COML 3025 - [Literature and the Bomb]

Spring. Next offered 2017-2018. 4 credits.

C. Caruth.

How can literature capture our experience in the nuclear age? And how have literary and artistic experience been affected by the dropping of the bomb? This course will examine literary, artistic and theoretical works in order to explore the nature of storytelling, experience, and representation in a nuclear world. Through the study of literary works, films, artwork and artistic installations, as well as critical texts, we will ask questions about the nature of history and survival in an age of potentially absolute destruction. Authors and artists include Marguerite Duras, Stanley Kubrik, Jacques Derrida, Andy Warhol, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, American bomb cinema, Japanese survival writing, the Gutai group, among others.