Monday, March 16, 2015

''Kingsman: The Secret Service'' is a spy-action-comedy ''cli-fi'' film and has been nominated for a 2015 Cliffie

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a spy action comedy ''cli-fi'' film and has been nominated for Best Cli Fi Movie of 2015 for the annual CLI FI MOVIE AWARDS to be announced next December.
Starring COLIN FIRTH; the ''villain'' is a climate alarmist/eco-terrorist. Rightwing Canadian newspaper columnist Mark Steyn has a rightwing write up on the movie here.

CLIIFIES news here: aka THE CLI FI MOVIE AWARDS, an annual movie awards event

korgw101.blogspot.com

Kingsman: The Secret Service
by Mark Steyn
Mark at the Movies
February 28, 2015
Send
Climate-change madman Thamuel L Jackson announces his plans for world dominathon.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

"Cli-Fi genre and academia make a good mix as college classrooms go cli-fi" - IPS oped (just published today)

 
UPDATE MARCH 11: IPS [Inter Press Service], an international news service, runs this oped on "Cli-Fi and academia make a good mix as college classrooms go cli-fi" - LINK to IPS site:

http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/03/cli-fi-reaches-into-literature-classrooms-worldwide/

LEDE: ''From Columbia University in New York to the University of Cambridge in the UK, college classrooms are picking up on the “cli-fi” genre of fiction, and cinema and academia is right behind them......While authors are penning cli-fi novels — with movie scriptwriters creating cli-fi screenplays to try to sell to Hollywood — classrooms worldwide are now focusing attention of the rising genre of literature and cinema.''

READ FULL TEXT HERE:

http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/03/cli-fi-reaches-into-literature-classrooms-worldwide/

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Danish literature researcher Gregers Andersen has published a non-fiction book about cli-fi novels (in Danish now, with an English translation coming out later this year)



In the academic world, on the research front, 'cli-fi' is 

growing by leaps and bounds. Two big events are on tap for 

2015.

1. Dr Adam Trexler in Oregon, an independent scholar, has arranged with the University of Virginia Press (UVA Press) to publish his genre-shaking nonfiction study of over 150 cli fi novels past and present. The book is titled ANTHROPOCENE FICTIONS and it is due out in May. Details are already online at the UVA website.

2. Danish researcher Dr Gregers Andersen is among the top academics in Europe also looking into the evolution and growth of the cli fi genre, and his new non-fiction book, based on his PhD thesis at the University of Copenhagen, will be published in English later this year. For now, it's available in Danish and titled: ''Klimaforandrede verdensforhold : Den globale opvarmning i fiktion og filosofi. ''

Tentative English title: 
[''Climate-Changed Existence and its Worlds: Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy'']

http://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/staff/?pure=en/persons/264665

A press release from the University of Copenhagen, where Dr Andersen works, published this news release on April 23, 2014 last year. The press release was headlined:


'' Fiction prepares us for a world changed by global warming ''



Dr Andersen teaches at the 

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen


He notes:


My research is primarily focused on 2 subjects.
1.) I am currently working on the project "Theorizing the Anthropocene", a project funded by the Danish Counsil for Independent Resseach. The main focus point of the project is the question: Which new critical notions of culture does the idea of the Anthropocene (i.e. "The Geologocal Age of Humanity) provoke in contemporary cultural theory? For more information visit the homepage: www.anthropocenetheory.com

2.) I am continiously also working with the phenomenon Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) - that is, fiction that employ the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in its plot - as well as with representations of anthropogenic global warming in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. I expect to publish a book on contemporary Western cli-fi in 2015, as well as a full view of my research on this subject can be found in my Danish language Ph.D. Dissertation ''Climate Changed Existence and its Worlds. Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy'' (published in Danish in 2014).   

THE PRESS RELEASE READS:

CLIMATE FICTION


Climate fiction, or simply ''cli-fi'', is a newly coined term for novels and films which focus on the consequences of global warming. New research from University of Copenhagen shows how these fictions serve as a mental laboratory that allows us to simulate the potential consequences of climate change and imagine other living conditions.
“Global warming is much more than scientific data on changes in the atmosphere; it is also a cultural phenomenon in which meaning is being shaped by the books we read and the films we see. And there are so many of them now that we can speak of a completely new genre, cli-fi, says PhD Gregers Andersen who has just defended his thesis Climate-Changed Existence and its Worlds; Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.
Photo: Twentieth Century Fox
Screenshot from The Day After Tomorrow, 2004
“We use these films and novels to imagine what life and society might be like in a future when global warming has dramatically changed our world because, as opposed to numbers and statistics, fiction can make us feel and understand the changes.”
In his thesis, Gregers Andersen analyses 40 different novels, short stories, and films produced between 1977 - 2014 which all, in one way or the other, employ global warming as a theme. And in the 40 works, he has identified five themes that each represents global warming in a different way: The Social Breakdown, The Judgment, The Conspiracy, The Loss of Wilderness and The Sphere.

