I hate voyages and explorers. -Claude Lévi-Strauss

While the planet did not come to an end with the wars, famines, holocausts, and atomic genocides of the 1930s and '40s, the world most certainly appeared shattered, newly vulnerable and precarious. At least this was the view broadly registered in France. Postwar reconstruction efforts served as opportunities — often of great urgency — for a reconceptualization and re-exploration of the world, of what a world or the world is, and of what or who constitutes and counts as part of the world. The world as such could no longer be taken for granted (as if it ever could be), and new explorations of the world and its meanings appeared throughout French expressive culture, letters, and public discourse. This seminar will study how artists, filmmakers, novelists, and philosophers took to exploration as a methodology for thinking, rethinking, and reinventing the world in an age of accelerated globalization.