Literature and the Elements I: Water

This course is the first part of a series of seminars on the elements—water, earth, air, fire—in the literary and cultural imagination. In times of global heating and the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, it becomes apparent that elemental forces do not reside in a pastoral background of our imagination but are vibrant and sometimes violent co-creators of planetary life-worlds. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of elemental ecocriticism, environmental media theory, the blue humanities, and feminist materialisms, we will engage literary texts that imagine worlds, bodies, aesthetics, politics, and futures shaped by water and fluid media. Alongside canonical climate fiction examples, the selection of texts will include Indigenous, Black, and queer-feminist perspectives on ways to reclaim, revision, and estrange relationships with water, ocean, flooding, and fluidity. Spaces of water are multiple. From rivers and oceans, to ponds, puddles, tears, and rain, water is a medium of life but also of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Its depths harbor an archive of toxins, merfolk, and octopi. It can be both monstrous and healing, highly symbolic and utterly strange. In this course we will explore this slipperiness and dive into genres of the watery imagination that include poetry, short stories, novels, and theory.

Texts to purchase:

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

Rivers Solomon, The Deep (2020) 

PLEASE NOTE: This course is supported by the TUD Diversity-Sensitive Teaching Award and is designed in dialogue with guest visits by speculative fiction author Rivers Solomon and the Indigenous writer and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor. The final list of has been posted on OPAL.