Nicole Seymour
California State University
High and Dry: Climate Fictions of Flooding and Drought
This seminar will focus on water as a motif in contemporary Anglophone climate change fiction, or cli-fi. Flooding and drought are equally devastating outcomes of climate change, and, accordingly, cli-fi from J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) to Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015) have depicted ordinary people grappling with and adapting to these new realities. We will start our course by considering Astrid Bracke’s definition of “flood fictions” as defined not simply by the depiction of floods, but also by “the depiction of the literal submersion of the narratives themselves by means of language erosion and narrative fragmentation.” We will build on Bracke’s work by developing a definition of “drought fictions”—that is, a theory of the aesthetic moves unique to the depiction of too little water, as opposed to too much. In addition to Ballard and Watkins’ novels, we will analyze excerpts from Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow (2013), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). Our discussion of literature will be supplemented by considerations of other media texts, including Eve Mosher’s High Water Line project (2007+), which the U.S. artist describes as “a public performance of drawing a blue chalk line around areas of a city or region indicating its future flood … vulnerabilities made more … dangerous by climate change,” and short personal narratives produced by participants in the course.