What Happened to the Future? Nostalgia After the End of History

Many critics have suggested that contemporary popular culture is mired in a nostalgic mode, one that responds to tumultuous and traumatic changes in the world with a retreat into the safety of past styles and aesthetics. As Mark Fisher has suggested, it is as if the future itself has been “slowly cancelled.” This course asks why this contemporary wave of nostalgia emerges when it does and how we might read media symptomatically to better understand what has happened to conceptions of the future in an age of media change, economic crises, and the looming threat of environmental collapse.