POST-1865 and DIVERSITY.

This semester, the “Topics in Popular Fiction” course focuses on climate change, engaging with literary and cinematic representations from around the world.

Hurricanes, forest fires, melting glaciers and sea ice, heat waves, and floods worldwide are increasingly drawing our attention to the harmful effects of man-made climate change. These cataclysmic changes in the global climate have captured the attention not only of scientists and environmentalists but also of novelists, poets, and filmmakers. A new genre of fiction, cli-fi, has emerged over the last two decades, rendering the current and future realities of global warming more palpable.

In this class, we will consider questions such as: how and why does cli-fi matter in the context of climate change? Can cli-fi help alter our conceptions of the earth and our role in changing it? How are our identities  important to the narratives about the ecological crisis? How do these texts conceive ways of adapting to new realities of climate change and imagine alternative futures? We will also analyze the specific formal and stylistic conventions of the genre of cli-fi and situate these texts within broader debates and discourses—scientific, philosophical, historical, and political—about climate change.

POST-1865 OR MAJOR AUTHOR (NOT BOTH) and DIVERSITY.

Fall 2025 author: Salman Rushdie.

Contemporary fiction's most international and influential writer, Salman Rushdie, is one of the most controversial figures in recent literary history. An author of Indian heritage, Rushdie has garnered countless accolades and prestigious international literary awards, as well as political opponents, resulting in a fatwa condemning him to death and the fatal stabbing of the author in August 2022. Drawing on his heritage as a migrant and multiculturalist, Rushdie is considered “the great chronicler of the global village”. His fiction is celebrated for its intellectual and linguistic playfulness, historical understanding, and its engagement with border crossings, both literal and figurative.

In this course, we will consider questions such as what makes Salman Rushdie a global author. Is Rushdie a champion of free speech and multiculturalism, or is he an author feeding the “cosmopolitan alterity industry” that invests in exoticizing cultural differences?

Situating Rushdie’s work within socio-political and historical contexts, we will approach his writings from various theoretical positions, including but not limited to postcolonialism, nationalism, globalization, identity, religion, multiculturalism, gender, representation, and popular culture. We will read Rushdie’s seminal fiction, including Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, as well as more recent novels, such as Quichotte.