Nature passes judgment

The 2004 Hollywood blockbuster ''The Day After Tomorrow'' is a prime example of the theme Gregers Andersen has termed the Judgment; during the film, global warming has catastrophic consequences and causes a new ice age that lays most of Earth waste.
“In The Day After Tomorrow and a number of similar fictions, nature passes moral judgment on mankind’s exploitation of Earth’s resources and becomes an avenger who, quite literally, clears the air and thus restores the proper balance between man and nature,” Gregers Andersen says.

Climate change speeded up for effect

Apart from the Judgment theme Gregers Andersen, as mentioned, points to four other recurrent themes in the climate fictions he has analysed: The Social Breakdown, The Conspiracy, The Loss of Wilderness and The Sphere (see explanation in the factbox to the right). Despite the thematic differences displayed in these fictional takes on global warming and climate change, they all seem to have one central trait in common:
“If we do not take care of our environment, of or our home, it will change, and it will feel and seem very different – “unhomely” if you will. This is exactly the feeling the fictions want to leave us with. And even though UN’s panel on climate change (IPPC) has previously issued a  report stating that global warming may lead to abrupt and irreversible changes , most of these fictions do tend to exaggerate the consequences of global warming, and the climate changes often happen extremely quickly,” Gregers Andersen points out and continues:
“They do this to depict characters who can remember how the world was before the climate changes set in – the characters are, in other words, able to spot that “our home” has changed. However, it is still a recognizable world the characters inhabit in these fictions. And it needs to be recognizable because we are supposed to feel uncomfortable with the fact that our home planet has become a strange and alien place.”


Friday, March 6, 2015

'Cli-fi' Down Under

WHY LOOK AT THE EARTH THIS WAY? WHO SAYS IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY? FROM SPACE THERE IS NO ''NORTH'' OR ''SOUTH''....
 
 
While Australia is often dubbed DOWN UNDER by northerners in Europe and North America, in fact, Australia is NOT Down Under anything, except in the way the industrial Northern world ordered the way maps and globes were created, putting THE GREAT WHITE NORTH on top of the globe in the so-called NORTH, where the GREAT WHITE RACES lived and they then put Australia way down there in the --get this term! -- the antipodes! ANTI PODES! Why anti? Maybe the antipodes are the real podes and Europe and North America are the antipodes? In a more realistic world, a globe of this EARTH might put Australia on the top of the globe and on the top of world maps and Africa too and NZ and India too, and put the beloved GREAT WHITE NORTH at the bottom of such an inverted globe. Who says Australia is down under? Down under what? BULLSHIT!

That said, and humor is always part of  daily menu here in the semi demi antipodes where this blogger lives on an invisible island -- invisible at least to the rest of the world! -- since we can see ourselves in plain light of day! -- that said, here is some good news about Australian literature.

More and more Australian novelists are embracing the cli-fi genre, either directly as Alice Robinson has in her powerful new cli-fi debut novel titled ANCHOR POINT, or indirectly in James Bradley's equally powerful cli fi novel titled CLADE.

Reviews for both books are appearing worldwide now on websites and blogs, and all you gotta do is Google the titles or check the summaries at Amazon.

With more and more academics in Australia embracing the cli fi meme, and the Marquarie Dictionary naming cli fi one of the key new terms of 2014, cli fi has found a home in Australia, too, with Robinon and Bradley leading the way this year. For sure, there is more to come Down Under, er, Up Above! Look at the world map and globe in a different way once in a while and see reality for what it is. It is not what we always think it is.

As Borges said, this ALL might just be ONE BIG DREAM that some diety from Asteroid Az101556 is dreaming, and when SHE wakes up, we will all be gone. Like that! In an instant! PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT.

But for now, know that cli fi is the next cab off the rank, as book critic Jason Steger put it in the Sydney Morning Herald recently.

NOTE: While some book blog reviewers and newspaper critics have put James Bradley's novel CLADE in the sci fi camp, if you look at the book and read for what it is, IT IS NOT sci fi at all.

As one reviewer in the so-called NORTHERN part of the globe wrote in his very good review of the novel: "Clade is science fiction, but it doesn’t feature any spaceships, aliens, or malevolent robots. Clade’s technology is believable advances of gadgets we’re already used to."

So then, if there are no ''spaceships, aliens, or malevolent robots'' and the technology in the novel is in fact just ''very believable advances of gadgets we’re already used to,'' then why label his novel as sci fi? It is not sci fi at all.

Just because a novel or movie takes place in the future does not mean it is sci fi. To be sci fi, a novel must have spaceships, aliens, malevolent robots, clocks that strike 13 and wormholes to Earth-like planets. Stuff like that. ''Clade'' has none of that. ''Clade'' is about humankind's future in relationship to climate change and global warming. It is a very well written and crafted cli fi novel. Period.

