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Fables for Tomorrow: Representations of Climate Change in Popular Culture

Another World Is Possible, David Buckland

Course Description

An increasing number of writers, filmmakers, and artists are pursuing creative ways of representing climate change, particularly through the genre of climate change fiction (or, “cli-fi”). Some examples of cli-fi-inspired works include the Hollywood blockbuster Day After Tomorrow and sleeper hit Snowpiercer, as well as bestselling literature like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow. In this course, we will ask: what is cli-fi? Who is its audience? In what different ways do cli-fi texts represent life beyond “the tipping point”? What different types of futures are represented by cli-fi? Are cli-fi futures necessarily (post-) apocalyptic? To answer these questions, we will examine a variety of literary and visual cli-fi texts, including short selections from authors including Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood and recently released films Interstellar and Mad Max: Fury Road. This course will interest STEM and humanities students alike, particularly those interested in applying literary and textual analysis to “real-life” problems. This course emphasizes college-level critical thinking, reading, and writing skills and culminates in a research-based essay on an independently-chosen cli-fi text.

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Course Aims

Why this course will appeal to IU freshmen

As a course constructed to meet the needs of an introductory composition course, our semester-long investigation of the cli-fi genre begins and ends with the genre’s rhetorical situation, emphasizing analysis of content, context, and form and how these features are relevant to the cli-fi text’s appeal to its audience. By the end of this course, students will not only be better practiced in the ins and outs of college-level reading and writing, they will also leave with a better appreciation for the humanities’ role in interpreting climate change for a lay audience. This course will interest students from a variety of disciplines, including those going into STEM-based fields, but also humanities-leaning students seeking a way to apply literary and other textual analysis to “real-life” problems. Finally, because of the popular primary texts we will be examining (some of which are listed in the course description), this course will also draw students interested in certain literary genres (particularly YA science fiction and fantasy).

Why this is a reading and writing course Cli-fi borrows tropes and narrative structures from science fiction and fantasy in order to represent the impacts of climate change on the environment and its inhabitants (humans and non-humans), particularly through stories about the near-future. Using WA active reading skills such as “Notice, Focus, Rank,” “The Method,” and “Difference in Similarity,” Unit 1 will prepare students to locate the formal and rhetorical features of climate change fiction. We will introduce generic conventions of sci-fi and fantasy depicted in Ursula LeGuin’s “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” and Unknown Future’s manifesto, Speculate This!, and we will investigate how these conventions are functioning similarly and differently in two cli-fi fiction texts: Rachel Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” and Margaret Atwood’s “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.” Students will notice that while cli-fi texts may share common generic origins, their visions of the future vary widely. Why are some cli-fi text buoyant, painting a hopeful future with techno-optimism, while others are distrustful of humanity’s ability to overcome impending environmental catastrophe? We will also consider cli-fi alongside non-fictional texts, including scientific models, IPCC maps, and documentary film clips, to think about the different ways fiction and non-fiction represent climate change and those futures affected by climate change. To provide a more orthodox introduction to the skill of active reading, Unit 1’s primary texts are literary. It is my hope that a thorough examination of the rhetorical conventions of these short stories will prepare students for the visual analysis they will do in Unit 2.

In Unit 2, we will further explore the relationship between cli-fi and form by thinking about how a particular type of cli-fi story, the (post-) apocalyptic narrative, represents human and non-human futures. In Unit 1, Carson and Atwood’s stories represent solemn, even deserted, worlds—worlds portrayed in the immediate aftermath of environmental apocalypse. In Unit 2, the primary texts we look include more elaborate (and thus, arguably more lively) portrayals of a post-tipping point future. In this unit, we will ask: What type(s) of futures does the post-apocalyptic narrative make room for? Who survives the environmental apocalypse? How might

