A class facilitated by Ben Woodard
Date: Saturday, September 17
Time: 1 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

SPECIAL NOTE: You must enter through the blue front doors on Union Street. Push buzzer #1E.

This course will explore 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, will be 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.

The first half of the course will be a lecture and the second will be a discussion. To help in facilitating discussion please write a 1-2 page response to any/all of the readings with the relation of the geological to thinking in mind.

Required Reading:

“The Festival” by HP Lovecraft http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/f.asp
“A Bit of the Dark World” by Fritz Leiber
“The Metamorphosis of the Earth,” by Clark Ashton Smith http://www.donaldcorrell.com/cas/63.html

Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. In particular these selections:
Machines are Digging 41-68
Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun I Solar Rattle 145-153
Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun II The Core 161-166

Suggested Reading:

“The Last Feast of the Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti
“Solar Inferno and The Earthbound Abyss” – Reza Negarestani
“Triebkrieg” by Reza Negarestani
“Drafting the Inhuman” by Reza Negarestani in The Speculative Turn

Further Suggested Reading:
Edgar Huntly by William Brockden Brown
Collapse v VI ed. Robin Mackay

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.