Apocalyptic Vision Research Articles

Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World

Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World

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This paper reads P. B. Shelley’s unfinished poem The Triumph of Life (1822), which recounts the poet’s visionary experience of beholding the triumphal procession of Life, in relation to his claims about imagination and love in A Defence of Poetry (1821). For Shelley, imaginative faculty forms the basis of a feeling of sympathy for others, which develops into love. This notion of sympathetic imagination appears to be the key to understanding the poem, especially the significance of Rousseau who guides the narrator through the apocalyptic vision. The principal purpose of this article is to elucidate the role of Rousseau in the Triumph, whom Shelley considers to be essentially a poet, i.e. a man of imagination. To Shelley’s way of thinking, Rosseau is proven highly imaginative in developing radical political ideas which had their roots in his fervent desire to remedy the ills of the world, and which profoundly impacted the outbreak of the French Revolution. However, Rousseau’s encounter with the vision of the “shape all light,” a malevolent spirit who offers him the cup of nepenthe, blots out his memories of the past, hence trampling the spark of imagination in his mind. For his ability to imagine ideal conditions for human existence is based upon his criticism of the harsh realities of the world—criticism being an act of remembering the past. However, Rousseau’s liberation from the chariot of Life is attained by his unswerving loyalty to democratic ideals, which holds true for Shelley.

Problems of Th eatrical art in the XXI century

From the last decades of the XX century to the present, the overall processes of integration have a total character in all spheres of human activity. In general, the cosmic quickness of development of technologies and especially information technologies have long removed the borders between different countries and civilizations. This triumphal move of globalization on our planet is a quite difficult process full of resistances. Its ongoing process is far ahead of comprehensive deliberation and assessing of possible positive and negative consequences raised by this occurrence. Despite the fact that historically globalization is a fully natural process, which certainly has not started only in the last decades of the XX century; some people consider the renaissance epoch as its beginning. There are people who think that this process originates from ancient times alongside with the development of mankind’s traditional cultures. However, subsequently in later history, it goes beyond the traditional boundaries of culture and often plays a destructive role towards it. During the discussions around globalization, there often appear catastrophic and apocalyptic visions. On the one side are those who consider globalization as historically inevitable and a progressive comprehensive occasion, while others emphasize the dangerous nature of this occasion for distinctiveness and development of different cultures and civilizations.

Katalog posthumanistycznych lęków w filmie Przestroga Agaty Alexander

The article contains an analysis of the science fiction film Warning (directed by A. Alexander, screenplay by A. Alexander, J. Kaye and R. Michaelson, USA–Poland 2021), which aims to determine the meaning of its structure and the motifs contained therein. As the author of the article claims, the film is an intellectual and artistic projection of the moral, existential and social consequences of technological development, especially of digital technologies. It shows a vision of the society of 2028, in which the fourth industrial revolution has already occurred. Androids, the transfer of consciousness, immortality, hybrids of religion and technology, and the resetting or virtualisation of memory no longer surprise anyone, so the effects of their use in everyday life are shown from the perspective of ordinary people. The film plot is made up of six micro‑‑stories, divided into parts and simultaneously developing, which, by presenting the existence of an individual in a technocratic world, also become an exemplification of a post‑‑humanist discourse permeated with fear and distrust toward the unreflective admiration of progress. The stories presented in the film create a kind of a “catalogue” of possible threats generated by technology, thus becoming yet another extremely current voice in the discussion about the state of modern civilization. A satirical and grotesque view of the near future supported by a catastrophic and apocalyptic imagination and a moral and didactic orientation determines the specificity of Warning’s narrative.

