Polar Fiction

Chicago, Ill.— Assuming the verifiable truth of global warming, some academics wish to circumvent the climate change debate and start teaching college students about importance of combatting this imminent disaster. Just as some environmentalists have co-opted the polar bear as a symbol for the predicted ecological crisis, Britt Rusert, a doctoral candidate at Duke University, visualizes polar exploration literature as a new outlet for this discourse. “How, I wonder, might such a polar canon help us conceptualize and historicize ecological crises, specifically the master discourse of global warming and their contemporary moments?,” she told a Modern Language Association (MLA) audience this December. She believes that “polar fiction is a potentially exciting place” to “certify climate change.” “What new types of inquiry could be activated…pedagogically to new environmental reality?,” she said.

The panel’s title, “Rethinking Polar Fictions in an Age of Inconvenient Truth,” insinuates a desire to revise history to include “evidence” of global warming. Similarly, Rusert denied the anachronisms of her approach, telling the audience that “American literature shows, in many ways, climate change is nothing new.” No historical revisionism is necessary to advance the climate change agenda.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.