Open Access

Roman Bartosch

• Roman Bartosch assesses the pedagogical potential of literature and the role of literary studies in an age of climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental destruction and degradation, and animal death and suffering. As he points out, these developments and students' responses to these various crises have received little or no attention in most educational contexts. Furthermore, many of today's curricular goals are essentially useless and meaningless for students facing an uncertain future. Bartosch asks us to reconsider what education could and should be in the Anthropocene, to acknowledge students' needs, and to reflect on why and how we teach literature and literary HAS in particular. As he also shows with his reading of Max Porter's novel "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" (2015), engaging with literary and cultural animals can be a means to "[cultivate] an interest in acts of relating animality and textuality in ways that open up ambiguity and, thus, imaginative spaces for potential conviviality and flourishing." In contrast to the current emphasis on competencies, solutions, and teleological thinking, this kind of learning, Bartosch suggests, "is geared toward bearing witness, ruminating on its meanings, and thus repositioning oneself within a larger web of ecological and semiotic diversities under threat." Teaching literary HAS and emphasizing "[c]apabilities, resilience, and multispecies flourishing," then, could be important means of preparing students for the uncertain and perilous times ahead.