It's true, ''sci-fi fans get excited about speculative future technologies and out-there social effects,'' and that's cool. There's a place for sci fi in our lives, for sure. But James Bradley new cli fi novel is not a sci fi novel. It's about people who dwell in the VERY near future, and it's not about spaceships, aliens, or malevolent robots at all. Read it and shelve in your ''cli fi'' rack.

Some reviewers have taken to calling CLADE as sci fi because they cannot think of another term for it. But ther IS a better literary term for it: cli-fi. A cousin of sci fi but in a different leagure entirely.

As for Alice Robinson's ANCHOR POINT, notice nobody is calling it a sci fi novel, even though it also takes place in the future. Even the author herself refers to it as a cli fi novel. James Bradley might soon refer to his novel as a cli fi novel, too, and drop the sci fi tag. But it's up to him, of course.
And in the end, what matters in literature is the STORY, the content of the book, and not the label critics give it. Cli fi, sci fi, schmi-fi --- what matters is the storytelling chops and both Robinson and Bradley have talent up the kazoo when it comes to telling powerful, rivetting stories.

That's what matters.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Lisa Hill previews Alice Robinson's ANCHOR POINT, a powerful cli fi novel from Australia

 
 
LISA HILL DOWN UNDER PREVIEWS ALICE ROBINSON's 'CLI-FI 'DEBUT NOVEL THIS WAY:

''As you could tell from the Opening Lines of Anchor Point that I posted a day or two ago, I was thoroughly impressed by this debut [cli-fi] novel. It’s an absorbing, satisfying book that suggests a promising future for Melbourne author Alice Robinson.''


 

LINKS:
Author: Alice Robinson
Title: Anchor Point
Publisher: Affirm Press, 2015
 
Fishpond: Anchor Point
or direct from Affirm Press.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Cli-fi literature class on tap at Columbia University Summer Sesssion, May 27 begins...



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY has an important class on tap starting May 27
 
PROFESSOR: ...............Darragh G. Martin, an Irish expat in New York for over 10 years and a playwright and a novelist, see THE KEEPER. Born in 1980. From Dublin.



Course Description

The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change?"(Tony Kushner, ''Angels in America: Perestroika'')
 
In 2005, Bill McKibben called for more writers and artists to address the climate crisis, arguing that political action would be impossible without greater cultural engagement. Ten years later, anthologies, labels, and patterns have emerged, allowing us to consider an emerging canon of ‘cli-fi' literature and explore how the Age of the Anthropocene imagines the story of climate change.
 
At once incredibly dramatic (exacerbating floods, droughts, and other extreme weather) and tremendously slow (with glaciers outpacing governments in speed), climate change presents particular challenges for storytellers. Examining a variety of forms (including plays, novels, films, and writing for children) we will consider how contemporary literature negotiates these and other challenges.
 
What happens to science when it becomes embedded within stories? What are the tensions between presenting climate change as a story of intergenerational responsibility or one of global inequity?
 
How is climate justice imagined by contemporary stories?
 
How are new developments in literature (hyperlinked poems, video series, interactive websites) adapting to represent climate change?
 
Our readings will focus on literature from the USA and United Kingdom, with additional readings from scientists, critics, writers, and activists from across the world. Each week we will focus on a different party in climate change's complex ecosystem, from the fossil fuel companies causing the climate crisis to the next generation of children reading and writing about climate change. Authors studied will include Barbara Kingsolver, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Tom Chivers, Steve Waters, Tarell McCraney, and Vandana Shiva. We will also watch and discuss the following films: Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Day after Tomorrow, and The Island President.


School of the Arts, Barnard, Columbia College, Engineering and Applied Science: Undergraduate, Engineering and Applied Science: Graduate, Graduate School of Arts and Science, General Studies, School of Continuing Education, Global Programs, International and Public Affairs
====================
(CFR) - THE CLI-FI REPORT:
Over 50 academic & media links:

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to the rising new literary genre

UPDATE!
'CLI-FI' LITERATURE CLASS at Columbia University... starts May 27 
 
 
 
by staff writer, with agencies:

Sci-fi isn't going away from the literary scene by any means, but there's a new kid on the block, and more and more colleges are offering classes on the rising new genre of "cli-fi."

Academia is waking up to the trials and tribulations of 'cli-fi,' and it's a trend worth watching.
This spring semester five colleges nationwide have cli-fi lit classes on tap, with both undergrad and graduate level courses involved. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. This year, 2015, is shaping up to be the Year of Cli-Fi in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well.

