Thinking with Images (Q3178)John David RhodesSpring 2014

Contact Information Office: Arts B 272Office hours: Tuesday, 3-4pm; Friday, 12-1pm (or by appointment)Email: J.D.Rhodes@sussex.ac.uk

Required Texts

Course Reader: available on Study Direct. Please arrange to have a hard copy printed for you at the Print Unit.

You should purchase your own copies of the following:

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [originally published 1967]).

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004).

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009).

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Weekly Lectures/Seminars/Screenings: Modern and Contemporary Symposia: Tuesdays, 4-

6pm, Arts A2 Screening: Tuesdays, 6-9pm, Arts A2 Seminars: 2-4pm and 4-6pm, Arundel 210

The Modern and Contemporary Symposia are compulsory. Each symposium will address a key dimension of contemporary (post WWII-present) thought and literary and/or cultural production. Your unseen examination will be based on the material covered in the symposia, so you are strongly encouraged to attend them all. A list of all symposia and readings associated with them is included at the end of this document.

Assessments:

There are three assessments for this module:

1) There will be a 3000-word course work essay, to be submitted on Thursday of week 6. See list of essay topics below.

2) There will be an unseen examination, in the summer assessment period. This will be three hours long, and consist of

three questions. The first question will address issues raised by the symposia. The other two questions will address material covered in the Thinking with Images seminars.

3) There will be an assessed presentation, date to be arranged between student and tutor. You will be signed up for presentations in pairs. You must make time to come see me together in my office hours in the week prior to the week of the presentation in order to discuss the presentation. You are also expected to make available to the group, via the forum on Study Direct, at least one short supplementary reading on the subject of your presentation and a bibliography of no fewer than four other critical works on the subject.

Reading: Apart from texts you should purchase on your own, all are in the Course Reader. The Rancière reading for week 11 will be made available to you on Study Direct. There are a number of items for futher reading/screening listed on the Library’s reading list for the module.

NB: The bibliographic information for all readings is found on the syllabus.

Seminar preparation:You should attend all screenings and have completed all readings before seminar meetings. You should have prepared at least two questions or interventions for seminar discussion. Always bring hard copies of the readings to seminar (whenever possible), as well as something to write with and on.

Office hours and email:Whenever possible prefer to discuss all matters related to your progress in the course during my weekly office hours. I expect everyone to visit my office hours at least once during term, apart from the consultation regarding your presentations. Given that there are four different times during the week during which you can see me in person (symposium+screening, office hours, seminar), I would prefer that you refrain from emailing me unless it is an absolute emergency.

Essay Topics for Essay due Week 6:

Please choose one of these topics and develop an essay in relation to it.

1. How does Deleuze’s notion of the ‘time-image’ (Deleuze) manifest itself formally? Does the ‘time-image’ have a political or

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ethical force or agency that the ‘movement-image’ lacks? Frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

2. How might notions of cinematic specificity and indexicality (Bazin and Cavell) inflect, inform, or complicate Nancy’s account of the image? Frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

3. How are bodies like images? Frame your response with reference to Nancy’s writing and at least one other philosopher we have studied so far, and with reference to two films we have studied.

4. Do contemporary philosophies of the image and contemporary filmmaking practices offer a means of reconceptualizing or overcoming Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ or Heidegger’s ‘world picture’? Engage at least one other philosopher we have studied together (in addition to Debord and Heidegger) and frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

5. Place Kant’s notion of the art work’s purposive purposeless in conversation with Nancy’s notion that the image is ‘distinct’. Are images good, or good for anything? Or is their value in not having any prescribed use? Frame your response with reference, as well, to two films we have studied.

Essay Requirements:

You must give the title an ORIGINAL TITLE of your own devising. DO NOT restate the given essay topic you have chosen.

Your essay should engage substantively and critically with both required readings and required screenings. Superior essays will show evidence of independent reading and screening.

Please make sure all essays are double-spaced and employ correct and consistent bibliographic formatting.

Presentations

All students will sign up for presentations in pairs (or occasionally groups of three).

Requirements: You and your presentation partner(s) will need to meet with

JDR in office hours a full week before your presentation.

