English majors are fast disappearing from our colleges and universities, and with good reason. Here’s a current summer course offering from Johns Hopkins University:

Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation – AS.060.186

This course will examine the relationship between capitalist accumulation, the climate crisis, and contemporary climate fiction. What is capitalist accumulation? How has this process led to the contemporary climate crisis? What ideas constitute its ideological apparatus? How do contemporary climate fictions critique and/or amplify these ideas? With these questions as our point of departure, we will read a selection of contemporary climate fiction alongside excerpted works of history, climate science, and critical theory. Through this examination, we will develop an understanding of how contemporary climate fictions participate in climate change discourse, politics, and the social struggles that both underpin and are exacerbated by climate change. By the end of the course, students will be able to define capitalist accumulation, its politics, and its ideas, as well as climate fiction. Students will analyze how climate fictions critique and amplify capitalist ideology and politics. Students will develop insights into how climate fictions perform this work at the levels of both content and form. Finally, through critical and creative writing projects that engage, reconsider, and respond to the course readings, students will refine critical thinking and writing skills.

And people wonder why students are avoiding English literature.

Yes, I know, there is a hilarious irony here about the whole concept of “climate fiction,” which I am sure is lost on the instructor.