This class will explore the relationship between environmental and cultural crises. What happens to culture when a keystone landscape, a landscape that is fundamental to a people’s existence and cultural identity, is damaged or even destroyed due to climate change? How does the culture respond to this crisis? How should it respond? How well can it respond? To answer these questions, we will look at the impact of disappearing glaciers in Iceland on Icelandic culture in the autobiographical text “N64 35.378, W16 44.691” by the Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason. We will also look at melting permafrost in Russia and sea level rise in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay region to assess adaptation strategies in different cultures. In doing so, we will see that there is no “one size fits all” answer to these difficult questions, and that the responses are often dependent upon the very cultural attitudes that were shaped by these keystone landscapes.

What are the environmental humanities? What role do they play in solving environmental issues? This lecture explores the problem of climate change through the lens of the environmental humanities. The talk will investigate American cultural attitudes towards the environment and how these attitudes impact the response to the climate crisis. In addition, we will investigate how different modes of cultural expression, such as literature, film, music, and art, suggest new ways for thinking about climate change and afford opportunities for imagining a more optimistic future. To pursue such an investigation, this lecture will introduce key concepts to the environmental humanities such as NatureCulture, the Anthropocene, and post-humanism. Ultimately, this talk will focus on the role that cross pollinating the natural sciences with the humanities will play in affecting the cultural paradigm shift from the consumerism of late capitalism to the sustainability of a green society that is willing to adapt to the global climate crisis.

In this class we will analyze Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” through the lens of the environmental humanities. We will treat this text as a prototypical example of eco-literature, experimenting with different ecological readings based upon varying bioethical modes of thinking. In doing so, we will discuss the possibilities and limitations of opening a fictional text to multiple interpretations of environmental worldviews, evaluating what role literature, and the humanities for that matter, can have helping people assess their own relationship with nature, and helping shape their attitudes about the environment. As part of this discussion, we will also attempt to “rewild” “A White Heron,” reimagining the story through traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous American bioethics as found in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s groundbreaking book Braiding Sweetgrass.

This lecture presents an interpretation of Thomas Mann’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s criticism of Nazis’ deadly political propaganda by using the Biblical figure of Moses in their biofictions: Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mann “Das Gesetz” (English, 1943; German, 1944).
The comparison of the different analyses of the African American writer and Thomas Mann in the American exile will be based on current research about anti-Nazi biofictions from the 1930s and 1940s.

In the North American context, fascism has taken a distinctive look and rhetorical pattern. Trump’s brand of fascism can be traced to deeply embedded racial and economic disparities which became key elements of his presidential campaigns. Tapping into the culture wars concerning racial, gender, and sexual minorities simmering in American political discourse, Trump’s brilliant abuse of social media and demagogic rhetoric elevated him into a Jesus-like figure, the only one who really understood underprivileged and uneducated white people in fly-over country. In this lecture, Dr Fuchs traces the historical roots of the peculiar brand of fascism surrounding the figure of Donald Trump and how, as a cult leader of the alt-right, Trump has gained complete totalitarian control of the Republican Party and transformed it into a classic fascist “Führer” party, exemplified by the violence not only advocated
but implemented by Trump on January 6, 2021.