ABSTRACT
While literary and cultural studies often introduce undergraduates to critical theory (e.g., Marxism, linguistics, feminism, psychoanalysis), the nuclear criticism of the 1980s and early 1990s is typically absent from the curriculum and the introductory anthologies such courses assign. Undoubtedly, this is partly a result of shifts in the institutional and political contexts within which it emerged. By the mid-1990s, the criticism that took the end of the world as its subject found that the Earth was still standing; and other political questions, such as the continuing evolution of global capitalism, made its ethical imperative seem less pressing.
