The Critical Perspectives series aims to bring the analytical insights of scholars, theorists, and critics working in literary and cultural studies into our English classrooms and broader academic community at UNC Asheville. A complement to our Visiting Writers series, Critical Perspectives draws no hard line between “creative” and “critical” work but gives focus to speakers who model contemporary modes of analysis in literary fields. Series topics correspond with and enrich current classes offered by English faculty, and collectively range across various approaches and subjects (historical, cultural, theoretical, formal) in contemporary literary studies.
Spring 2025
Erin James: “Building the World with Narrative in an Era of Climate Change”
Monday, April 14 at 5:30 p.m in HIG 203
In this talk, Erin James explores the connections between the stories we consume and the anthropogenic climate change that is quickly rebuilding our world. She does this by examining what happens in our brains when we engage with narrative, using recent work in cognitive science and narrative theory to argue that reading not only introduces us new worlds (e.g., Westeros in The Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Jane Austen’s England) but also transports us to those worlds, imaginatively and emotionally. She thus sees reading as a form of world-building in which we construct mental models of the worlds of stories and inhabit them. As with food, she argues, so too with stories. Just as we are what we eat, we build what we read. In other words, the real-world that we are actively building via climate change is profoundly shaped by the storyworlds that we repeatedly practice modeling and inhabiting when we read narratives.
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