ENST 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The novel in English as it has developed in Africa, America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, India, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Topic for 2026/27b: Global Climate Fiction. (Same as ENGL 257) Climate fiction (cli-fi) is an emerging literary genre that, put simply, engages with climate change. Yet, like the overdetermined complexity of global warming itself, cli-fi’s range of thematic registers and formal modes is anything but simple. While often speculative or dystopian, cli-fi also appears as understated realist narratives. It imagines possible futures as readily as it writes viscerally from our shared present. This fiction may revel in apocalyptic visions of ruined spaces, but it can also take the form of quiet meditations on loss and displacement. Cli-fi’s explicit engagement with anthropogenic climate change spans literary and genre fiction alike—from high literature to young adult fiction, from the novel to the short story. While this expansive scope risks blurring the genre’s definitional coherence, cli-fi from the Global South has nonetheless distinguished itself sharply from that of the Global North. Our course begins here, with the premise that the Global South’s experience of climate change—shaped by the Global North’s disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions—creates an uneven geopolitical rift in contemporary climate fiction. Reading English-language cli-fi from the Global South alongside postcolonial ecocriticism, we trace the entanglements of colonialism, globalization, and our current climate crisis to explore how literature aesthetically mediates our interconnected political, social, and environmental ecologies. Possible texts: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, Daryll Delgado’s Remains, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Rajat Chaudhuri’s Spellcasters, Glenn Diaz’s When the World Ended I Was Thinking about the Forest, Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species, and Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief. Possible theorists and critics: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sharae Deckard, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Jefferey Santa Ana. Alden Sajor Marte-Wood.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS