Beskrivelse
What is Europe? What is Europe now and what was it one or two centuries ago? Why and how did this small and once so peripheral continent become such a central player in world history? And what is Europe’s role now and in the future, where the waters are rising, the forests are burning, and the Arctic is melting?On this course we will examine Europe’s shifting role in the geopolitical world order, starting with coal and capitalism in the early 19th century. (Imperialist) center or (colonial) periphery, sophisticated metropole or hopeless latecomer are some of the perspectives on Europe we will consider on the course. Reading literary and aesthetic ideations of social, political and ecological displacements, we will be looking at a Europe in crisis. How does literature portray and problematize Europe’s self-ordained role as (former) imperialist center of the world? And how can we, via literature, detect the traces of a decolonial and ecological reinvisionings of the past’s formerly so unassailable (Eurocentric) narratives of power, civilization, and progress?