On finiteness of curves with high canonical degree on a surface

The \emph{canonical degree} of a curve $C$ on a surface $X$ is $K_X\cdot C$. Our main result, is that on a surface of general type there are only finitely many curves with negative self--intersection and sufficiently large canonical degree. Our proof strongly relies on results by Miyaoka. We extend our result both to surfaces not of general type and to non--negative curves, and give applications, e.g. to finiteness of negative curves on a general blow--up of $\mathbb P^ 2$ at $n\geq 10$ general points (a result related to \emph{Nagata's Conjecture}). We finally discuss a conjecture by Vojta concerning the asymptotic behaviour of the ratio between the canonical degree and the geometric genus of a curve varying on a surface. The results in this paper go in the direction of understanding the \emph{bounded negativity} problem.