How have writers, filmmakers, and artists imagined ecological disaster and the end of the world? What are our images of lost worlds and our stories of extinction, including our own as a species? In what ways have representations of apocalypse changed over the last 200 years?
The module starts with fossil finds of extinct animals and severe weather in the nineteenth century, both of which led to a sense of impending doom, before addressing twentieth-century concerns about human fertility, pandemics, machine takeover, and environmental pollution. In our own age, biodiversity loss and reports of climate change make extinction an issue more pressing than ever before, leading scientists to suggest that ours is the Anthropocene – the sixth age of mass extinction and the first geological epoch for which homo sapiens is responsible. By exploring how natural and man-made disasters have variously been conceptualised in fiction, poetry, painting, photography and film, and across disciplinary boundaries from geology to philosophy to cultural studies, this module addresses some of our deepest fears about the future of the planet and about ourselves as a species, including our complex relations to non-humans and non-living materials.
Topics and key concepts addressed on this module include: deep time, fossils, volcanism, asteroid collision, evolution, degeneration, zoonosis, contagion, bio-engineering, posthumanism, cybernetic society, Novacene, materialism, ecocriticism, animal studies, rewilding, de-extinction, dinosaurs, whales, whale oil, fossil fuels, climate fiction, petrofiction, and oil-aesthetics.
Module content note: some of the works we study may include violence. Please contact the module supervisor if you have any questions.
PRIMARY READING
Atwood, Margaret, "Time Capsule found on a Dead Planet" (2017)
Bacigalupi, Paolo, "The Calorie Man" (2005)
Ballard, J.G., The Drought (1965)
Byron, George Gordon, "Darkness" (1816)
Calvino, Italo, "The Petrol Pump" (1974)
Dick, Philip K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968)
Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun (1962)
McGuire, Richard, Here (2014)
Melville, Herman, selected chapters from Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
* Merwin, W.S., "For a Coming Extinction" (1967)
Mie"¢ville, China, "Covehithe" (2011)
Poe, Edgar Allan, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
Shelley, Mary, selected chapters from Frankenstein (1831)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, "Mont Blanc" (1816)
* Smith, Charlotte, "Beachy Head" (1807)
Snyder, Gary, "Oil" (1958)
Wells, H.G., The Time Machine (1895)
Yamashita, Karen Tei, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990)
FILMS
Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (1982)
Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2006)
Jurassic Park, dir. Steven Spielberg (1993)
Lessons of Darkness, dir. Werner Herzog (1992)
Mad Max: Fury Road, dir. George Miller (2015)
Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier (2011)
Oil Wells of Baku: Close View, dir. Lumière Brothers (1896)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, dir. James Cameron (1991)
The Day after Tomorrow, dir. Roland Emmerich (2004)
Wall-E, dir. Andrew Stanton (2008)
SECONDARY READING
Baudrillard, Jean et al., Looking Back on the End of the World (1989)
Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination (2008)
Cuvier, Georges, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes (1796; 1812)
Dawson, Ashley, Extinction: A Radical History (2016)
Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
Boetzkes, Amanda, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (2019)
Heise, Ursula K., Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016)
Huggan, Graham, "Last Whales: Eschatology, Extinction, and the Cetacean Imaginary" (2017)
Huggett, Richard, Catastrophism. Asteroids, Comets, and Other Dynamic Events (1997)
Lovelock, James, Novacene: The Coming of Hyperintelligence (2019)
Mitchell, W.J.T., The Last Dinosaur Book (1998)
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)
Petroculture's Research Group, After Oil (2016)
Rose, Deborah Bird et al., Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017)
Szeman, Imre, "System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster" (2007)
Trexler, Adam, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015)
Wood, Gillen D'Arcy, Tambora: The Eruption that changed the World (2014)