Literature course focuses on polar communities and climate change

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Through the spring of 2024, the College of the Liberal Arts’ theme, “Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet,” is focusing on the ongoing work of Liberal Arts students, faculty, staff and alumni in support of sustainable futures. Professor of English Hester Blum’s fourth-year seminar this semester, ENGL 487W Literature of Polar Voyaging, studies the impact of the climate crisis on human communities — specifically at the two “ends of the Earth.”

According to Blum, students in the course analyze forms of literary expression that are shaped by and responding to environmental conditions in the extreme north and south. These works are also fascinating to read.

“I wanted to give students a sense of the kind of worlds that polar literature describes, as well as why one would want to imagine such worlds,” she said.

One of the main focuses of the course is how continental Americans, as well as people in other Western countries, perceive the Arctic regions. The Arctic might be relatively sparsely populated, but it is still a homeland and community for millions of individuals.

“The Arctic has historically been envisioned by people in the continental United States and in Europe as empty or blank,” Blum said. “Yet it has been continuously populated by Inuit and other Indigenous people for many thousands of years. One of the most important things I want students to think about is not only that what happens in our part of the world deeply affects what happens in the Arctic, but also that it's not just a place for research extraction or tourism for those coming from the south.”

Another topic the course covers is the enduring speculative presence of the Arctic regions in literature, specifically its perception as an imaginative, mysterious location.

“Outsiders have been traveling to the Arctic for a thousand years as part of expeditions in the name of discovery, trade and science, but the difficulties of polar travel meant that information about the region was often sketchy,” Blum said. “One theory maintained that beyond the polar ice caps was a warm, open polar sea. This was taken up by science fiction but was also sincerely held as a belief by many people in the 19th century.”

The course examines many works of literature that focus on the polar regions, including both works of fiction and nonfiction. Texts include novels, poems and essays that centrally focus on the Arctic and Antarctica.

“We began by reading Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,’” Blum said. “We then read ‘Pym,’ a novel that was published in 2011 by the contemporary Black writer Mat Johnson, which is a retelling of the Poe story from the perspective of members of an all-Black expedition to a South Pole 'hollow earth.' We’re now moving into more contemporary works for the rest of the semester, many by Inuit writers.”

With sustainability and the climate crisis being a central theme of the course — and of the college — Blum explained that the course analyzes the literature and rhetoric of environmental topics.

“We study climate extremity using humanities research methods to look at literature but also other artistic and communicative media,” Blum said. “These texts think deeply about questions of environmental justice and how unequally the effect of industrialization registers on people in the north.”

Overall, Blum wants students to think of the Arctic as a space of human culture and community, rather than a geopolitical or energy asset. She hopes students also reflect upon how the United States' actions and fossil fuel use impacts these regions.

“I don’t think there is a wide enough appreciation in the U.S. of how the polar regions function as human cultural spaces,” Blum said. “For example, consider the balloons that were shot down last month over Alaska and Canada. News reports stressed that these were shot down in places where there was no risk to humans, but there was no acknowledgement that people do in fact live in those high Arctic areas.”

Blum is no stranger to the Arctic and Antarctica. She has enhanced her studies in polar literature by taking five trips to the regions. She traveled to Antarctica in January 2022 with the Penn State Alumni Association, where alumni listened to historical lectures on a ship and went on shore to see the abundant wildlife. Additionally, Blum has traveled to the Arctic region in Nunavut, Canada, as well as in Svalbard and Sweden.

“These trips have all been in service to my scholarship,” Blum said. “I wrote a book about polar expeditionary print culture that came out a couple years ago, and I’m working on a new project that is about the timescales of ice. It’s evolving into a book about my polar travels and what it means for an English professor to do humanities field work, which is not the usual practice for literary researchers.”

These travels gave Blum a fuller understanding of the polar regions and the communities that live there, she said.

“If 19th-century polar exploration was driven by colonialism, resource extraction and the advancement of science, is it possible for my 21st-century literary study of the polar regions to participate in forms of knowledge-gathering that do not replicate the ongoing harms of exploration?” Blum’s research asks.

She said these experiences have helped her better educate students on the idea that the Arctic is not an outlandish place for exploitation but rather an enduring homeland at the forefront of climate action.

‘Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet’

In the fall of 2022, the College of the Liberal Arts chose the theme for its next offering in its Moments of Change initiative — an undertaking that brings students, faculty, staff and alumni together to explore what it means to live through historic and contemporary times of change. Through the spring of 2024, “Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet” is focusing on the many aspects of sustainability and highlighting the ongoing work of the Liberal Arts Sustainability Council, students, faculty and staff in that regard. Similar to “Remembering 1968” in 2018 and “A Century of Women’s Activism” in 2020, the college has planned an array of courses, lectures, presentations and events centered around the “Creating a Livable Planet” theme.