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You must assign to the seminar one article—a work of criticism or theory—that deals directly with the film (or at least the director of the film) screened that week. This reading should be made available to the seminar via a pdf or link and put on Study Direct, via the forum. Please advertise which seminar group (2pm or 4pm) your reading is intended for, since both groups share the same forum. You must make this available by the Monday of the week of your presentation.

As presenters you are expected not just to read out to the seminar, but to lead a seminar discussion for approximately thirty minutes. Your presentation should also include close analysis of film clips.

The presentation should endeavour to make strong connections between the film(s) screened and the readings.

You must bring to seminar a handout with a bibliography for further reading. The handout may also include other information.

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Screenings: Thinking with Images6pmArts A2

21 January Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)28 January The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989)4 February Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964)

(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai ming-liang, 2003)11 February Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul,

2004)February 18 L’intrus (The Intruder, Claire Denis, 2004)25 February The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami,

1999)11 March Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)18 March Histoires du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)1 April Audience (Barbara Hammer, 1982)

Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)8 April The Turin Horse (Bèla Tarr, 2011)

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Week by week syllabus

Week 1(Seminar: 24 January)

Interest (Plato and Kant)

Reading Plato, The Republic, Benjamin Jowett, trans. (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991). selections

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the power of judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000 [1790]), pp. 89-127; pp. 182-87.

Screening(21 January)

Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)

Presentations N/A

Week 2(Seminar: 31 January)

Alienation (Heidegger and Debord)

Reading Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995 (originally published 1967).

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 115-154.

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3-35.

Suggested Reading:Brian Price and John David Rhodes, eds., On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010)

Screening(28 January)

The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989)

Presentations N/A

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Week 3(Seminar: 7 February)

Ontology (Bazin, Cavell, Nancy)

Reading Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The image—the Distinct.” In Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. Jeff Fort, trans. 1-14. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema?. Volume I. Hugh Gray, ed. and trans. 9-16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979. (pp. 10-25; 118-133)

Alexander Garcìa Düttmann, ‘Why Burn a Photograph?’, World Picture 8 (Summer 2013) http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_8/Duttmann.html

Screening(4 February)

Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964) (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971) Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai ming-liang,

2003)Presentations

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Week 4(seminar: 14 February)

Movement/Time (Deleuze)

Reading Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” (1929) In The Eisenstein Reader. Richard Taylor, ed. and trans. 93-110. London: British Film Institute, 1998.

Bazin, Andrè. “An Aesthetic of Reality.” In Bazin, Andrè. What is Cinema? Volume II. Hugh Gray, ed. and trans. 16-40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’, Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14-19.

Gregory Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Gregory Flaxman, ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1-57.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze’, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Gregory Flaxman, ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 365-373.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Hugh Tomlins and Barbara Habberjam, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. (pp. 1-28)

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2000 [1989]). (pp. 1-24)

Screening(11 February)

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weeresethakul, 2004)

L’eclisse (The eclipse, Michelangelo Antonioni) excerpt on Study Direct

Paisan (Paisà, Roberto Rossellin, 1946) excerpt On Study Direct

Presentations

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Week 5(seminar: 21 February)

Body (Nancy)

Reading Nancy, Jean Luc. Corpus. Richard A. Rand, trans. (New York: Fordham Univesity Press, 2008), 150-170 (‘Fifty-eight Indices on the Body’; ‘The Intruder’)

Screening(February 18)

L’intrus (The Intruder, Claire Denis, 2004)

Presentations

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Week 6(seminar: 28 February)

Evidence (Nancy)

Reading Jean Luc Nancy, L’Évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami. Brussels: Yves Gevaert Èditeur, 2001. (pp. 8-56; 80-95)

Screening(25 February)

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

Presentations

**WEEK 7: No Meeting/No Screening**

Week 8(seminar: 14 March)

Politics (Rancière)

Reading Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004).

Jacques Rancière, ‘Uses of Democracy’, from On the Shores of Politics, Liz Heron, trans. (London: Verso, 1995), 39-61.

Jacques Rancière, ‘What Aesthetics Can Mean’, From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Sciences (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 13-33.

Scott Durham, ‘“The Center of the World is Everywhere”: Bamako and the Scene of the Political’, World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008)

http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_2/Durham.html

Screening(11 March)

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)

Presentations

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Week 9(seminar: 21 March)

Emancipation (Rancière)

Read Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009.

Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, Dissensus , Steve Corcoran, ed. and trans. (London: Contiuum, 2010), 134-151.

Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Emiliano Battista, trans. (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 1-20; 171-187.

Screening(18 March)

Histoires du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)

Presentations

**NB: Seminar for Week 10 will be held, for everyone, from 2-6 (venue TBC), and take place as a symposium featuring a talk by Dr. Katherin Groo from Aberdeen University. Please make arrangements in advance to attend this event if your seminar does not ordinarily begin at 2pm.**

Week 10(seminar: 28 March)

The Archive and the Digital (Derrida and others)

Reading Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory’, Digital Memory and the Archive, Jussi Parikka, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) 81-94 on Study Direct

Wendy Hui Kyon Chun, ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008), 148-171. on Study Direct

Friedrich A. Kittle, ‘Forgetting’, Discourse 3, (1981), 88-121. on Study Direct

Screening selections of user-generated re-mixes

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(25 March) from the Dutch Film Archives Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)

Presentations N/A

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Week 11(seminar: 4 April)

Actions and Judgements (Arendt, Zerilli)

Reading Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 (1958). (pp. 175-247)

Zerilli, Linda M.G. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. (pp. 1-31; 125-163)

Recommended reading: Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema’. Screen 16:3 (1975): pp. 6-18. (available via electronic journals/Oxford Journals online)

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. (pp. 1-31) (in library)

Screening(1 April)

Audience (Barbara Hammer, 1982) Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Presentations

Week 12(seminar: 11 April)

Endings (Rancière, encore)

Reading Jacques Rancière, Bèla Tarr, The Time After, Erik Beranek, trans. (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013) on Study Direct

Screening(8 April)

The Turin Horse (Bèla Tarr, 2011)

Presentations N/A

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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SYMPOSIA

WEEK 1Round table discussion: What is the contemporary?Peter Boxall, Alistair Davies, JD Rhodes, Nicholas Royle, Michael Jonik, John MastersonReading: Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary'This round table discussion will turn around the question of how we focus on the contemporary, and what we mean by 'modern'. Supported by a reading of Giorgio Agamben's short essay 'What is the Contemporary', colleagues will ask what is at stake in thinking about the present, the near past and the near future. What elements define our own specific contemporaneity? What are the problems involved in thinking about contemporaneity more generally? What do we mean by the concept of modernity, and is our own period entering into a new era in the history of the modern? The answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, will offer a framework for the symposia to follow.

WEEK 2Post-war Europe and the Culture of RuinsAlistair Davies. Respondent, Peter BoxallReading: Alun Lewis, 'Raiders Dawn'David Jones, 'Prothalamion'T.S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding'Virginia Woolf, 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'

The mass bombing by the Germans of British cities and the mass bombing of German cities by the British destroyed a large number of lives and laid waste large tracts of cities, destroying public buildings and architecture of great historic importance and leaving the historic centres of cities in ruin. Great medieval centres – in Britain as well as in Germany - were reduced to rubble. The symposium will explore, through a reading of the poetry of T.S.Eliot, David Jones (who both endured the blitz in London) and W.H.Auden (who was sent to Germany after the war as a member of the American army to assess the psychological effects of mass bombing on the civilian population), some of the moral and ethical questions raised then – and now – by mass bombing. Did mass bombing serve strategic purposes or was it an instrument of terror? Did it become – for the British as for the Germans - an act of the deliberate destruction of the symbolic structures of the enemy’s national identity? The English philosopher A.C.Grayling and the German-born writer W.G.Sebald have recently argued that the British bombing of German cities amounted to a war crime (as does the German historian Jorg Friedrich in The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945). The discussion will be concerned with the ways in which the

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mass killing of civilian populations and the mutual self-destruction of the historical sites and legacies of European nations raised questions – and continues to raise questions – about the nature and legitimacy of European culture. We will track the ways in which such self-questioning was an important aspect of the cultural regeneration of Europe in the post-war period. The British cities most affected by mass bombing – London, Swansea, Southampton, Coventry, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Bristol – have been regenerated but to what extent do we still live ethically and imaginatively in a culture of ruins?