The Mytheme of Way in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

The way or road is one of the central mythemes in the world literature. It is used as a bone-structure in numerous mythic and literary narratives. In a sense, the myth of Sisyphus, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal and other medieval Grail romances, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi and The Waste Land and many other masterpieces of the world literature are embodiments of the mytheme of the way and the mythic motive of quest. The forms of its literary embodiment of the mytheme vary from one literary epoch to another depending on the author’s world outlook and method. As Temur Kobakhidze puts it, in the final analysis, two separate journeys, the historic and the spiritual one, can be presented in any work. The historic journey can take place in the profane time of everyday events, while the spiritual quest endures in the sacred space-time, serving as a binding principle for what can be described as the mythopoeic chronotope of the spiritual quest (Kobakhidze 2008: 94). The narrative structure of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road is shaped by the mytheme of way or road. A father and his son “journey” alone through burned America. The land is covered with ash, it is cold enough to crack stones, the sky is dark. Cannibals, marauders and lawless bands stalk the road. Their destination is the coast, although they do not know what, if anything, awaits them there. The association with Sisyphus comes to mind immediately – all their efforts to escape the same dangers and overcome the same obstacles endlessly seems to be aimless and even if they reach their destination and survive, there is no sense in survival – it is the world in which no hope remains. In this sense, the narrative structure of the “road” is modelled on the myth of Sisyphus. At the same time, the apocalyptic vision of the total devastation is a literal/physical actualization of T. S. Eliot’s metaphoric image of the “waste land”. All characters, but one, are nameless – McCarthy depicts the all-human condition. While the book details the journey, it is not specified what cataclysm has destroyed the industrial civilization and almost all life. One might assume that the protagonists face the results of Anthropocene – a new geological epoch of significant human impact on geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. Anthropocene is inevitably followed by the era of Posthumanism that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human and inhuman (the animal and the technological). However, it does not mean that what McCarthy offers is the totalization of the posthumanist epistemology. The novel is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness, love and empathy for others that keeps two people alive in the face of total post-apocalyptic devastation.

The World and the Desert: A Comparative Perspective on the "Apocalypse" between Buddhism and Christianity

abstract: In this essay, the concept of apocalypse, understood as the "end of the world," will be examined within the context of ancient Buddhism and Christianity. The study will focus on the genealogy and use of expressions such as lokanta, lokassa anta ṃ, and lokassa atthaṅgama , as found in the Pāli canon of Buddhism, going on to compare them with Jewish, as well as early Christian, apocalyptic literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epistles of James and Jude, and the Gospels. The goal of this article is to identify points of convergence in the history of these two concepts of apocalypse, foregrounding the central role within both traditions of analogous socio-cultural circumstances that were actually more influential than their respective doctrinal visions. The essay will argue how the ascetic character of early Buddhism and Christianity, reflecting their opposition to the surrounding social order, contributed to the emergence of similar apocalyptic visions.

Tension Between Obliteration and Regeneration in Walt Whitman’s Selected Poems

This article explores the poet’s tension between his fear of environmental obliteration and a hope for spiritual regeneration in Walt Whitman’s poems This Compost. To do so, it applies ecocritical perspective which studies about the relationship of man with the biotic and a-biotic world in the literary text. Walt Whitman, in his poems, unfolds his reverence to the natural world. He celebrates the beauty of everyday life and nature. In these poems, he glorifies nature for its amazing ability to transform every dead, diseased and sick matter into regeneration. He does not see death as an end of life. He finds it as an event to renew life to a beautiful one. In the poems, his mind wrestles with his inner fear of getting in touch with the nature and in the second part he glorifies nature with the faith that it has an amazing capacity of renewing every ugly matter into divine materials for a new life. This study concludes that human being’s relationship with the earth is unbounded and maternal. It portrays how the poet’s fears and apocalyptic visions are ultimately silenced.

