Unit 1: Introduction to the course. Breaking Boundaries

• Mark O’Connell,  excerpts from Notes for an Apocalypse (2020)

• Johan Rockström, Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet (2021 Netflix documentary) 

• Bill, McKibben, “When Words Fail” (2008). https://orionmagazine.org/article/when-words-fail/

• Hannah Arendt, prologue to The Human Condition (1958)

• Borges, JL. “"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1961) and discussion of Velazquez La Meninas

• Intro material Padlet#1: https://concordacademy.padlet.org/laurence_vanleynseele/apocalypse-whatever-caring-in-the-post-truth-era-8sgshhb0i7zdqq2j
   

Unit 2:  Communication Without Community? 

• Byung-Chul Han, excerpts from The Disappearance of Rituals 

• Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021 Netflix Comedy Special) 

• Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

• James Bridle, excerpts from The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future  (2018)

• Helen Lewis, “The Internet Loves an Extremophile” (The Atlantic, Jan 2023)

• Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021)

• David Foster Wallace “This is Water” (2005 Kenyon commencement address )

• Puchner, Martin, from the intro to Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop (Feb 2023)

• "The society of authenticity is a performance society" Padlet: https://concordacademy.padlet.org/laurence_vanleynseele/the-society-of-authenticity-is-a-performance-society-the-dis-3hln5zfvi5vtymjz

• Lockwood Padlet: https://concordacademy.padlet.org/laurence_vanleynseele/no-one-is-talking-about-this-uf7rukt95juqno6s

Unit 3: Humans, Nature, Machines, Monsters

• Genesis (1-3 + The Flood + Babel)

• Shakespeare, The Tempest

• Tim Morton excerpts from Ecology Without Nature (2016)

• Shakespeare Behind Bars (2006 documentary, https://shakespearebehindbars.org/)

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

• Weil, Elizabeth, “Your are not a Parrot” (March 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html)

• Glenberg, Arthur, “It takes a Body to Understand the World” (April 2023 https://medium.com/the-conversation/it-takes-a-body-to-understand-the-world-why-chatgpt-and-other-llms-dont-know-what-they-re-saying-856c114529f6) 

• H. Holbein, The Ambassadors

•  F. Nietzsche, excerpt from “On truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”

• Storm and Crisis Padlet: https://concordacademy.padlet.org/laurence_vanleynseele/socratic-conversation-reading-the-tempest-to-think-about-our-lb0aodoscj2lwtef

Unit 4: What Next?

• Yoko Tawada Scattered All Over The Earth (2018)

• Bruno Latour, excerpts from Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018)

• Adam Kirsch, excerpts from The Revolt Against Humanity:  Imagining a Future Without Us (Jan 2023)

• Optional readings to choose from: 

• Poetry for the Apocalypse (https://www.americanscientist.org/article/poetry-for-the-apocalypse)

• Dunlop, Catherine T. “History Unclassified. Losing an Archive: Doing Place-Based History in the Age of the Anthropocene” (2021, recommended by Ed. Rafferty)

• “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies” Intro to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene ed. by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (2017)

• Hua Hsu, “Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety” (excerpt). Published March 25, 2019, issue

• Claude Monet clips

• Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

• https://concordacademy.padlet.org/laurence_vanleynseele/what-next-humanism-posthumanism-transhumanism-and-scattered--k7y0igtpcf9ireow