With such publications as the New York Times (''College Classes Use Art to Brace for Climate Change'')
and Time magazine (''Cli-fi Goes to Hollywood'') reporting on the new genre in 2014, and with an Associated Press wire story going nationwide to 1,500 newspapers in December as well,  several universities and colleges in the United States have taken up the call and are part of a telling new trend in higher education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper in Washington, D.C., which covers American academic issues in a variety of subject areas, has assigned a staff reporter to look into the rise of cli fi in the academy as well, according to sources.

Joining professors at Temple University in Philadelphia in the east and the University of Oregon out west, three other colleges are offering cli-fi courses this semester: Holyoke Community College in western Masschusetts, the University of Delaware and the State University of New York in Geneseo (SUNY Geneseo).

There is, of course, a long and storied history of teaching sci-fi at colleges across the country, with several universities even setting up literature departments that specialize in sci-fi research, writing and novels. Now cli-fi is joining the academic world and finding a room of its own there as well.

Elizabeth Trobaugh and Steve Winters at Holyoke Community College are team-teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester titled “Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

The class combines an "Introduction to Literature" segment and a lab science segment, Trobaugh told this blogger in a recent email. "The final project of the class will have students write their own cli-fi short stories."
 
I asked Trobaugh what books her students were reading for the class.

“We are using a short story collection titled 'I’m with the Bears', and students will also be reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s 'The Windup Girl' and science writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s nonfiction book 'The Sixth Extinction'. We plan to show the movies 'Avatar' and 'Snowpiercer'."

When I told Trobaugh that I planned to write a news story about her course, she replied: "Thank you for your interest in what we are doing this semeseter.
Professor Winters and I thought we were onto
something, and your email confirms our
conviction that cli-fi is indeed on the rise, and this is the moment (as
Macklemore says in the song) to catch the wave."

Stephen Siperstein, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon in Eugene who was profiled in the New York Times article last April, is also teaching a cli-fi literature class this semester, with his undergrad students posting weekly class blogs about what they are reading and how they are reacting to the new genre of fiction.

At Temple Universtiy, Ted Howell, also a doctoral student, is teaching an undergraduate class titled "Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse'' witgh about 30 students enrolled. They are also keeping weekly blogs about the course, using them to interact online outside of class with their professor and fellow students.

"The first two texts we read this semester, 'The Machine Stops' by E.M. Forster and 'The Time Machine' by H.G. Wells, were written way before 'climate change' as we understand it was a real concern, but part of what I’m doing by assigning them is investigating what it means to talk about 'climate change' in books written in an earlier era," Howell said in an email.

At SUNY Geneseo in upstate new York, Professor Ken Cooper is teaching a class this semester titled "Reader and Text: Cli-Fi".


"We will begin by analyzing some print and electronic texts from the emergent genre of ''cli-fi'': renditions of the present and future inflected by anthropogenic climate change," Cooper told his students by way of introduction. ''Representative works may include Paolo Bacigalupi’s 'The Windup Girl,' Barbara Kingsolver’s 'Flight Behavior,' Cuaron’s 'Children of Men,' and the Cape Farewell/ADRIFT project. 
There will be at least one zombie apocalypse." 

Professor Siohban Carroll at the University of Delaware is a specialst in 19th century British literature and, having recently heard of the cli-fi term, told this blogger in a recent tweet: "I'm sort of teaching a 19th Century 'cli-fi' class right now at the graduate level. This week: Mary Shelley & the Anthropocene."

At Columbia University in New York, Irish expat Darragh G Martin will be teaching a summer session class on cli-fi novels and movies, with the course set to begin on May 27 and enrollment still open, according to sources. The class has a student limit of 30 people, but being in New York, the media capital of the world, there is a good chance that media outlets in Manhattan will be interviewing Dr Martin and his students for a major summer of 2015 "cli fi in the classroom" story -- from the BBC to CNN, from ABC to NBC, from the New York Times to the Guardian.

So there's a new kid on the academic block: 'Cli-fi' coures are becoming a much-talked-about item on many college class syllabus websites now and there's a big future in all this for students, professors, researchers and novelists. Hollywood screenwriters, too.

TWEET:
College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to rising new literary genre

Professor Siobhan Carroll is teaching a 19th Century "cli-fi" class this semester at University of Delaware

Professor Siobhan Carroll is teaching a 19th Century "cli-fi" class  this semester at the University of Deleware -- at the graduate level. This week: ''Mary Shelley and  the Anthropocene.''  on Twitter for info and details.