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Hollywood’s audience’s familiarity with apocalyptic tropes inform an author or director’s visual and narrative choices? Unit 2 will make use of the filmic elements lesson of regular W131 to prepare students to use visual details as the evidence for analysis in their assignments for this unit. We will examine these films through three carefully-selected secondary sources which provide useful lenses for the lens-driven analysis of Essay 2. Finally, in Unit 3, we will conclude the course by investigating how literary and filmic cli-fi tropes manifest in types of cli-fi art. We will look at photographs, mixed-media art installations, sound art, and music that draw upon the conventions we have discussed in Units 1 and 2, and we will discuss how these different media similarly and differently represent climate change and climate change futures. In this unit, we will stress “Sources in Conversation” and the “Evolving Thesis,” both in our examination of how multimedia artists use these analytical moves to construct their cli-fi texts, but also as we write our final essays. While we will be looking at “remixed” cli-fi during the first two weeks of Unit 3 (see the Unit 3 description on page 8 of this proposal for a full description), for their final essay, students will have the option of choosing any cli-fi text for their research-based analysis (literary, visual, or multimedia).

Course Trajectory

Unit One: Writing for a Future Planet (6 weeks) What is cli-fi? How do we define it?

In Unit 1, students will establish an introductory understanding of the genre, including cli-fi’s formal conventions and how cli-fi negotiates different kinds of audiences. Our primary readings in this unit will introduce students to literary cli-fi, while our secondary readings will provide students with a framework for thinking about cli-fi as a genre which combines scientific vocabulary and fact with speculative imagination.

Primary Readings

Our introduction to cli-fi will begin with two very short works of fiction: Rachel Carson’s “A Fable For Tomorrow,” from her landmark work, Silent Spring, and Margaret Atwood’s “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.”* “A Fable For Tomorrow” describes a make-believe American town stricken by an invisible threat: radiation and chemical pesticides. Questions we will discuss include: How does Carson appeal to her mid-century audience? What connections does Carson make between the Cold War and environmental catastrophe? How are allusions to the Soviet Union used to create a parallel between the threat of communism and the threat of science and technology spun out of control? The narrator of Atwood’s “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” seems to speak to an audience visiting from Earth “from some distant world” after humans have disappeared. We will discuss how Atwood’s allegory, with its allusions to Ovid’s metal ages, speaks across time. How are contemporary, future, and even, perhaps, inter-planetary audiences implicated in a millennia-old narrative about the trade-off of peace for

* Together, “A Fable For Tomorrow” and “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” are less than five pages total,

so I don’t expect the amount of reading to cause students any unnecessary hardship.

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knowledge? How does this conflict relate to the history of and debates about climate change? We will use our secondary readings about narrative form to think about Carson and Atwood’s representations of the future as persuasive strategy. Do these authors use emotional and/or evidence-based appeals to deliver their messages? What do they leave “open” to the reader’s imagination? Why are these “remainders” important to literary cli-fi?

Secondary Readings

The main goal of Unit 1 is to identify a working vocabulary and set of conventions for cli-fi. Additionally, we will think about the persuasive nature of cli-fi. For whom do cli-fi authors write? How can we tell? We will begin with an excerpt from Mark Maslin’s book, Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction. Written for a non-expert audience, this reading will establish a common vocabulary for students unfamiliar with the science and sociohistorical context of climate change.† It will also lay out an explanation of the climate-change “tipping point,” which we will refer back to throughout the course, particularly as we discuss cli-fi’s representations of the future. (All of the texts we look at represent futures past the tipping point.) In the first two weeks, we will also read excerpts from Stuart Hall’s Representation and John Frow’s Genre. Using Hall’s definitions of culture and representation, students will gain a better understanding of genre as something culturally reproduced.

We will use our remaining secondary readings to think about how and why literature has embraced “cli-fi” as a way of representing the (near) future as affected by climate change. These readings will introduce students to the formal elements of cli-fi (particularly its status as an off-shoot of science fiction). The first is Ursula Le Guin’s “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology,” a short essay which speaks to the rhetorical situation of the sci-fi. Le Guin emphasizes the amount of background research that goes into building plausible fictional worlds; the reader’s enjoyment of sci-fi texts, she argues, is in part derived from the author’s incorporation of scientific fact. This essay is useful not only because it provides historical context for cli-fi’s sci-fi roots but also because it presents fictional worlds as rhetorically-situated texts. Second, we will read excerpts from Speculate This!, a manifesto which envisions “alternative futures” through the use of “speculative practices that embrace uncertainty.” We will use Speculate This! as a starting point for thinking about the different kinds of futures represented by cli-fi. Is a cli-fi text more rhetorically successful if it is pessimistic or optimistic? Are cli-fi futures affirmative (open) or firmative (closed)? These ideas will provide us with a productive foundation for our discussion of post-apocalyptic cli-fi texts in Unit 2, and we will return to “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” and Speculate This! as lenses for Essay 2.

