Despair and Hope in Environmental Literature

Description: The course takes a look at literature that engages with environmental challenges (such as climate change) and explores how literary texts deal with questions of what it means to be hopeful/hopeless in times of increasing ecological crises. The goal is to examine how the concepts of hope and despair are depicted in fictional/nonfictional texts and what the significance of such texts might be in discussions about environmental sensibility and responsibility. In this session, we will discuss and analyze a chapter out of Dr. Jane Goodall's The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet (2021). A copy of the chapter "The Resilience of Nature" can be found here.