Green Utopias? Flipping the Script on Urban Disaster

Green Utopias? Flipping the Script on Urban Disaster, Buchenau, AmSt 3, K / Ka / Kb; Tuesdays, 12-14, T03R04D10 (5 ECTS, Klausur in AmSt3, 4 ECTS in K, dort mündliche Prüfung)

Early twenty-first-century American life has been distinctively marked by urban disasters that have been understood as unmistakable markers of the arrival of the Anthropocene and its human-made climate instability. These disasters include tropical storms and wildfires on the American west coast, Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, and the COVID pandemic’s impact on New York. These catastrophes have figured prominently in a US popular literature and screen culture that has sought to come to grips with the ways in which each has been collectively shattering, disrupting many people’s faith in the livability of their cities; each has also had a pronounced impact on how we imagine and experience an urban life that seeks to minimize each city’s ecological footprint, flipping the script on the urban impact on the environment. This seminar will examine the ways in which American literature, film and television since 2000 have represented urbanity in the aftermath of ecological catastrophe, attending to affect—dread, anxiety, emptiness, mistrust, anti-authoritarianism, vigilantism—as well as plot, setting, and mise-en-scene. We will discuss critical essays by scholars in environmental studies and in literature, film and television studies, as well as literature, film and television texts that may include:

 

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, 1975

Octavia Butler, Fledgling, 2006

N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017)

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2014)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-2007)

 

Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg 2012)

Spaceship Earth (Matt Wolf, 2020)

WALL-E (Pixar 2008)

Tomorrowland (Disney 2015)

 

Treme (HBO 2010-2013)

Girls (2012-)

 

This class addresses SDG 11 (healthy cities). It will allow students to improve their Information Literacy, Analysis, Written Communication, and Intercultural Knowledge and media competences.