Booking will close on Friday 3rd October 2025 at 12 noon.

Due to limited resources, we are UNABLE TO ACCEPT LATE BOOKINGS after this date.

This course will be held in Room 1S05 of the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee.

Tuesday mornings 10.00 a.m. - 12.00 p.m. for five weeks, 7th October - 4th November 2025.

This course explores novels about climate change (and related ecological issues). It will address questions such as:

Does climate change challenge familiar forms of literary imagination and representation by the very different treatment of time and qualities of sympathy which it demands?
What role can imaginative writing play in promoting understanding and changes in behaviour and values?
What is the role of the imagination in planning and implementing adaptation and mitigation?
How can ecological literature avoid myths and clichés such as heroic redemption, saviour narratives, survivalist fantasies, techno-futurism?

Texts:

Jessie Greengrass, The High House (2021)
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020)
James Bradley, Clade (2015)
Michael Christie, Greenwood (2021)
Maja Lunde, The History of Bees, trans. from Norwegian (2018)

Tutor: Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts has taught literature and related subjects at Dundee University since 1993, having previously been a lecturer at London University. He is currently a Research Professor of Modern Literature in the School of Humanities. His teaching and research has been in modernist fiction and poetry, contemporary British and Irish poetry, literature and science, and literature and visual culture. As well as the English MA and MLitt, he taught for several years on the MFA Art and Humanities. He was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded projects, ‘Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition’ (2009-2011), leading a team of researchers in Literature, Psychology and Fine Art from the Universities of Dundee and Kent. His books include Conrad and Masculinity (2000), Poetry and Contemporary Culture (co-edited 2002), Geoffrey Hill (2004), and Strangeness and Power: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (edited, 2020).

Course code: 09 113

Enquiries should be sent to: lifelonglearningdundee@gmail.com

As a volunteer organisation with limited resources, we try to respond to all queries as quickly as possible. Please bear with us.

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The Fiction of Climate Change