Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 4: Ben Woodard on Complicitous Continuums: The Horrors of the Cosmicist Earth
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York
This course explores the Geo-philosophical earth as theory-fictional node for explaining a cosmicism/universalism in which the outside is continuously advancing upon all purportedly firm grounds and solid bodies. Weirdness, as in the weird of weird fiction and the darkness of dark romanticism and the crumble of the gothic, is explored as the intrusion of the non-local upon the local, arguing that all stability is in fact subject to continuous degradation, shift, and collapse.
Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His work focuses on the concept of Nature in German Idealism, philosophies of becoming, contemporary philosophy, as well as in Weird and Speculative fiction. In addition to On an Ungrounded Earth, his book Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life is forthcoming from Zer0 books. He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought.
For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562
Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.
