About

According to a popular reading of the ancient Mayan calendar, the world was supposed to come to an end in the year 2012. And yet . . . here we are. Why are humans compelled to think about what life would look like without them? Why are we so drawn to fantasies of disaster? This course will ask why global catastrophe has proven to be such a rich site for the cultural imagination. We begin by examining classic historical accounts of the apocalypse, from the Christian Book of Revelation to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1722). Next, students consider a range of disciplinary perspectives to analyze the way that films like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Melancholia (2011) imagine cataclysmic events. In the second half of the semester, students pursue their own research projects, informed by class discussions of recent theoretical approaches to posthumanism. Possible research topics include climate change and the concept of earth death, eschatology in global religions, humor and the Armageddon, and the zombie apocalypse as biological disaster. Finally, students will translate their research projects into a creative form appropriate for a general audience.