MACMILLAN Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

Product Description Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene? And what can reading teach us? To answer these questions, the book develops a concept of transcultural ecology that understands fiction and interpretation as text models that help address the various and incommensurable scales inherent to climate change. Focussing on text composition, reception, storyworlds, and narrative framing in world literature and elsewhere, each chapter elaborates on central educational objectives through the close reading of texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole and J.M. Coetzee as well as films, picture books and new digital media and their aesthetic affordances. At the end of each chapter, these objectives are summarised in sections on the ‘general implications for studying and teaching’ (GIST) and together offer a new concept of transcultural competence in conversation with current debates in literature pedagogy and educational philosophy. Review “Bartosch’s book argues for a way of reading, critiquing, and teaching literature in the Anthropocene that meets the complex and confusing shifts in scale of this epoch. In doing so, it brings these now familiar ecocritical questions of scale into conversation with pedagogical questions of literary-critical competence, and shows us how utterly compelling and timely such a conversation is.” (Adeline Johns-Putra, Reader in English Literature, University of Surrey, UK) “What role can reading stories play in teaching environmental awareness and responsibility? In this insightful study, Roman Bartosch treads sure-footedly through the maze of recent research in ecocriticism and educational theory. His argument that students should be trained in tracing and plotting fictional actions and their consequences across different scales makes a significant new contribution to thinking on the purpose and practice of teaching literature in schools and universities. Distancing himself from over-simplifying claims that literature can be treated as a vehicle for turning readers into environmental activists, Bartosch focuses productively on how it can help us think of our impact on the environment over multiple and incommensurable scales. Engaging with texts ranging from the new world literatures to films and graphic novels, he argues that reading texts from different scalar perspectives and exploring with the tensions that arise between them should form the basis of a newly defined transcultural ecological competence.” (Axel Goodbody, Emeritus Professor of German and European Culture, University of Bath, UK) “This is a theoretically highly sophisticated yet eminently readable and practice-oriented study of literary pedagogy in an age of climate change and the Anthropocene. Productively absorbing current developments in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, the book extends cultural ecology as a key frame of reference towards a ‘transcultural ecology’ of literature, which transgresses the confines of individual cultures towards a plurality of human and nonhuman agents that make up the multiscalar challenges of the Anthropocene. As Bartosch demonstrates in textual models from a decidedly non-eurocentric corpus of world literature, it is not in any moral certainties but in the shifting scales of reading and interpretation that these challenges become aesthetically enacted in texts and pedagogically relevant to new forms of educational practice. The book is thus highly recommended for ecocritics, environmental humanities scholars, and teachers of literature on various levels of competence.” (Hubert Zapf, Professor of American Studies, University of Augsburg, Germany) From the Back Cover Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene? And what can reading teach us? To answer these questi