College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to rising new literary genre

BARS BLOG in UK tells us:

5 Questions: Siobhan Carroll on her new book ''An Empire of Air and Water''


Siobhan Carroll - An Empire of Air and Water


Siobhan Carroll is an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware, specializing in British literature from 1750 to 1850 and in modern fantasy and science fiction. This spring semester she is teaching a graduate level class on what might be termed cli fi literature of the 19th Century, with this weeks working class title MARY SHELLEY AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Five Questions: Siobhan Carroll on An Empire of Air and Water


Siobhan Carroll - An Empire of Air and Water
Siobhan Carroll is an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware, specialising in British literature from 1750 to 1850 and in modern fantasy and science fiction. In the past couple of years, she has published articles on Mary Shelley in the European Romantic Review and on Neil Gaiman in Extrapolations, but her larger project has been a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between literature, science and exploration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to the ways in which the geographies of extreme spaces have been configured and imagined. The culmination of this project is her new monograph, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850, which will be published this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press and which we discuss below. The introduction can be read here.
1) How did you first become interested in atopias (defined in your introduction as ‘”real” natural regions falling within the theoretical scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as “place.”‘)?
It emerged from a chance remark I made to Pat Brantlinger at Indiana University. We were discussing how the British narrated imperial history.
Thinking of the Shackleton and Scott stories I’d consumed as a child I said, “Of course, to the Brits the North & South Poles were the ultimate imperial spaces.”
He said, “Really? Why?”
And that’s where this project began – in an attempt to answer that question.
I soon noticed my primary sources grouping together the poles with other unusual spaces. Poems like Byron’s The Island would make sure to establish a captain’s polar ambitions before turning to the ocean and to caverns. Newspapers and geographical textbooks would pay tribute to the poles, caverns, the ocean and the atmosphere before turning to the English countryside. I felt I was starting to get a handle on the poles – Jen Hill’s and Adriana Craciun’s work proved very helpful in thinking through the way polar space constructed British imperial character – but I wanted to know how the poles related to these other geographies. What brought them together in the British imagination? And what kind of cultural work were they performing?
For me, the answer began to turn on the issue of habitation. I learned that none of these geographies – including caves – were considered permanently habitable. At best, they could serve as temporary refuges when your nation cast you out, but sooner or later you would have to return to green, arable land in order to build a home. Edward Said famously said that discussions of imperialism are discussions of habitation. But I was looking at evidence that spaces imagined as not only uninhabited but as *forever* uninhabited – spaces that would permanently resist the empire’s colonizing projects – were playing important roles in defining the British Empire.
Eventually I started using the term “atopia” to discuss these regions – geographies that could never be converted into dwellings. Essentially, I argue that Britons used these sites to define the empire: to set its limits, to establish their national character, and to “prove” their right to dominate more hospitable geographies and peoples. At the same time, in imagining a site as an atopia, Britons were also telling themselves that (to borrow a phrase from Rosalind Williams’s new book) the “triumph of human empire” was impossible. Our twenty-first century attempts to comprehend climate change and ocean acidification struggle against this cultural conceit.
2) An Empire of Air and Water examines the poles, the sea, the air and underworlds, with a conclusion on the unknown spaces of the labyrinthine nineteenth-century city. What lead you to select these particular foci, and were there other types of space, such as wildernesses, deserts or mountains, which you considered including?
I looked at each of them. “Wilderness” I dismissed because (in most discourses) it’s not atopic. Yes, it’s an extreme space, and yes, you can die in it, but it is improvable. Turner’s frontier will advance, this hostile line of trees will be cleared, and you’ll build yourself a nice little town on the spot where a bear once ate your parents.
Mountains and deserts were trickier. I found the habitable/uninhabitable lines harder draw with those spaces, and they were often treated differently in my primary sources. Mountains, for example, were imagined as known and mapped even if nobody had ever climbed them – because they performed the political function of serving as “natural borders” between nations. Deserts I would have liked to have tackled had I had more time, but my sense is that they became more important to the British imperial imagination in the later nineteenth century. I’ve got an article on the backburner about deserts in the Siege of Khartoum that may well turn a postscript for this project.
2) Your book focuses on the Romantic Century (1750-1850). How did you come to decide that this span would be the most suitable for your study, as opposed to one extending earlier or later or one which covered a smaller or larger chronological range?
The book does engage with texts and topics falling outside that date range: it’s hard to describe the cultural operations of these spaces without mentioning works like Dickens’s The Frozen Deep or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness! But in conceptualizing the project as a whole, the “Romantic Century” seemed to truly capture a period of intense transformations in how people thought about the globe. D’Anville’s 1749 map of Africa popularizes the idea that there are “blank spaces” that European empires should probably do something about, while the Great Exhibition of 1851 asserts the British Empire’s ability to not only know but also to spatially organize the diverse circulations of the world.
4) Which primary and secondary texts proved the most crucial for you in shaping your research on uncolonisable spaces?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man both proved enormously important for me – Frankenstein because it marks a definitive break in the tradition in polar narratives up until that point, and The Last Man because it’s uncannily prescient in imagining the human race facing a global environmental disaster that might be of its own making. I might go so far as to call it the first novel of the Anthropocene.
As for secondary texts Рthere were so many inspiring scholars whose work I read and whose arguments helped shape my own. Edward Said, Henri Lefebvre, Benedict Anderson, and Marc Aug̩ proved essential touchstones for me in formulating my arguments. In British scholarship, the work of scholars like Tim Fulford, Alan Bewell, and Saree Makdisi provided an important foundation for the way I was thinking about exploration in the Romantic Century. And then there are scholars like Margaret Cohen, Sam Baker, Lauren Benton, and Adriana Craciun, who published works that helped me solve particular problems in the later stages of this project.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
In researching An Empire of Air and Water I came across a lot of material on nineteenth-century geo-engineering projects that proposed doing things like attacking the poles in order to change the global climate. One 1860s American proposal suggested reversing the current of the Gulf Stream in order to destroy the British Empire. (That’ll teach them!) My next project takes these schemes of “extreme improvement” as a starting place for its investigation into how Britons and Americans conceptualized human agency in relation to air, water, and plant circulations. It’s tentatively titled Circulating Natures: Planetary Politics in the Transatlantic Imagination.

