registers appropriate for different purposes and readerships
• construct a reasoned, well written argument based on research and analysis of text
• research a topic or issue independently

This module explores the origins, affects and traumatic effects of the climate crisis with a specific focus on energy crisis (and above all, oil) though world literatures and across time. The consideration energy and ecology as the crux of literary studies entails that energy and ecology – as a way of living, seeing and reading the world – change how and what we invest in, engage with, and take from literature: including the modes of knowledge, models of action, and visions of the world.

The focal points of the module comprises the exploration of the following:

(1) how works of world literatures (1900-present) place energy, empire, economics, and ecology at the centre of an emerging planetary crisis;

(2) the theories and conceptions of climate change and energy cultures (including various trends in ecocriticism);

(3) how these modern and contemporary texts grapple with the energy crisis, boom-bust dynamics of oil, time-space compression, racial, gender and class politics of oil and other energy resources, and the environmental catastrophes that confront us now;

(4) how modern and contemporary writers have tended to imagine the environments and energy modes of the future;

This module takes us through an array of pivotal moments in the history of energy regimes, energy crisis, oil-driven events, and climate catastrophes as depicted in literary works. It thus examines how the energy and climate crises contributed to the rise of new social and political systems, a new geological age defined by human influence (the Anthropocene) and the rise of a new world and world order (since 1900) driven by oil (Capitalocene and Thermocene).

Teaching methods will include:

• Lectures, seminars, learning support hour and one-to-one tutorials (consultations)

Learning methods will include:

• Group work
• Engagement with guest speakers from areas such as environmental science, the heritage sector, and public policy groups to take place online.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.