LBST 504 - The Cultural Heritage of the Nuclear Age

This course explores responses to nuclear war and disaster in literature, film, and other forms of cultural expression. Our approach will be comparative and transnational, as we will consider works from a variety of contexts around the world: reflections on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese literature and French New Wave cinema; ideologies of nuclear proliferation in Hollywood productions such as Disney’s “Our Friend the Atom” and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer; and intersections of antinuclear writing and Indigenous activism in Soviet Central Asia, North America, and the Pacific Islands. We will also probe the boundaries of genre and narrative as we analyze survivors’ accounts from Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk, Los Alamos, the Marshall Islands, and other sites. Our methods will be interdisciplinary, informed by practices and theoretical frameworks from literary studies, film studies, philosophy, history of science, environmental studies, and critical Indigenous studies. Ultimately our goal is to better understand how the advent of nuclear technologies has shaped our world, as well as our depictions of it.

Unit(s): 0.5
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Graduate course. Offered spring 2025.