WEEK 3 Modernism, Late modernism and the ContemporaryPeter Boxall and Sara CrangleReading: Samuel Beckett, 'Imagination Dead Imagine' and 'Stirrings Still'This discussion between Peter Boxall and Sara Crangle will turn around our understanding of the historical limits of modernism, and its presence as a shaping force in the contemporary literary imagination. The symposium will depart from a reading of Samuel Beckett's short later pieces, particularly 'Imagination dead Imagine', and 'Stirrings Still'. These pieces, it will be suggested, might be thought of as the last throes of a modernist imagination, the exhaustion of a movement that defined the aesthetics of the first half of the twentieth century. But it is also the case that these works of exhaustion and termination witness the birth of a new set of aesthetic possibilities, that have come to fuller expression in other contemporary works, often influenced by Becket's writing. The discussion will ask how the kinds of novelty and aesthetic energy that emerge from Beckett's late work, and that move through a wide range of contemporary forms of expression, shape our understanding of the ends of modernism. Does Beckett's legacy suggest a new way of thinking about the afterlives of modernism? Is there a strain of late modernist writing still apparent in the contemporary, that would cause us to rethink our understanding of the historical character of postmodernism?

Week 4The Image. JD Rhodes. Respondent, Bethan StevensReading:JL Nancy's 'The image, the Distinct' in The Ground of the ImageFrom Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed.Contemporary thought has consistently used the image as a term under which to diagnose the ills of postwar culture. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s excoriating account of ‘the culture industry’ to Guy Debord’s critique of the ‘spectacle’, the image has frequently been instrumentalised as both the literal embodiment of and a potent metaphor for the abuses of consumer capitalism. Without

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discounting these important critiques, can we consider the contemporary’s image saturation in terms that are somewhat more elastic? What does the image-as-image propose or make possible? Do images neutralize our participation in the world, or do they enable a taking-part in the world’s complexity?

WEEK 5Psychogeography, capitalism and the trace of the past Alistair Davies. Respondent, JD RhodesScreening: Patrick Keiller, dir., LondonScreening: Ken Loach, dir., The Spirit of 45

Psychogeography has a number of origins – in the writing of De Quincey and Baudelaire, in the 1920s writing of Louis Aragon, in the radical politics of Guy Debord and the Situationists of the 1960s. I shall explore its instances in contemporary British writing from W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn to the writings of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair and the films and installations of Patrick Keiller. I will trace the importance of Romanticism in psychogeography, explore the notion of the trace and of disappearance in psychogeography and examine the equivocal politics of British psychogeographers, at once politically oppositional and yet strangely conservative. Do we find in current psychogeography the diminished ambition and scope of British radical politics of the left?

WEEK 6

Class in the contemporary British novel Martin Ryle. Respondent, Alistair DaviesReading:Ian McEwan, SaturdayHistorically, novels have often sought to offer comprehensive images of ‘the nation’. Representations of working-class people were central in the work of nineteenth-century writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. But such representations have been increasingly problematic since E M Forster wrote in Howards End (1910) that he was ‘not concerned with the very poor’ because they were ‘unthinkable’The lecture will outline this long history, and consider how it might be explained, before turning to some recent British novels in which questions of class are important. The lecture will be illustrated with quotations and references; students will not be expected to have read the novels in question (which will include Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, Ali Smith’s The Accidental and John Lanchester’s Capital).WEEK 7 READING WEEK WEEK 8Queers, Women and the Future

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JD Rhodes. Respondent Sam SolomonReading: From Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of FreedomFrom Lee Edelman, No FutureMuch contemporary theoretical work focused on gender and sexuality has attempted to identify the power and specificity of ‘what’ sexual subjects are: what is a woman? what is a queer? These attempts to identify the ontology (essential characteristics) of women and queers have been undertaken, moreover, to identify the agency of womanhood and queerness. Frequently agency has been understood in these accounts as a practice of the sovereignty of the subject. Linda Zerilli’s recent writing, which is deeply engaged with the work of Hannah Arendt, has attempted to identify the promise of feminism not in terms of ontology or sovereignty, but in terms of action and judgement; she asks us to focus on ‘who’ we are (as feminists and queers) and on our ability to act, when action itself is, in fact, predicated on our non-sovereignty. This lecture will set out the contours of Zerilli’s intervention and suggest ways in which her work, which is focussed primarily on feminism, might redirect certain problems in recent queer theory.

