Instructor: Tyler Harper

In the summer of 2017, Times Higher Education published the results of a survey in which fifty Nobel laureates were asked a simple question: “What is the biggest threat to humankind?” In response, over a third of the laureates reported “population rise/environmental degradation,” while nearly a quarter selected “nuclear war.” The remaining votes were split between “infectious disease,” “selfishness,” “ignorance,” “fundamentalism,” “Trump,” “AI,” “inequality,” “drugs” and “Facebook.” Of course (excepting perhaps “drugs” and “Facebook”) these answers were not surprising. Today, it is common knowledge that human beings live in a galaxy among galaxies, terrestrial parasites sucking the blood of a star destined to burn out. On the coasts, real estate investors factor sea-level rise into their decision making, while the Silicon Valley elite build compounds in New Zealand to weather the coming global crisis. In our movie theaters, images of the apocalypse suffuse our popular consciousness—nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, and life-annihilating plagues surge at the box office, depicting science fictive futures that are entertaining precisely because they are based in scientific fact. In short, our contemporary imagination is apocalyptic—the possibility of human extinction is accepted as a mundane part of the dominant cultural fabric. The goal of this course will be to do the difficult work of confronting and thinking critically about this new state of affairs. Proceeding thematically, we will examine sources of and responses to the threat of human extinction, particularly as encoded and explored in modern film, literature, philosophy and music. Topics to be examined include the death of the sun, nuclear holocaust, doomsday cults, superbugs, global warming, environmental catastrophe, and the threats posed by artificial intelligence and bioengineering. At all times, efforts will be made to contextualize these threats/phenomena historically as well as philosophically. Particular attention will be paid to how the “meaning” of human extinction is figured in these works, and the way in which the function of genre (especially the “science fiction” genre) both frames and subverts this question. Readings/assignments will span literary science fiction and graphic novels (Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, Octavia Butler, Alan Moore, Jeff VanderMeer), film/ television (Dr. Strangelove, The Road, Children of Men, Avatar, True Detective, The Walking Dead), philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Francois Lyotard, Lee Edelman) and even rock, hip-hop and heavy metal (Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Busta Rhymes, Black Sabbath, Cattle Decapitation).

Instructor: Lauren Wolfe

The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. —Douglas Huebler, American artist. While quotation and allusion have always been staples of the literary stock and trade, the 20th century saw a radial explosion in the diversity of techniques of literary appropriation. The wholesale theft and re-presentation of extant texts came to be seen as a critical gesture. Now that we are well into the 21st century and we traffic daily in medial platforms that permit the limitless reproduction and palimpsesting of all sorts of texts, now that appropriation is part and parcel of the gestural repertoire of the Culture Industry, we have to ask whether and how appropriative literature maintains the criticality it once assumed. Which also means asking how, on what grounds and by what means it was able to assume this critical position in the first place. Through select readings of appropriative literature, their contexts and intertexts, we will ask what it means to treat language materially as well as semantically, how appropriative practice challenges the traditions, conventions and institutions that authorize acts of literary language and how these practices change our ideas regarding what we believe the “work” of literature can or should be.

Instructor: Will Clark

Illness and disease are eternal facts of human life, but the history of medicine tells us that the meaning of illness has always been a complex, debatable matter. The goal of this course is to explore literature and film that tasks itself with representing illness and shaping the narratives we tell ourselves about our bodies. We will talk about texts that confirm or upend their era’s ideas about what makes us sick. We will look at films that pathologize their subjects. We will read works of literature that try to heal wounds and repair damages.This course argues that themes pertaining to illness and therapy are axiomatic for the history of criticism, theory, and political debate. Particular focus  will be given to marginalized bodies and identities, with a large portion of the course devoted to the politics and art of the AIDS epidemic in America. Films include Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, Todd Hayne’s Safe, and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason. Readings include texts by Sigmund Freud, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thomas Mann, and Susan Sontag.