 In the past couple of years, she has published articles on Mary Shelley in the European Romantic Review and on Neil Gaiman in Extrapolations, but her larger project has been a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between literature, science and exploration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to the ways in which the geographies of extreme spaces have been configured and imagined. The culmination of this project is her new monograph, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850, which will be published this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press and which we discuss below. The introduction can be read here.
1) How did you first become interested in atopias (defined in your introduction as ‘”real” natural regions falling within the theoretical scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as “place.”‘)?
It emerged from a chance remark I made to Pat Brantlinger at Indiana University. We were discussing how the British narrated imperial history.
Thinking of the Shackleton and Scott stories I’d consumed as a child I said, “Of course, to the Brits the North & South Poles were the ultimate imperial spaces.”
He said, “Really? Why?”
And that’s where this project began – in an attempt to answer that question.
I soon noticed my primary sources grouping together the poles with other unusual spaces. Poems like Byron’s The Island would make sure to establish a captain’s polar ambitions before turning to the ocean and to caverns. Newspapers and geographical textbooks would pay tribute to the poles, caverns, the ocean and the atmosphere before turning to the English countryside. I felt I was starting to get a handle on the poles – Jen Hill’s and Adriana Craciun’s work proved very helpful in thinking through the way polar space constructed British imperial character – but I wanted to know how the poles related to these other geographies. What brought them together in the British imagination? And what kind of cultural work were they performing?
For me, the answer began to turn on the issue of habitation. I learned that none of these geographies – including caves – were considered permanently habitable. At best, they could serve as temporary refuges when your nation cast you out, but sooner or later you would have to return to green, arable land in order to build a home. Edward Said famously said that discussions of imperialism are discussions of habitation. But I was looking at evidence that spaces imagined as not only uninhabited but as *forever* uninhabited – spaces that would permanently resist the empire’s colonizing projects – were playing important roles in defining the British Empire.
Eventually I started using the term “atopia” to discuss these regions – geographies that could never be converted into dwellings. Essentially, I argue that Britons used these sites to define the empire: to set its limits, to establish their national character, and to “prove” their right to dominate more hospitable geographies and peoples. At the same time, in imagining a site as an atopia, Britons were also telling themselves that (to borrow a phrase from Rosalind Williams’s new book) the “triumph of human empire” was impossible. Our twenty-first century attempts to comprehend climate change and ocean acidification struggle against this cultural conceit.
2) An Empire of Air and Water examines the poles, the sea, the air and underworlds, with a conclusion on the unknown spaces of the labyrinthine nineteenth-century city. What lead you to select these particular foci, and were there other types of space, such as wildernesses, deserts or mountains, which you considered including?
I looked at each of them. “Wilderness” I dismissed because (in most discourses) it’s not atopic. Yes, it’s an extreme space, and yes, you can die in it, but it is improvable. Turner’s frontier will advance, this hostile line of trees will be cleared, and you’ll build yourself a nice little town on the spot where a bear once ate your parents.
Mountains and deserts were trickier. I found the habitable/uninhabitable lines harder draw with those spaces, and they were often treated differently in my primary sources. Mountains, for example, were imagined as known and mapped even if nobody had ever climbed them – because they performed the political function of serving as “natural borders” between nations. Deserts I would have liked to have tackled had I had more time, but my sense is that they became more important to the British imperial imagination in the later nineteenth century. I’ve got an article on the backburner about deserts in the Siege of Khartoum that may well turn a postscript for this project.
2) Your book focuses on the Romantic Century (1750-1850). How did you come to decide that this span would be the most suitable for your study, as opposed to one extending earlier or later or one which covered a smaller or larger chronological range?
The book does engage with texts and topics falling outside that date range: it’s hard to describe the cultural operations of these spaces without mentioning works like Dickens’s The Frozen Deep or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness! But in conceptualizing the project as a whole, the “Romantic Century” seemed to truly capture a period of intense transformations in how people thought about the globe. D’Anville’s 1749 map of Africa popularizes the idea that there are “blank spaces” that European empires should probably do something about, while the Great Exhibition of 1851 asserts the British Empire’s ability to not only know but also to spatially organize the diverse circulations of the world.
4) Which primary and secondary texts proved the most crucial for you in shaping your research on uncolonisable spaces?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man both proved enormously important for me – Frankenstein because it marks a definitive break in the tradition in polar narratives up until that point, and The Last Man because it’s uncannily prescient in imagining the human race facing a global environmental disaster that might be of its own making. I might go so far as to call it the first novel of the Anthropocene.
As for secondary texts Рthere were so many inspiring scholars whose work I read and whose arguments helped shape my own. Edward Said, Henri Lefebvre, Benedict Anderson, and Marc Aug̩ proved essential touchstones for me in formulating my arguments. In British scholarship, the work of scholars like Tim Fulford, Alan Bewell, and Saree Makdisi provided an important foundation for the way I was thinking about exploration in the Romantic Century. And then there are scholars like Margaret Cohen, Sam Baker, Lauren Benton, and Adriana Craciun, who published works that helped me solve particular problems in the later stages of this project.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
In researching An Empire of Air and Water I came across a lot of material on nineteenth-century geo-engineering projects that proposed doing things like attacking the poles in order to change the global climate. One 1860s American proposal suggested reversing the current of the Gulf Stream in order to destroy the British Empire. (That’ll teach them!) My next project takes these schemes of “extreme improvement” as a starting place for its investigation into how Britons and Americans conceptualized human agency in relation to air, water, and plant circulations. It’s tentatively titled Circulating Natures: Planetary Politics in the Transatlantic Imagination.

