ENGL 445
World's End: Literary Ecologies of the Limit Spring 2017
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

Consciousness of the world’s finitude in a time of environmental degradation and headlong global capitalism prompts restraint, a harboring of resources. But beyond the economic logic of conservation and expenditure, might imagining the world from the vantage point of its limit provoke a more profound rethinking of ourselves and the things of the world? Does it change what it means to possess, or even what an experience of the world is? Does it change human relationship? This course explores these questions in part by reaching back to the early modern period, when the boundedness of nations and worlds first comes to view in a meaningful way. But the course will have a long arc, from Shakespeare to Godard. Primary works may include: Shakespeare, King Lear; Marvell, “Upon Appleton House”; Browne, Urn Burial; Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth; Godard, Weekend and Goodbye to Language; Tarkovsky, Solaris; Delillo, White Noise; Atwood, Oryx and Crake. Theoretical texts include: Nixon, Slow Violence; Agamben, The Time that Remains; Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology; Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence; Nancy, After Fukushima; Derrida, “On an Apocalyptic Tone…” and Beast and the Sovereign.