Course overview
This course allows students to engage with the representation of frontiers and limits in a range of media and genres, attending to problems of politics and form, aesthetics, alterity, and appropriation. We ask how contemporary cultural objects - texts, artwork, films - work through the demands and dilemmas of the frontier understood both as contested (geological, topographical, and historical) space and metaphor for that which challenges our comprehension. How do writers or filmmakers represent that which is at or over the frontier of knowledge, individual or collective? What are the stakes, political and aesthetic, in their choices? After a survey of the ethics and aesthetics of the frontier in colonial-era poems, diaries, letters, short fiction, and visual art, we consider modern and contemporary engagements with the idea of the frontier. Topics might include the longevity of the Western in anglophone writing, engagements with contemporary refugee and migrant experience, speculative explorations of alternative border-zones, worlds, and artificial intelligences, and the ideological work of representations of outer space.