Studies in Contemporary Literature (461-0-21)
Topic
The Planetary in Contemporary Art
Instructors
Evan Mwangi
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This graduate seminar investigates how the "planetary" emerges as a critical, ecological, and aesthetic problem specifically within the contemporary—its temporalities, epistemologies, and shifting claims to newness. With sustained attention to late‑20th‑ and 21st‑century artistic and literary production, the course examines how contemporary art and theory articulate, contest, or reimagine the interface between planetarity and the contemporary as concept, period, and mode of attention. At the same time, the seminar foregrounds how the contemporary provides a critical vantage from which to reconsider foundational aesthetic formations, inviting students working in earlier periods to explore how older artistic and intellectual traditions acquire new resonance when approached through planetary and ecological epistemes. In tracing these contemporary formations, the course also foregrounds the subtle but persistent allusions the contemporary makes to foundational aesthetic and intellectual traditions, revealing how early‑period frameworks continue to structure, haunt, and inflect present‑day planetary thinking. Emphasis will be placed on the fostering of holistic humanistic perspectives attentive to the tensions, disjunctions, and transformative ruptures that unfold across temporal scales. A corollary objective of the course is to bring planetary ecology—its crises, imaginaries, and material demands—into conversation with the evolving category of the contemporary, to illuminate how artists register and respond to environmental transformations.
Through readings in literature, visual culture, and interdisciplinary theory, we will explore how globalization, ecological crisis, mediation, and emergent forms of world‑relation compel a rethinking of both the artwork and the category of the "new." Theoretical touchstones include Raymond Williams, Giorgio Agamben, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jean‑Luc Nancy, Terry Smith, Nicolás Campisi, Lionel Ruffel, Kathryn Yusoff, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rosi Braidotti, and Heather Davis, whose writings collectively shape current debates on contemporaneity, ecological planetarity, environmental crisis, multispecies entanglement, and planetary‑scale cultural imaginaries. These frameworks will help us examine how the contemporary is defined, experienced, and questioned in relation to climate precarity, ecological interdependence, and shifting cultural imaginaries of the Earth.
Students will engage literary and artistic practices that grapple with global aesthetics, temporal rupture, ecological vulnerability, and new configurations of relationality that exceed national, regional, or historical frames. Case studies from 20th‑ and 21st‑century literature and contemporary art will illuminate how creative practices negotiate tensions between novelty and repetition, immediacy and historicity, locality and totality. Ultimately, the course seeks to develop a clear and discerning understanding of how the planetary—ecological as well as cultural—is figured, theorized, and sensed within the evolving rubric of the contemporary.
Teaching Method
Interactive lectures, discussions, presentations.
Evaluation Method
6000-word paper, annotated bibliographies, class presentations, weekly self-evaluation, and peer critiques.
Class Materials (Required)
Texts (May Change):
The Whale Rider (1987) — Witi Ihimaera. Harcourt paperback (2003), ISBN 9780152050160
The Hungry Tide (2004) — Amitav Ghosh. Mariner Books paperback (2006), ISBN 9780618711666
Parable of the Sower (1993) — Octavia Butler. Grand Central Publishing paperback (2019), ISBN 9781538732182
The Stone Gods (2007) — Jeanette Winterson. Mariner Books paperback (2009), ISBN 9780156035729
The Old Drift (2019) — Namwali Serpell. Hogarth paperback (2020), ISBN 9781101907153
The Fifth Season (2015) — N. K. Jemisin. Orbit paperback (2015), ISBN 9780316229296