Reading and Writing Trajectory

†If necessary, the instructor will emphasize during the first week that the objective of this class is not to debate the

existence of climate change and global warming, but rather, to use tools of rhetorical analysis to examine the ways

writers and artists represent these phenomena.

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The first two weeks of Unit 1 focus active reading (annotation, note-taking, and summary). In addition, we will draw upon WA’s “notice, focus, rank” as we try to establish cli-fi’s generic patterns and conventions in our test objects and course readings. To test student’s active reading skills at the end of the first week, students will be asked to complete a blog post hypothesizing on our unit inquiry question using the test objects and/or introductory course readings (excerpts from Climate Change, Representation, or Genre) discussed so far in class. Students will turn in a short summary (MT 1) of either “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” or the Speculate This! excerpt by the end of the second week. The next two weeks of Unit 1 focus on rhetorical situation and the rhetorical triangle. To prepare them for rhetorical analysis in MT2, students will read WA’s explanation of “The Method” as well as “Rhetorical Analysis for Visual Texts” from Wilhoit’s A Brief Guide to Writing From Readings. While students will not be analyzing visual texts for any of their Unit 1 assignments, we will think about the parallels between literary-based textual and visual evidence, and how analysis proceeds from such evidence-collection. (This semester, I have found it very helpful to draw comparisons between an author’s word choice and a director’s choice of filmic elements – it is my intention that the Wilhoit reading will concretize this analogy.) We will return to the Wilhoit reading in Unit 2 during film analysis.

Throughout the semester, we will be incorporating corresponding analytical skills from the standard W131 skill crescendo. Our discussion of the Carson/Atwood readings will emphasize questions of audience: Who are Carson and Atwood writing for? How are cli-fi conventions used to reach the audience in a way similarly or differently from non-fiction portrayals of climate change? To conclude Unit 1, students will practice “difference in similarity” in a comparative analysis of the LeGuin/Uncertain Commons or Carson/Atwood readings (Essay 1). This option between the two pairings is meant to provide students a “creative” (Carson/Atwood) and a “critical” (LeGuin/Uncertain Commons) option for the comparative analysis. Students will be doing a focused rhetorical analysis for their Essay 1 assignment, so no matter which they choose, they will still be accomplishing the same pedagogical task of establishing an insightful relationship between two texts using rhetorical analysis.

Primary Materials (supplied as PDFs) Rachel Carson, “A Fable For Tomorrow” (1962) Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” (2009)

Secondary Materials (supplied as PDFs) Mark Maslin, from Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction (2014) Stuart Hall, from Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

(1997) John Frow, from Genre (2006) Ursula LeGuin, “Do-It-Yourself-Cosmology,” (1979) Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (2013)

Readings from Writing Analytically Notice, Focus, Rank, 17-21

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Uncovering Assumptions, 56-58 The Method, 26-32 Asking “So What?”, 21-23 Difference in Similarity, 82-83

Readings from A Brief Guide to Writing From Readings (supplied as PDFs) Summary, 61-66 Rhetorical Analysis of Visual Texts, 158-166

Readings from Rules for Writers “Read Actively: Annotate the Text,” 70-73 “Providing Transitions,” 64-66 “Use signal phrases to integrate sources,” 112-114 “Integrating and Citing Sources to Avoid Plagiarism,” 455-456 “Integrating Sources,” 469-479

Unit Two: Visualizing the (Post-) Apocalypse (5 weeks) What types of futures does cli-fi represent?

In Unit 1, students will establish a working understanding of climate change (including “the tipping point”), genre as concept, the formal conventions cli-fi, and cli-fi’s rhetorical situation, including its audience. By the time they have finished this first unit, students will be prepared to translate their skills of rhetorical analysis to film-based cli-fi narratives that are both longer and larger in scope than the short stories from Unit 1. Using these longer cli-fi narratives, Unit 2 asks students to think more pointedly about the implications of cli-fi’s representations of the future. More specifically, is there room for humans after the tipping point?

