Short Course Description
Visions of the world?s collapse and the government?s deformation abound in recent American culture. What is at stake in imagining the end of the world? How do such imaginings open or foreclose possibilities for revolutionary change? Is it possible to imagine the world as having already ended? This course explores twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. representations of apocalypse and dystopia, examining their aesthetic and political facets. We will range across fiction, poetry, and film, pairing primary works with short theoretical readings. Course texts will include: Nathaniel West?s The Day of the Locust; T.S. Eliot?s The Waste Land; Octavia Butler?s Parable of the Sower; Louise Erdrich?s Future Home of the Living God; James Cameron?s Terminator 2; and Colson Whitehead?s Zone One.
Full syllabus is to be published
