SUSTAINABLE TEXTUALITY IN A CHANGING WORLD

 

Jane Ekstam

Prof. Dr., Østfold University College, Department of Languages, Literature and Culture, SWEDEN, E-mail: jane.m.ekstam@hiof.no

 

 

Abstract

Based on my forthcoming trilogy, ‘Katja’s World Game’, my presentation demonstrates how literary works are ‘laboratories of human self-exploration’ (Hubert Zapf). They are also ‘imaginative biotopes’ that provide the symbolic space to explore the dimensions and energies of life. When seen in this light, literary texts are a form of sustainable textuality because they are sources of ever-renewable creative energy (Rueckert).

We need to help our students cultivate creativity as well as appreciate its power. Creativity and critical thinking belong together. Students must be able to infer judgements, evaluate and assess, and develop a moral disposition, i.e. a willingness to accept new ideas, concepts and viewpoints. These skills are particularly crucial in the current climate change crisis.

Higher education has the unrivalled capacity to pursue and shape the values, knowledge, skills and research that are crucial to a society shifting to a low-carbon and safe future. The usual concerns of research and teaching excellence, competitive league tables, student and staff retention and so on now need to be put into the broader vision and goal of economic and social well-being nested in the imperative of planetary survival; and while there is still time to make a critical difference. These assumptions, as Jonathon Porritt demonstrates, ‘are so utterly detached from the realities of the lives young people will be living in the future as to make any notion of conventional curriculum reform sound ridiculous. Might it not be time to think much more radically about how best to structure the education that young people need to overcome the disconnection between them and the natural world by reconnecting education to the ways in which nature works?’ (Hope in Hell. A decade to confront the climate emergency, 2020, p. 294).

The six undergraduate students in my three novels explore the realities of today’s climate crisis. My novels are designed as a basis for discussion in the university classroom. They are part of a new approach to higher education, which can no longer just be a way of training young people for the world of work that awaits them – in a physical world apparently untouched by the emergencies of climate change and ecosystem collapse: we must re-create our world, regenerate, and thereby ensure the future for coming generations. Literature has a special power to make the truth of this statement both clear and highly personal.

Keywords: higher education, novel, creativity, climate crisis, ecosystem, regeneration