Migration, Climate and Anxiety in Literature in English

The course focuses on how literature in English published since 1989 has engaged with migration and climate change as two of the main aspects that are at the root of what has been termed the current “age of anxiety“. The course highlights and discusses how the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 is often considered to signify the beginning of the current epoch of globalisation, and also the time when, in environmental terms, concerns transitioned from the threat of nuclear war to the imminence of environmental disaster. The global increase in the volume and accelerated pace of the transnational movement of people, information and goods has been increasingly perceived as provoking a number of challenges or “global threats“ to the validity and sovereignty of the nation state. The most recent challenges posed by climate change and forced migration have often been responded to in political and media discourses in a manner that has promoted the negative affects of anger, frustration, fear and anxiety. These individual emotions, experienced collectively, have generated what has been termed as “affective economies“ that move people into different types of political action, and make subjects align either with or against others. This course will focus on an in-depth analysis of a selection of representative fictional texts in English that criticially engage with the perception of migration and climate change as global threats. The analysis of these literary texts will encompass a number of relevant theoretical approaches, including transculturality, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, risk theory and affect theory.