Primary Texts: Films

Unit 2 expands the realm of cli-fi from literature to film while honing in on a particular kind of cli-fi future: environmental apocalypse. We will watch Interstellar (2014) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) while building upon the idea of speculative world-building that was introduced in Unit 1. These films offer very different visions of the post-tipping point future: in one, humans must find another planet to inhabit, in the other, they search for a habitable corner of a nearly totally-desertified Earth. We will think about the ways our films use speculative elements (in particular, technologies and social orders unfamiliar to a modern-day audience) in order to answer Unit 2’s inquiry question. If cli-fi affirms a human future, what does this future look like, and how is it made possible? What are the similarities and differences between literary and visual cli-fi?

Both Interstellar and Mad Max contemplate the idea of home within the context of environmental apocalypse. Set during an incurable crop blight sometime in the near future, Interstellar follows a group of scientists as they travel through space to find a new planet for

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humanity. Mad Max tells the story of Furiosa and Max as they fight the tyrannical War Boys and attempt to find a hospitable home in a land devastated by nuclear holocaust. While neither film references climate change outright, they are considered part of the cli-fi genre because the ecological conflicts represented are fundamentally tied to climate change (among these conflicts are desertification and water insecurity). Continuing our discussions from Unit 1, we will examine how genre differently informs directorial decisions and along with them, representations of the (post-) apocalypse. For example, the future envisioned in the action-thriller Mad Max is necessarily more violent (at least more explicitly so) than the future envisioned by Interstellar, a science-fiction drama. We will continue to think about what makes a persuasive cli-fi text and, along these lines, how our films use visual elements to make claims upon the audience. We will use our three secondary essays as lenses for complicating our initial arguments about the films.

Secondary Readings

To acquaint ourselves with contemporary debates about cli-fi and to facilitate early discussions about Interstellar and Mad Max, students will read The New York Times’s “Room For Debate” feature “Will Fiction Influence How We React to Climate Change”? at the beginning of Unit 2. The “Room For Debate” feature contains six responses to the aforementioned question. Students will be required to respond to one of these six respondents in a class blog format.‡ These responses will provide a starting point for our initial discussions of the films.

To further enrich our critical examination of Interstellar and Mad Max, we will read three additional secondary texts: “Narrative in the World Risk Society” by Ursula Heise, an excerpt from Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton, and “Posthumanism, Environmental History, and Narratives of Collapse” by Dana Phillips. These secondary texts have been selected because of their clear and obvious lenses (necessary for the work students will be doing in Essay 2) and because of the discussion questions they generate. Heise’s essay presents the idea of risk as a guiding mechanism in 21st-century ecological narratives. Heise advocates Ulrich Beck’s global ethics of “shared risk” in a world threatened by environmental catastrophe. This reading will allow us to make connections between the affirmative and firmative futures explored in Speculate This! and the different representations of shared risk in Interstellar and Mad Max. In what ways are characters forced to share resources? Is an ethics of shared risk part of a post-apocalyptic future? In a future after the tipping point, who lives and who dies, and why? In Ecology Without Nature, Morton argues that in order to truly think ecologically, we must do away with the concept of Nature. Nature, he suggests, is a cultural construction—and a dangerous one at that. We will use Morton’s essay to discuss: how do these films collapse or reinforce the binary of nature and culture? How do their representations of science and technology function in a cli-fi context? Do the films depict a redeeming promise of science to “save” humans (and their environments) is troubled, or do they represent a different kind of future? Phillips, meanwhile, critiques the (post-) apocalyptic themes that dominate ecologically-

‡ This reading was not introduced in Unit 1 because early on, I want students to establish some of their own ideas

about our course topic.

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minded fiction, arguing that due to generic convention, tales of apocalypse (as well as other “narratives of collapse”) are unnecessarily “more doom-ridden than the evidence they present warrants.” Phillips’s essay provides an important counter-point to class discussions about the rhetorical efficacy of cli-fi narratives (particularly post-apocalyptic ones) and gives us an unexpected entry into the interpretation of each of the films’ ambiguous endings. Phillips’s reading will help us discuss whether or not the films we watch are these films ultimately optimistic or pessimistic. Do they raise awareness about climate change or are they trying to accomplish something different?

