COML 6155 - [Explosive Histories]

(crosslisted) ENGL 6794

Spring. Next offered 2016-2017. 4 credits.

C. Caruth.

What is literature in the atomic era? And how does literature help us pose the question of what constitutes an era, an age of history, after the dropping of the atomic bomb? This course will examine literary, theoretical, and artistic texts in order to ask about the ways in which the advent of the nuclear age has shifted our experience of events, history, and representation. We will focus, in particular, on the role of the literary as an inquiry into this new event, and will examine the intricate relation between the notion of literature and the notion of a nuclear world. We will also explore other modes of conceptual and artistic expression that consider the nature of thought, and survival, in an age of potentially absolute destruction. Authors and artists include Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jonathan Schell, Marguerite Duras, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Robert Jay Lifton, Andy Warhol, American bomb cinema, Don DeLillo, the Gutai group, among others.