ENG42150 Energy, Modernity, Culture

Academic Year 2023/2024

Energy is the dirty substrate of modernity, turbo-charging not only our infrastructures, but also our affects, desires, and imaginaries. Taking on Patricia Yaeger’s provocative call to read for the “energy unconscious” fuelling our cultural works, this module will consider how energy generated by sources like coal, oil, nuclear, solar, water, and wind register in contemporary texts from sites like Australia, the Caribbean, Ireland, the Niger Delta, North America, the North Sea, and the UK.
Critical literary and environmental topics covered in the syllabus may include petro-modernity, hydro-fictions, solarities, aeolian (wind) imaginaries, cli-fi, resource fictions, extinction, slow violence, and/ or the Anthropocene, as we examine the aesthetics of texts from the global hotspots of energy extraction and global warming. We will also probe the uneven impact of energy pollution and climate change; and may draw on additional critical insights from fields like eco-feminism, queer ecology, environmental racism, postcolonial ecocriticism, world-ecology, the blue humanities, and/ or animal studies.
The energy humanities is one of the most exciting strands of environmental criticism to emerge in recent years, and throughout this module you will be prompted to engage with cutting edge criticism and texts, such as poetry, short stories, TV shows, film, and novels, all with a view to querying how the humanities can mediate, and perhaps even intervene in, our climate changed world.