Reading and Writing Trajectory

At the beginning of this unit, students will be informed of an analytical concept map assignment (MT 4). This assignment asks students to visualize connections across essays and films in the form of a concept map (examples will be provided). MT 4 replaces the analytical outline of W131 but asks students to engage the same foundational WA skills in a focused assignment (in particular, “difference in similarity,” “source as lens,” and “sources in conversation”). While they will be completing about the same amount of written work (that is, the word counts for the analytical outline and analytical concept map are comparable), my hope is that the creative freedom of an illustrated map will inspire students to think more imaginatively about relationships among our readings and films. Digital forms (PowerPoint diagrams, Twine stories, Mind Maple maps) will be encouraged. As students proceed with their film viewings and unit readings, they will add new ideas to their concept maps and will have the option to present and post them to our course blog, along with their Unit 2 blog post.

The first two weeks of Unit 2 will focus on visual analysis. As we look at how filmic elements are used to depict post-apocalyptic worlds, we will think about the how such conflicts are similar or different to those represented in “A Fable For Tomorrow” and “Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet.” How do representations of cli-fi futures in literary texts compare to those in visual ones? Are there any literary conventions of form which are translated to visual texts? During this part of the unit, we will return to Wilhoit’s “Rhetorical Analysis of Visual Texts.” Students will be asked to turn in a film viewing guide by the end of the first week of Unit 2 and a 10 on 1-style visual analysis in MT 3 by the end of the second week. The remainder of Unit 2 will be devoted to discussion and drafting (including the pre-writing hosted by MT4) of an extended lens-based analysis for Essay 2. We will pay particular attention to thesis statement development using the X/Y thesis skill from WA.

Primary Materials Christopher Nolan (dir.), Interstellar (2013) George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Secondary Materials (supplied as PDFs) The New York Times, “Room for Debate” Op Ed: “Will Fiction Influence How We React to

Climate Change”? (2014) Ursula Heise, “Narrative in the World Risk Society” (2008)

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Timothy Morton, from Ecology Without Nature (2009) Dana Phillips, “Posthumanism, Environmental History, and Narratives of Collapse”

(2015)

Readings from Writing Analytically 10 on 1, 105-106 Sources as Lenses, 63-68 X/Y Thesis, 129-33 Sources in Conversation, 189-93

Readings from Understanding Rhetoric (supplied as a PDF) “The Paragraph Sandwich”

Unit Three: Cape Farewell and Other Artistic Responses to Climate Change (4 weeks) To what extent is cli-fi equipped to meet the rhetorical challenges of climate change?

This unit returns to an inquiry question posed earlier in the semester: in what ways is cli-fi equipped to communicate the risks of climate change for non-expert audiences? During the semester, we will move from literary cli-fi, to filmic cli-fi, and, finally, in Unit 3, to what I’m calling “remixed” cli-fi: artistic responses to climate change which draw upon both the speculative conventions of cli-fi and contemporary scientific technology to reach out to non-expert audiences.

One example of “remixed” cli-fi is D.J. Spooky’s Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, a multimedia piece which samples and electronically manipulates the sound of melting ice (collected during a scientific expedition to the South Pole). We will use this piece to review our “active reading” skills from Unit 1 to discuss how to analyze multimedia texts (this will be especially important for students who choose multimedia texts for their Essay 3 analysis). Returning to Ursula Le Guin’s “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology,” we will also revisit to the skill of “Sources in Conversation” to think about the ways that cli-fi is made more or less convincing through the explicit incorporation of “real-world” (rather than speculative) science and technology. While we will continue our discussions of primary and secondary materials in class, the final three weeks of our course will be especially devoted to students’ final projects (particularly research, drafting, and final presentations).

Primary and Secondary Materials

We will begin this unit with a short reading from The Guardian, “12 Tools for Communicating Climate Change More Effectively.” The article explains the challenges scientists have communicating the risks of climate change to non-expert audiences and describes useful tools for “climate change communicators,” including “8. Communicate through images and stories.” Drawing upon their skills of rhetorical and visual analysis from Units 1 and 2, and using our discussion of D.J. Spooky’s Terra Nova a model, students will complete a close reading (or visual

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analysis) (MT 5) of one object from the Cape Farewell project§ and will conclude by explaining how the object they have selected uses any of the twelve tools listed in The Guardian article. This exercise will prepare students for the close-reading work of Essay 3. Our final secondary reading will be “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge” by Finis Dunaway. This essay, which discusses Banerjee’s photographs of ANWR and their political life during Congress’s debates about arctic drilling in the early 2000s, models the research-based analysis students will be asked to do for Essay 3.

