Intendierte Lernergebnisse
Students will gain an understanding of theories, forms, and representations of intergenerational justice and apply them to the interpretation of contemporary (climate) narratives. They will learn to articulate how central ethical debates concerning intergenerational justice and demographic and environmental crises are negotiated through fiction. Besides practicing their interpretative skills of narratives in different media (prose fiction, short story, drama), they will also deepen their theoretical knowledge in literary theory and interdisciplinary approaches (ecocriticism, cultural aging studies, ethical criticism, gender studies).
Lehrmethodik
in-depth discussions of textsshort lecture inputsexpert groups/student-led tasks
Inhalt/e
The exponential growth of the human exploitation of nature, along with the growth of the world’s population and longevity threaten imaginations of the future. Discourses of demographic and environmental crises raise pressing questions about intergenerational justice. This comprises matters of social justice, questions of justice between the old and the young and between present and future generations. This class explores contemporary fictions that engage with these debates and negotiate issues such as old age, disease and extinction, care and responsibility, guilt and blame, reproduction, euthanasia, and gerontocide. Often, the narratives employ dark humour in the attempt to balance hope and despair. A main aim of this class is to practice interpretation skills. To do this, we will discuss a selection of different texts including two novels, Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (2021) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), two plays, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) and Tamsin Oglesby’s Really Old, Like Forty Five (2010), as well as Margaret Atwood’s short story “Torching the Dusties” (2016).
Literatur
Jessie Greengrass, The High House (2021)John Lanchester, The Wall (2019)Please obtain your own copies of the two novels. All other materials will be made available by the instructor on Moodle.