Stories from the End of the World

Humans seem to have always imagined the end of their world order. It appears that, without the “sense of an ending,” not only artistic production, but also individual and social lives cannot be made coherent and effective. Fantasizing about the apocalypse is something that many people in the US and almost everywhere else in the world used to do on a daily basis either by watching their favorite shows on TV, by playing videogames, or by listening to political speeches. Of course, in 2020 all this has become not only fictional anymore due to the tragedies and disruptions brought about in our daily life by the Covid-19 pandemic: we truly live in a post-apocalyptic world. But it is worth remembering that many experienced such a condition even before 2020 and we can learn from their reflections and imaginations how to live the apocalypse. This course will start from these observations to ask why imagining the end is so pervasive in contemporary cultures, what ethical choices are put in front of us “at the end of the world as we know it”, and how we can analyze critically where apocalyptic images are coming from and how they are used in contemporary conversations.