The Department of Literatures in English at IC is holding an interdisciplinary event this Thursday, Oct. 24, at 5pm in Business 111.
"Studying Literature in the Climate Crisis, or a Tale of Three Pipelines," a talk by Caroline Levine, Cornell University
Can the study of literature help us to address the accelerating climate catastrophe? This talk will argue that the most conventional ways we study literature may actually be supporting climate denialism and inaction. Levine will make the case for a different method of connecting literature to environmental activism, and she will show how the happy endings of the nineteenth century novel could be surprisingly useful guides for us in this moment of accelerating climate change. The talk will then use this analysis of novelistic endings to analyze pipelines, and will tell the stories of three different pipelines—one for oil, one for water, and one for racial justice—ending with a call to action.
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is currently the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature and spends much of her free time engaged in climate activism, including the drive to divest the Cornell endowment (which was successful in 2020).
We would love to see you there!! Please share with interested faculty and students.