This seminar focuses on dimensions of time and space underground. Using caves, natural underground spaces, as a springboard, the seminar investigates how the interrelated measures of time and space act and are conceived within real or imagined locations beneath the Earth's surface.

Core topics include the nature of caves and their human uses, and the nature of underground spaces constructed by people that in various ways mimic caves, such as mines, tunnels, subways, pipelines, sewers, catacombs, tombs, and dungeons. The underground is also constructed metaphorically through underground movements, including clandestine military resistance, the Underground Railroad, the criminal underworld, and underground music, and has significant theological expression via concepts of the religious/mythological underworld, as construed by classical Mayan, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations. There exists too an extensive literary underground, with caves and similar spaces featured extensively in writings covering a broad spectra of time and location. Depiction and experience of underground time and space is also featured in films, on TV, and in sundry video games.

Tuesdays, 5:30-8:10pm
Curtin Hall 939