WEEK 9 Control, Insecurity, Riot – Deleuze, Rancière, BadiouMichael Jonik. Respondent, Peter Boxall Reading: From Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control'Jacques Rancière, ‘The Insecurity Principle' In: Chronicles of Consensual Times', pp. 110-113.This symposium will consider how three philosophers – Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou - have diagnosed the contemporary political situation, and have sought to open a conceptual space for thinking an emancipatory politics within it. First, Deleuze's 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' extends and modulates Foucault's notion of a disciplinary society in the light of what he identifies as a move from confinement or enclosure to networked or corporatized forms of control – ‘the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination’. In his short article, ‘The Insecurity Principle', Rancière, building on Deleuze’s notion, prompts us to identify ‘insecurity’ as the ’mode of management of collective life’, especially in the light of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Insecurity becomes a principle of state power if not planetary organization insofar as insecurity is ‘geared towards reproducing and renewing, in circular fashion, the very circumstances that maintain it.’ The primary focus, however, will be on Alain Badiou’s recent 'The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings' in which he asks not only ‘what is going on?’ today, but also how we might bring about effective modes of resistance. To

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begin, Badiou assesses the manifold forms of mastery undertaken by ‘Capital’s executives’— the tiny oligarchy which commands the lives of millions – as operating behind ‘interchangeable rubrics of modernisation, reform, democracy, the West, the international community, human rights’. Badiou finds in today’s widespread uprisings, from London and Paris to Cairo and Bahrain, the ‘stirrings’ of an opposition to this oligarchy and the lineaments of a new planetary order: ‘[W]e find ourselves in a time of riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signalled and takes shape. Our masters know this better than us: they are secretly trembling and building up their weaponry, in the form both of their judicial arsenal and the armed taskforces charged with planetary order. There is an urgent need to reconstruct or create our own’. To this end, he anatomizes these recent ‘diverse and spirited riots’ and seeks to find in them the possibilities of a ‘Rebirth of History’ in the form of the rebirth or new beginning of the Communist Idea.

WEEK 10Apocalypse and the ContemporaryJohn Masterson. Respondent Michael Jonik

Reading“Spiritual Wickedness in the Heavens”. Introduction to Slavoj Zizek’s Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011)‘Thinking the End of the World.’ Introduction to Claire P. Curtis’ Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: We’ll Not Go Home Again (New York: Lexington Books, 2010)

Countless artists, writers, thinkers and cultural commentators, not to mention theologians, economists and scientists, have been preoccupied with apocalyptic scenarios in their work. We might think in particular about the role played by speculative and science fictions, as well as cinema, radio, television and the internet in more recent times. How do these imaginings correspond to and/or depart from the ‘end times’ discourses and visions that have come before? Are there any features of contemporary, 21st century cultural and critical production that might suggest a paradigm shift in these debates? To what extent might these responses be framed by the particular ecological, economic and ideological crises confronting us today? Or is it more productive to think of ours as a ‘postapocalyptic’ age? Taking the introductions to two recent texts (Zizek’s Living in the End Times and Curtis’ Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract) as points of departure, this session will explore some of these questions by drawing on a host of contemporary literary as well as filmic references.

WEEK 11 'Literature and the Environment'

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Nicholas Royle, respondent Peter Boxall

Reading:Timothy Clark, 'The Challenge'Timothy Morton, 'A Quake in Being'

The question of the environment arguably subsumes all others. How might the study of literature be relevant or even urgent in this context? Nicholas Royle will explore some of the most pressing and compelling aspects of the relationship between literature and the environment, focusing in particular on 'The Challenge', in Timothy Clark's Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (CUP 2011), pp.1-11, and 'A Quake in Being', in Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, pp.1-24.  

Week 12Roundtable discussion: Archaeologies of the future

Alistair Davies, Peter Boxall, Sara Crangle, JD Rhodes, Pam Thurschwell and othersReading: From Fredric Jameson, A Singular ModernityThis discussion will close the series, by addressing our conception of the future. How has the location of the future changed in the modern and contemporary period? What are the historical mechanisms by which we conceive of the future now? What is the status of prophecy and prediction, in the early years of the new millennium? The discussion will bring the threads that have run through the series together, through this reflection on our relationship with the time to come.

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