Kursinformation

Beyond the visible spectrum of reality, whole realms await discovery. Literature and film have long engaged in imaginations of those realms, often in close dialogue with scientific advances that have brought previously unseen dimensions of life and matter into focus. In this course, we will explore a variety of such cultural representations of the tiniest and most fundamental levels of existence. Beginning with Robert Hooke’s early account of microscopy, Micrographia, published in 1665, which shocked and inspired early modern writers like Margaret Cavendish and continued to resonate in early eighteenth-century writing like Gulliver’s Travels, we will go on to consider, among others, Hollywood’s 1966 vision of the inner life of the body in Fantastic Voyage, and Adam Dickinson’s poetic negotiations of the chemical and microbial substance of his own organism in Anatomic (2018). As will become apparent, imaginations of what I collectively refer to as “the molecular” span a fascinating range of forms, genres, themes and concerns.  At the level of the very small, human scales are challenged, new ecological perspectives open up, and new aesthetics, like the molecular sublime, arise.