Course Description
We live in the Anthropocene. Every day, we hear or see news on global warming and climate change reported by newspapers, television, internet news sites, etc.
Hard scientific data clearly show the deteriorating situation caused by greenhouse gases. In our everyday life, too, we are increasingly aware of the concrete effects of global warming.
Yet, for many people, the Anthropocene remains an abstract idea. It is not always easy to make connection between the number (e.g., the global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius) and its real-world implications (a devastating impact on hundreds of millions of people all over the world). While we can clearly explain what is occurring by providing scientific data and information, rational discourse is not always sufficiently persuasive because of dissociation between knowing facts and understanding what they mean to us as existential
beings. This is why we need to actively make use of our imagination to get what global warming entails for us and the future generation. To exercise our imagination, we cannot
remain passive but actively train the faculty for it. It is here that cinema comes into the picture.
Cinema can play a powerful mediating role in our imagining of the Anthropocene by providing concrete narratives, characters, thematic motifs, visual representations, and sometimes
spectacles. Even blockbuster entertainment movies can potentially be a form of thought experiment. While the fact remains that they are image-commodities produced for making a
profit, the blockbusters often respond to the unconscious social anxieties, desires, and concerns in the form of a narrative spectacle. Although there is no cinema of the Anthropocene as a clearly defined genre, there are many films where the problems of the Anthropocene (e.g., global warming, climate change, environmental pollution and destruction, the weaponization of natural resources) are centrally featured, not always but often as images of apocalypse. In this course, we will read critical works in the environmental
humanities and look at various examples of Anthropocene films, which may show natural and ecological disasters, the consequences of radioactive fallout, the end of the world, and posthuman imageries. Throughout the semester, we will try to form a constructive relationship between the humanistic theories of the Anthropocene and the close analyses of concrete films without reducing either of them to a convenient illustration of the other.

Learning outcomes
By finishing this course successfully, students will be able to discuss what the Anthropocene is, how it started, why it has become one of the most critical issues we are now facing regardless of where we live on earth. In addition, they will begin to see many popular movies and art films from a new perspective of the Anthropocene.
Their knowledge of the films examined in the course will in turn help them think about the problem of the Anthropocene more concretely. Based on what they learn in this course,
students can take more advanced courses in the environmental humanities in the subsequent semesters.

Teaching and evaluation methods
Combination of lecture and discussion. There will be a weekly reading assignment. Students will be asked to give at least one class presentation on the assigned reading and/or film. The following is the percentage of the overall grade assigned to each evaluation: A (10–25%), B (25–40%), C (25–40%), D (5–10%), F (0–5%)

Bibliography
--Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. Verso.
--Brereton, Pat. 2016. Environmental Ethics and Film. Routledge.
--Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell.
--Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry. 35 (Winter): 197–222.
--Cubitt, Sean. 2016. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Duke University Press.
--Ellis, Erle C. 2018. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
--Fay, Jennifer. 2018. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press.
--Marran, Christine L. 2017. Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World. University of Minnesota Press.
--Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Last updated: January 29, 2025