Reading and Writing Trajectory

For their final assignment (Essay 3), students will do a research-based rhetorical and/or visual analysis of an independently-chosen text which answers one of our course inquiry questions. (To help facilitate this process, I will be providing an “archive” of possible texts.) The last half of this unit will be dedicated to the research process, including the assembling of an annotated bibliography (MT 6) and drafting. Prior to this work, however, students will complete a final blog post and MT5, assignments which will emphasize the close-reading skills which are foundational to Essay 3. I will stress that while students will be completing research-based analysis for Essay 3, their claims will extend from the text-based evidence from their primary text. We will be making two class visits to the library: one to learn about how to research using IU’s library databases and one for final presentations using the Scholars’ Commons IQ wall.

Primary Materials Cape Farewell Project (ongoing) D.J. Spooky, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

Secondary Materials (supplied as a PDF) Adam Cornor, “12 Tools for Communicating Climate Change more effectively” Finis Dunaway, “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics

of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge” (2009)

Readings from Writing Analytically Academic Research Skills, 186-195 Evolving Thesis, 156-175

Readings from Rules for Writers “Conducting Research,” 420-41 “To Locate Articles, Search a Database or Consult a Print Index,” 426-430 “Evaluating Sources,” 437-441

Summary of Assignments

§ Cape Farewell is a non-profit think tank sponsored by Arts Council England which brings together artists, writers,

journalists, and scientists “[to communicate] on a human scale the urgency of climate change.”

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Title Description Source Length Points

Unit 1

Blog Post Reflection Course Inquiry Question 100 words 10

Microtheme 1 Summary “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” or Speculate This!

400 words 50

Microtheme 2 Rhetorical analysis “A Fable for Tomorrow” or “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet”

500 words 50

Essay 1 Comparative analysis Either “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” and Speculate This! or “A Fable For Tomorrow” and “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet”

4 pages 100

Unit 2

Blog Post Reflection One film, using “Room For Debate”

100 words 10

Microtheme 3 Visual analysis One scene from Interstellar or Mad Max: Fury Road

500 words 50

Microtheme 4 Analytical concept map Both movies, plus one additional primary text from Unit 1 and two secondary texts (one from each unit)

500 words 50

Essay 2 Lens-driven analysis Interstellar or Mad Max: Fury Road, plus two secondary sources

5 pages 200

Unit 3

Blog Post Reflection Response to Unit Inquiry Question using Cape Farewell

100 words 10

Microtheme 5 Close reading One text or object from 500 words 50

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Cape Farewell

Microtheme 6 Annotated bibliography and class presentation

5 secondary sources, 1 of which must be independently found

~150 per entry; 5 minutes

60 (50 written; 10 oral)

Essay 3 Research-based analysis

One independently-selected cli-fi text, plus 4 secondary sources from MT6, including 1 peer-reviewed article

6 pages 300

Short Assignment Points

In-class contributions Reading guides and annotations, film viewing guides, and in-class writing

Varies 60 (20 per unit)

1000 total

Course Materials and Availability

Students will be required to purchase Writing Analytically and Rules for Writers. Course readings and additional composition readings (from A Brief Guide to Writing From Readings and Understanding Rhetoric) will be provided at the beginning of the semester in a PDF “binder” on Canvas.

Sample of Possible Cli-Fi Texts for Essay 3

Ice Music by D.J. Spooky (music, multimedia) “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change” by Margaret Atwood (essay,

multimedia) Icebergs by Olafur Eliasson (sculpture) Waste Labyrinth by Luzinterruptus (sculpture) Virtual Forests by Naziha Mestaoui (interactive multimedia) Rain Room by rAndom (interactive multimedia) Cli-fi related fiction and poetry from environmental-themed journals, including Orion,

Terrain, and ISLE