This course occupies a tension between “representation” and “nature.” Some Darwinians—although perhaps not Darwin himself—consider artistic representation an organic function, such that nature is but the process of becoming-art. Other thinkers deem representation and nature entirely distinct; from a liberal standpoint, for instance, art ought to usher nature into the human realm of representation to shape opinion and deliberation. 

AP/HUMA 4226 examines the emergence of various configurations of the interplay between life and art, as well as the social and political role that this interplay has been, or has not been, expected to play. Specifically, we assess the alignment and misalignment of aesthetic experience (the encounter with art) and civic or moral education. 

This iteration of the course pays particular attention to the cinematic and literary corpus known as ecohorror. At is broadest, both conceptually and historically, ecohorror brings horror tropes to bear on the contradictions of environmental existence—contradictions that pertain to the antagonism between human beings and nonhuman natures in industrial societies. In its compulsion to repeat Edenic falls, ecohorror poses a problem for ecocriticism, or the study of representations of nature: it is a subgenre that refuses to solve the contradictions it posits. Put differently, ecohorror denies both the status quo of climate catastrophe and the utopia of multispecies harmony imagined by environmentalists. 

What are we to make of such hostile representations of nature? And what are we to do with ourselves in their midst? 

Materials include environmental theory by Monique Allewaert, Hsuan L. Hsu, Frédéric Neyrat, Sam See, and others, in addition to such contemporary specimens of ecohorror cinema as Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021), Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb (Dýrið, 2021). A portfolio and an annotated bibliography, among other assignments, build toward a final research project.