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Schools add climate fiction to literature curriculums

Posted at 5:49 PM, Mar 06, 2016
and last updated 2016-03-06 17:49:58-05

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Colleges and universities worldwide are incorporating into their curriculums the evolving genre of literature that focuses on the changes coming to Earth as the result of climate change — “cli-fi.”

Some of the books and movies are now being lumped into the genre of climate fiction have been around for years, while other novels were written more recently in direct response to the challenges the planet is facing.

University of Virginia English Professor Jennifer Wicke is going to be teaching a course on the subject later this year at the Bread Loaf School of English on Middlebury College’s campus in Ripton.

She says people in literature have just as much to say about climate change as people in the hard sciences.