AML 3311 - Fall 2026 - Ballard

“The world keeps ending, and the world goes on.” So writes contemporary poet Franny Choi in an evocative phrase that captures the apocalyptic sensibilities of post-World War II American culture. This course surveys the ways in which apocalypse has saturated American literature from the postwar moment to the present, exploring how major authors have indexed nuclear, social, geopolitical, epidemiological, and ecological crises through apocalyptic storytelling. We will consider what insights the project of following the apocalyptic can offer us into the relationship between “literary” and “genre” fiction in the postwar period. We will take seriously the socially uneven distribution of apocalyptic experience in postwar America. And we will, continuously, move back and forth across both of apocalypse’s eschatological dimensions—as the end of the world, and as revelatory and prophetic knowledge of the world. Authors covered in this course will likely include Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Adrienne Rich, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Karen Russell, Craig Santos Perez, and (bringing it full circle) Franny Choi, read alongside relevant critical and scholarly sources.