Apocalyptic Narratives PDF Download

Author: Hauke Riesch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Linking literature from the sociological study of the apocalyptic with the sociology and philosophy of science, Apocalyptic Narratives explores how the apocalyptic narrative frames and provides meaning to contemporary, secular and scientific crises focussing on nuclear war, general environmental crisis and climate change in both English- and German-speaking cultural contexts. In particular, the book will use social identity and representation theories, the sociologies of risk and Lakatos’ philosophy of science to trace how our cultural background and apocalyptic tradition shape our wider interpretation, communication and response to contemporary global crisis. The set of environmental and other challenges that the world is facing is often framed in terms of apocalyptic or existential crisis. Yet apocalyptic fears about the near future are nothing new. This book looks at the narrative connections between our current sense of crisis and the apocalyptic. The book will be of interest to readers interested in environmental crisis and communication, the sociology and philosophy of science, and existential risk, but also to readers interested in the apocalyptic and its contemporary relevance.

Author: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Author: Carol Mason
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724673
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
How can those who seek to protect the "right to life" defend assassination in the name of saving lives? Carol Mason investigates this seeming paradox by examining pro-life literature—both archival material and writings from the front lines of the conflict. Her analysis reveals the apocalyptic thread that is the ideological link between established anti-abortion organizations and the more shadowy pro-life terrorists who subject clinic workers to anthrax scares, bombs, and bullets.The portrayal of abortion as "America's Armageddon" began in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Mason says, Christian politics and the post-Vietnam paramilitary culture popularized the idea that legal abortion is a harbinger of apocalypse. By the 1990s, Mason asserts, even the movement's mainstream had taken up the call, narrating abortion as an apocalyptic battle between so-called Christian and anti-Christian forces. "Pro-life violence of the 1990s signaled a move away from protest and toward retribution," she writes. "Pro-life retribution is seen as a way to restore the order of God. In this light, the phenomenon of killing for 'life' is revealed not as an oxymoron, but as a logical consistency and a political manifestation of religious retribution."Mason's scrutiny of primary sources (direct mail, internal memoranda, personal letters, underground manuals, and pro-life films, magazines, and novels) draws attention to elements of pro-life millennialism. Killing for Life is a powerful indictment of pro-life ideology as a coherent, mass-produced narrative that does not merely condone violence, but anticipates it as part of "God's plan."

Author:
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 0857861018
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

Author: Greg Garrett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190260459
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In Living with the Living Dead, Greg Garrett shows that the zombie apocalypse has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can represent a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to mental illness. But paradoxically this narrative also offers human beings a chance to find emotional and spiritual comfort; these apocalyptic stories about individuals facing the imminent prospect of grisly death also offer us wisdom about living in community, present us with real-world ethical problems, and invite us into a conversation about what it means to survive.

Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians, literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned, among other things, with the relation between cultural and scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is one of the main aims of this book.

Author: M. Tanaka
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137373555
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Starting with the history of apocalyptic tradition in the West and focusing on modern Japanese apocalyptic science fiction in manga, anime, and novels, Motoko Tanaka shows how science fiction reflected and coped with the devastation in Japanese national identity after 1945.

Author: Stephen Joyce
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319939521
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...

Author: Elizabeth K. Rosen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739117910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.

Author: Roslyn Weaver
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786484659
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Australia has been a frequent choice of location for narratives about the end of the world in science fiction and speculative works, ranging from pre-colonial apocalyptic maps to key literary works from the last fifty years. This critical work explores the role of Australia in both apocalyptic literature and film. Works and genres covered include Nevil Shute's popular novel On the Beach, Mad Max, children's literature, Indigenous writing, and cyberpunk. The text examines ways in which apocalypse is used to undermine complacency, foretell environmental disasters, critique colonization, and to serve as a means of protest for minority groups. Australian apocalypse imagines Australia at the ends of the world, geographically and psychologically, but also proposes spaces of hope for the future.