KU.Campus

82-008-L-ANG03-V-S-SE-0916.20262.002

Literature and Media (Bachelormodul): "The End of the World as We Know It" in American Literature and Culture

Seminar (präsent)

Englisch

21.10.2026 - 05.02.2027

Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

Temmen, Jens

25 unbegrenzt

In our contemporary moment of anthropogenic polycrisis, imaginaries of the apocalypse abound. Stories of climate catastrophe, narratives of pandemic crisis and imaginaries of planetary destruction and abandonment, negotiated particularly (but not exclusively) in American literature and culture, reflect a growing anxiety about the impending end of the world as we know it. In the specific US context, these global discourses intersect with the rise of right-wing tech-optimism and an assumed decline of the US empire and the global order connected to it.

Despite this (justified) sense novelty and urgency expressed in these imaginaries, contemporary visions of global annihilation still draw on a long-standing canon of cultural texts that negotiate the meaning of the apocalypse in America across different periods, regions, genres and literary and cultural traditions. Tracing these narratives back to the inception of the United States, we find them entangled with discourses of settler-colonialism, anti-Black racism, and eugenics, for example, highlighting that, in US cultural imagination, the world has been ending all the time.

Our class takes a critical look at narratives across different media, and at the ways in which they negotiate the end of the world as we know it. We will discuss the traditions, forms, and devices of apocalyptic literature, as well as the roles narratives of annihilation play in our contemporary moment of planetary polycrisis.

22.09.2026 -

a.Anmeldbar