Cli fi class at UO in 2014 garnered a lot of national interest, starting a new academic trend: backstory

College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to rising new literary genre



University of Oregon

 

 English Class

 

“Cultures of Climate Change” graduate seminar in 2014 garnered a lot of national interest

CLIMATENOVELS-master675

In 2014, both The Huffington Post and The Washington Post mentioned UO English Professor Stephanie LeMenager’s 2014 graduate seminar, “Cultures of Climate Change,” in stories about the emerging genre of “cli-fi.”

This is not the first time LeMenager’s seminar has attracted national media attention. Recently, Time Magazine reporter Lily Rothman interviewed UO English Professor Stephanie LeMenager for the May 19 issue of Time in her review of the summer blockbuster, Godzilla. Rothman links the movie to the emerging genre of “cli-fi.” Read the review, “Godzilla, Into the Storm and More Summer Cli-Fi Thrillers.”

Professor LeMenager is a leader in the field of environmental humanities and has recently received national attention for her graduate seminar “Cultures of Climate Change,” which features “cli-fi,” or science fiction concerned with environmental issues.

Read the New York Times feature, “College Classes Use Arts to Brace for Climate Change,” on Professor LeMenager’s graduate seminar “Cultures of Climate Change.”

Read the CAS story about the national media attention LeMenager’s work has recently received.

Ken Cooper teaching CLI FI class at SUNY Geneseo this semester as cli fi trend in college classes gets another boost

College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to rising new literary genre

 

 

ENGLISH 203 - Reader and Text: ''Cli-Fi'' | Professor Ken Cooper 8:30am-10:10am at SUNY Geneseo.edu

 

This course, along with its kindred sections, aims to develop your working vocabulary for analyzing texts and relating them to contexts; your understanding of the theoretical questions that inform conversations about textual meaning and value; and your competency, as writers, in the discipline of English. 
 
We will begin by analyzing some print and electronic texts from the emergent genre of ''cli-fi'': renditions of the present & future inflected by anthropogenic climate change. 
 
Representative works may include Paolo Bacigalupi’s "The Windup Girl," Barbara Kingsolver’s "Flight Behavior," Mr Cuaron’s "Children of Men," and the Cape Farewell/ADRIFT project. 
 
There will be at least one zombie apocalypse. 
 
We then will consider this defining subject of our times in relation to your own intellectual work, particularly regarding disciplinary knowledge and its boundaries. Approaching the culture of climate change via its narration, poetics, and latent metaphors may provide one answer to the question “What do you do with an English major?

Monday, March 2, 2015

'Cli-fi' in the classroom: colleges nationwide follow trending course topic

College classrooms go 'cli-fi' as academia wakes up to rising new literary genre



NEWS LINK
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/03/01/cli-fi-in-the-classroom/

Categorized | Dan Bloom, Culture & Lifestyles, Science, Medicine, Education


‘Cli-fi’ in the classroom

Print Friendly
By Dan Bloom
Danny Bloom

Danny Bloom


In the usual way I meet most people these days, I met Elizabeth Trobaugh the other day via an email she sent me from her office in western Massachusetts where she is a professor of English at Holyoke Community College. Her email arrived out of the blue, a complete surprise, but as you shall see, a welcome one, too.



