ENGL 695 A1: Literary Themes: The Aesthetics of Disruption: or, How to Imagine the End of Everything in Nineteenth-Century Literature

E. Kent

This course examines the imagination of possible futures in nineteenth-century fiction, with a focus on the disruptive effects of science and technology. From theories of entropy and the inevitable heat death of the universe, to multi-dimensional geometry, geological deep time, evolution and the disruption of biblical literalism, nineteenth-century science posed fundamental challenges to the way people conceived of their place in the cosmos. Simultaneously, advances in communication like the telegraph, telephone, or radio and modes of transportation like rail, bicycles and pneumatic tubes were seemingly making the world a smaller place. How did writers and artists respond to these disruptions? What possibilities for social change are registered in their work? What social or planetary endings are entailed by a sense of time that is measured in geological epochs rather than human millenia? How can we re-imagine our place in nature, when we neither sit at its centre nor have the power to bend it to our will? Pursuing these questions, students will consider a range of genres, from speculative fiction, the urban gothic, alternative histories, utopias, and scientific romances that sought to mediate and in some cases naturalise the threat of technological disruption.