How will it end? Scientific/political hubris, a nuclear event, an asteroid, environmental disaster, overpopulation, resource scarcity, commodity price spikes, riots, social chaos, social control? This course investigates how people have imagined apocalypse and post-apocalypse over time, on the premise that fantasies of the end provide a window into the anxieties of the societies that produce them. In spite of its orientation toward fictional scenarios, this is primarily a course about postwar American environmental and political thought, and the ways these inflect or are inflected by fantasy. |