Fiction at Worlds’ Ends - Einzelansicht

Postapocalyptic fiction remains an important anglophone literary mode for modeling, analyzing and responding to the various ways in which human beings grapple with various ends of human history on earth, if not of the entire world itself. Existing analysis of this trend and the threats it espouses largely focuses on the temporal element: how much time is left before the climate emergency intensifies so much that human life is no longer sustainable? When will the planet begin to fight back against the degradation that globalizing consumption has unleashed? How can one prepare to remain after the (nuclear) bombs fall? This course considers these important aspects and also encourages students to engage with the postapocalyptic mode in terms of space.
It is not a coincidence that many postapocalyptic fictions involve the sojourn of survivors in the aftermath of apocalypse; indeed this movement recalls histories of forced migration as the result of world-ending violence. Recognizing the actual past of colonization and world-destruction as coterminous with any future world destruction, we undertake to learn how human and nonhuman worlds already ended when European colonizers came and how those affected now live out postapocalyptic (as well as postcolonial and posthumanist) realities. This will further enhance analysis of fiction that considers all the ends of the world.

Please organize the following texts (any edition) before the first session; the ISBN provided below refers to the version that the instructor will use for course preparation and page-number citation, but any edition will suffice. Please consider the reduced environmental impact that purchasing from a second-hand used and/or independent bookseller will have as you make your purchasing decision.

Gee, Maggie. The Ice People. John Blake, 1999.
ISBN: 9781860661532
Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. Grand Central, 2000.
ISBN: 9780446675604

Selected readings (short stories, poems, and text excerpts) and multimedia will be shared via Moodle, the e-learning and content management platform (see Course Schedule for more information).