It turns out that professor Trobaugh is team teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester, with her colleague Steven Winters, titled “Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

The class, part of a nationwide trend where colleges and universities are offering classes about the cli-fi genre of movies and novels, combines an ”Introduction to Literature” segment and a lab science segment, she said. “We meet with our students for six hours a week, plus a two-hour lab,” Trobaugh told me by way of introducing herself and her work.

“The final project of the class will have students write their own cli-fi short stories.”
When I asked her how she found me, she said she was doing some online research about the cli-fi term and found my name and email address via a Wikipedia entry and just wanted to say hello. “I found your name in a Google search when I was trying to learn more about the term ”cli-fi” and when the genre was first identified, and from there I found your website and blog,” she wrote.

”Our college is very supportive of interdisciplinary learning, allowing us to develop “Learning Communities” that combine two courses from two different disciplines.”
I asked Trobaugh what books her students were reading for the class.

“We are using a short story collection titled I’m with the Bears, and students will also be reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s [cli-fi novel] Windup Girl and science writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s nonfiction book titled The Sixth Extinction. We plan to show the movie Avatar and maybe Snowpiercer.”
The last part of her first email caught my attention, too.

“When I saw your email address, I just thought I’d reach out and say hi and thank you for coining the term and identifying the genre that we have built our course around,” she wrote. ‘I will direct our students to your cli-fi website, too.”

“I also want to tell you that I enjoyed reading your semi humorous ‘Yiddish Guide to Climate Change’ that was published in San Diego Jewish World a few months ago,” she added.

“By the way, I went to Tufts, too,” she told me. “I graduated in 1986.”

So we are fellow Tufts Jumbos (I graduated in 1971).

Elizabeth Trobaugh’s letter made my day on a quiet Sunday morning , and now we are friends.

*=====================================
Danny Dan Daniel O'Bloom is an inveterate web surfer and cli-fi enthusiast.


MORE CLASSES

ENGLISH 203 - Reader and Text: ''Cli-Fi'' | Professor Ken Cooper 8:30am-10:10am at SUNY Geneseo.edu

This course, along with its kindred sections, aims to develop your working vocabulary for analyzing texts and relating them to contexts; your understanding of the theoretical questions that inform conversations about textual meaning and value; and your competency, as writers, in the discipline of English.
We will begin by analyzing some print and electronic texts from the emergent genre of ''cli-fi'': renditions of the present & future inflected by anthropogenic climate change.
Representative works may include Paolo Bacigalupi’s "The Windup Girl," Barbara Kingsolver’s "Flight Behavior," Mr Cuaron’s "Children of Men," and the Cape Farewell/ADRIFT project.
There will be at least one zombie apocalypse.
We then will consider this defining subject of our times in relation to your own intellectual work, particularly regarding disciplinary knowledge and its boundaries. Approaching the culture of climate change via its narration, poetics, and latent metaphors may provide one answer to the question “What do you do with an English major?

Sunday, March 1, 2015

The ''BUILD CLIMATE JUSTICE'' campaign (get started here)

  1.  
    ANNOUNCING THE ''BUILD CLIMATE JUSTICE'' campaign worldwide, all nations, in all languages: send your personal statement and tweet it with hashtag ‪#‎buildclimatejustice‬
    to #buildclimatejustice campaign: "I build climate justice by ___ __ _ ____ ___ ___!" [ADD YOUR STATEMENT, name an action you are taking or plan to take or hope to take soon, to help build, in your own way, climate justice for now and future generations. One sentence.]
    ...LAUNCHED TODAY: via Twitter and FB. a social media platform no homepage, no website. Make your voices heard via social media and the hashtag #buildclimatejustice. IT WILL CATCH ON over time!
  2.  
ANNOUNCING THE ''BUILD CLIMATE JUSTICE'' campaign worldwide, all nations, in all languages: send your personal statement and tweet it with hashtag ‪#‎buildclimatejustice
  1.  
    1. 7. JOIN! campaign: "I build climate justice by doing what is necessary, in the years I have been allotted."
    1. 6. Announcing the campaign: "I build climate justice by refusing to be distracted and entertained to death."
    1. 5. Announcing campaign: "I build climate justice by writing novels about issues for future generations."
    1. 4. Announcing the campaign: "I build climate justice by sticking my neck out."
    1. 3. Announcing the campaign: "I build climate justice by being a voice for those who are not heard and are invisible."
    1. 2. Announcing the campaign: "I build climate justice by standing up for future generations, as yet unborn."
    1. 1. BUILD IT & THEY WILL COME: Announcing the campaign, worldwide input wanted, all languages: Write your slogan: (more)
  •