Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture PDF Download

Author: Monica Germana
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134667477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world’s globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex – and, frequently, paradoxical – paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

Author: Lee Quinby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Millennial rhetoric is both pervasive and persuasive, Quinby argues, because it operates with mutually reinforcing doses of fear and hope. Religious and secular anxiety erupts over charged issues such as sex education, the regulation of cyberspace, and the masculinity of the Promise Keepers. Quinby exposes the dangers of millennialist solutions, which link misogyny, homophobia, and racism with absolutist claims about truth, morality, sexuality, and technology.

Author: Thomas Lawrence Long
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148467X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to the medical crisis, prevent the spread of the disease, and treat the HIV infected. Using the analytical tools of literary analysis, cultural studies, performance theory, and social semiotics, AIDS and American Apocalypticism examines many kinds of discourse, including fiction, drama, performance art, demonstration graphics and brochures, biomedical publications, and journalism and shows that, while initially useful, the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric in the long term are dangerous. Among the important figures in AIDS activism and the arts discussed are David Drake, Tim Miller, Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushner, as well as the organizations ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers.

Author: John Joseph Collins
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199856494
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism. The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology's role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.

Author: Stephen D. O'Leary
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195352963
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Apocalyptic expectations of Armageddon and a New Age have been a fixture of the American cultural landscape for centuries. With the approach of the year 2000, such millennial visions seem once again to be increasing in popularity. Stephen O'Leary sheds new light on the age-old phenomenon of the End of the Age by proposing a rhetorical explanation for the appeal of millennialism. Using examples of apocalyptic argument from ancient to modern times, O'Leary identifies the recurring patterns in apocalyptic texts and movements and shows how and why the Christian Apocalypse has been used to support a variety of political stances and programs. The book concludes with a critical review of the recent appearances of doomsday scenarios in our politics and culture, and a meditation on the significance of the Apocalypse in the nuclear age. Arguing the Apocalypse is the most thorough examination of its subject to date: a study of a neglected chapter of our religious and cultural history, a guide to the politics of Armageddon, and a map of millennial consciousness.

Author: Richard Bradford
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119653061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 912

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THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.

Author: James Craig Holte
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Imagining the End provides students and general readers with contextualized examples of how the apocalypse has been imagined across all mediums of American popular culture. Detailed entries analyze the development, influence, and enjoyment of end-times narratives. Imagining the End provides a contextual overview and individual description and analysis of the wide range of depictions of the end of the world that have appeared in American popular culture. American writers, filmmakers, television producers, and game developers inundated the culture with hundreds of imagined apocalyptic scenarios, influenced by the Biblical Book of Revelation, the advent of the end of the second millennium (2000 CE), or predictions of catastrophic events such as nuclear war, climate change, and the spread of AIDS. From being "raptured" to surviving the zombie apocalypse, readers and viewers have been left with an almost endless sequence of disasters to experience. Imagining the End examines this phenomenon and provides a context for understanding, and perhaps appreciating, the end of the world. This title is composed of alphabetized entries covering all topics related to the end times, covering popular culture mediums such as comic books, literature, films, and music.

Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351850628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable fate—the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia, hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience and knowledge. The essays comprising this volume concern a range of writers’ engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’ to critiques of contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which ‘end times’ reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt political advocacy or – more positively – provide a repertoire for the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.

Author: Barbara Brodman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683930517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.

Author: Linda Pillière
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000768457
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which ghosts haunt and shape cultural identities and memory, considering the manner in which the fluctuations of such identities sometimes imply the rethinking or rewriting of the past. Drawing on case studies in historical, political, literary and linguistic studies, it explores the narratives that produce imagined communities and identities and the places in which cultural identities are constructed through memory, asking how far these identities and memories disinherit or exclude otherness, and how far ghosts disturb orderly narratives, inviting multiple readings of the past. Thematically organized to consider the persistence of ghosts within present memory and identity, the creation of new identities through intertwining narratives of the past, and the reclamation of identities in postcolonial contexts, Memory and Identity: Ghosts of the past in the English-speaking world offers a multi-disciplinary examination of the concept of haunting. Memory and Identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and history with interests in memory and identity.