3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

“Everything which we loved is lost! We are in a desert” – this emotional assertion was the reaction to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting The Black Square, as the artist himself recalled it. This sentiment of fearing, warning and even witnessing the end of the world as we know it, will stand at the center of the course. We will study the literary and cinematic representations of this apocalyptic notion and investigate its theoretical, theological, physiological and aesthetic aspects. We will seek to trace the narrative dynamics as well as literary and cinematic means of apocalyptic representations in works from various periods, languages, cultures and religions. Among the issues to be discussed: what is the apocalypse, biblical apocalypse, dystopia and nostalgia, trauma and post trauma, war and the apocalypse, the Holocaust as the end of civilization, the atomic bomb, realism and anti-realism, political changes and the apocalypse in popular culture.