Lecture 20: the dying world

English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
UC Santa Barbara

The world is increasingly unthinkable – a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all – an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.

Eugene Thacker, preface to In the Dust of the Planet

A few words about the final exam …

  • Two sections:
    • Quote identification/fill in the blank (out of approximately ten, pick six; ten points each, for sixty points total).
    • Short essay (pick one option, forty points).
    • Two sections of extra credit questions, pick one from each section (worth up to three and five points).
      • Extra credit sections will have the lowest point payoff for work done of any questions on the final exam.
  • I recommend reading the entire exam first before beginning to work on it.
  • Pace yourself!

Sample questions

Quote identifications. Pick 6 of the following quotes. In each quote, fill in the blank(s), and then explain, in approximately two to three sentences, the following information about the quote: which text the quote is from, the author of that text, the speaker(s) in the passage, and the relevance the quote has to the broader concerns of the text and/or the course as a whole. (10 points each.)
Is something growing on your back? I don’t see nothing growing on your back. It’s there all the same. Who told you that? Whitegirl. That’s what she called it. I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A ___________ _________. Trunk, branches, and even leaves.

Sample questions

Quote identifications. Pick 6 of the following quotes. In each quote, fill in the blank(s), and then explain, in approximately two to three sentences, the following information about the quote: which text the quote is from, the author of that text, the speaker(s) in the passage, and the relevance the quote has to the broader concerns of the text and/or the course as a whole. (10 points each.)
Is something growing on your back? I don’t see nothing growing on your back. It’s there all the same. Who told you that? Whitegirl. That’s what she called it. I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A __chokecherry__ __tree__. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. (Beloved, p. 18)

Several ways of thinking about the world

  • The world as we primarily experience it (what Eugene Thacker calls the World or the world-for-us).
  • The world as it is in itself, and which presents itself to us as an object of study, which is (perhaps) finally unknowable (what Thacker calls the Earth or the world-in-itself).
  • The imaginative construct of what the world might be like without us (what Thacker calls the Planet or the world-without-us)

Living after the end of the world

He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory. (18)
Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all. (28)
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? (32)

Who is it? said the boy.

I dont know. Who is anybody? (49)

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. (54)

Do I look like an imbecile to you?

I dont know what you look like. (65)

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? (89)