This course is a thematic investigation into the visual representation of the sublime from the 18^th century to the present. We will explore the question of limits posed by our relation to nature, technology, and spectacle, and compare ideas pertaining to the unrepresentable, the uncanny, and even terror, from the infancy of modernism to the contemporary. Rather than serving a chronological survey, the course will be concerned with a set of historical problems, oftentimes cutting across several decades and national borders. Attention will be paid to the use of primary historical and philosophical texts in addition to secondary scholarly ones. Among the themes to be explored are: the philosophical and political bases of the category of the nature, the problem of the ‘sublime’ and the catastrophic, the representation of environmental despoliation at the hands of industry, and the imagined exotic landscapes of the colonial and imperial terrain.