Living Through Catastrophe (COMPLIT 146)

3–5 credits · Graduate

How have people managed to confront moments of catastrophe, and how might we confront our own tumultuous times? We will address today's tremendously difficult historical realities - War, genocide, ecocide, fascism, racial hatred, political extremism, and the demise of the international rules-based order and of the biosphere. Each of these can be taken as symptoms of something profoundly wrong. We will see how writers and thinkers from different times and places have imagined radically different relations between humans and the world to help us reconsider the way we spend our time on this planet. The course is designed to create opportunities to explore, meditate, grieve, and learn together.