Many films and television programs have dramatized end-of-the-world scenarios. This class will examine this collection of texts as a hypothetical “genre” that cuts across media as well as other genres. How have the mass media represented the end of the world? What have cinema and television told us about global destruction? What is the relationship between the end of the world and the death of the individual? How and why do we artfully represent something that, if it ever happened, would have no audience? What “revelations” have come from these texts’ depictions of massive destruction? We will find that there has been a wide variety of ways that films and television programs treat the end of the world, and that these variations reveal much about the social and cultural world in which they were produced and circulated.
As an exploration of a hypothetical genre, we will examine film and television genres more broadly. Are genres historically generated and responsive, and if so, how? What are the characteristics and conventions of the genre, how have they changed over time, and what have these variations indicated about the world? One premise of this class is that we can learn much about our world by looking at its termination.
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