In this course, we will explore the relationship between environment, estrangement, and pathos in philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic terms. Starting with questions of cosmic scale – what Friedrich Nietzsche once termed “humanity’s place in the universe” – we will turn to novels, poems, and films that respond to existential alienation, entropic decline, imminent catastrophe, and the sense of a general melancholia pervading the natural world. We will touch upon a wide range of traditions, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to contemporary “cli-fi,” from the desert hermits of ancient Egypt to fin-de-siècle decadence, from Romanticism’s poetics of nature to modern “weird fiction.” Along the way we will address topics such as the threat of extinction, “ecological grief,” “collapsology,” and other affects associated with the Anthropocene. Readings will likely include fiction by Kōbō Abe, J.G. Ballard, Aase Berg, Algernon Blackwood, Rachel Carson, Liu Cixin, Camille Flammerion, Anna Kavan, Izumi Kyōka, Stanislaw Lem, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vladimir Sorokin, and others.