Groza konfliktów religijnych we Francji w Kronice Pierre’a Belona du Mans (1517-1564)

PIERRE BELON, naturalist and traveler of the 16th century, known for his publications in the field of botany and zoology, and above all for his account of the voyage to the Levant (1546-1549), is also the author of the Cronique, unpublished in the sixteenth century. This polemical work describes the events of the beginning of the French Wars of Religion that Belon witnessed. It consists of a speech addressed to King Charles IX and two accounts of the sieges: that of Moulins imposed by the Huguenots and that of Bourges by the royal army. The Cronique is an important source of information on the religious and political conflicts between Catholics and Huguenots. The article presents the historical context of the events described by Belon as well as the circumstances of the creation of the work. The selected fragments show issues addressed by the author such as the horror of religious conflict, the horror of war, the fear experienced by the people and the apocalyptic vision of the future of France. Although Belon was first and foremost a doctor and naturalist, he showed great interest in the language and coined many neologisms that defined the Huguenots and their activities. The value of the Cronique resides above all in the fact that, thanks to the observations it contains, it makes it possible to better understand the atmosphere of the tragic period of the fratricidal wars in France.

Deciding whether it’s too late: How climate activists coordinate alternative futures in a postapocalyptic present

Climate activists are confronted with an increasing tension between the need for urgent climate action and a sense that it could already be too late to prevent ‘dangerous’ or ‘runaway’ climate change. In this context, scholars observe the spread of a postapocalyptic environmentalism that understands climate change as already being locked in beyond ‘safe’ limits. This narrative challenges apocalyptic environmentalism, which presents climate disasters as a future threat to be avoided. We aim to improve our understanding of the profound yet contradictory impact of this shift on climate activism. Specifically, we explain why in some cases, the postapocalyptic narrative is adopted without clearly impacting climate activists’ goals and strategies, which remain informed by an apocalyptic vision based on notions of solution, control and progress. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a British climate movement organization, we explain why apocalyptic strategies can be reproduced despite postapocalyptic visions, and how this can result in a juxtaposition of strategies perceived as most realistic and strategies actually being pursued. We argue that Tavory and Eliasoph’s (2013) theory about the disjuncture and coordination of imagined futures can help us make sense of this situation. We expand this theory by showing the importance of spatialization as a strategy to overcome temporal contradictions.

Paths and Puzzles: Walking the Maze in the Apocalypse of Golias

The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the dissertation gaining the highest mark in the Cambridge University final examination in English. The article printed here is the Prize Essay for 2022. He laid bare the secrets of his right hand, and when I had looked and began to read, I found written in dark lettering, ‘I am the leader who goes before, and you must follow me.’ He whom I had begun to follow glided quickly past, and, as I was led more rapidly, we tumbled together into another land. (ll. 25–31)1 This is the first of several disorientating narrative movements in the late twelfth-century Latin poem, the Apocalypse of Golias.2 The poem narrates a dream or vision which begins under an oak tree with the appearance of Pythagoras, the leader in the passage above, proceeds to an apocalyptic vision, and ends with a cursory coda in heaven. The difficulty posed by these movements has led several influential critics to condemn the poem for structural incoherence: F. Raby judged the beginning ‘not very well related to the rest of the narrative’ and ‘irrelevant’; J. B. Hauréau added that titling a work ‘apocalypse’ does not license the mixing of incoherent material; and Karl Strecker claimed that the two outer sections were appended unnecessarily to the central one.3 It is to this discussion of structure and movement that the present investigation contributes, employing more recent developments in scholarship on miscellanies and the ‘whole book’, and approaching the poem through the specific instance of its transmission in Cambridge, Trinity College, O.2.45, a thirteenth-century miscellany from Cerne Abbey, Dorset.4 Specifically, it is suggested that the materials surrounding the poem in O.2.45 – diagrammatic, mathematical, and riddling – might have schooled a reader in methods of reading which would equip him to negotiate the narrative shifts and turns in the Apocalypse which have traditionally been attributed to poor poetic construction. Underlying this essay is a methodological approach, outlined by Nichols and Wenzel, which, proposing that ‘the individual manuscript contextualizes the text(s) it contains in specific ways […] seeks to analyze the consequences of this relationship on the way these texts may be read and interpreted’.5 Using both formalist and material-text analysis, this essay explores possible routes through the text, and their interaction with ideas of memory and numerical structure, games and diagrams, to advance an interpretation that places the reader at the centre of a textual diagram which amazes and amuses.

A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World by John Jeffries Martin

One may not expect to see the apocalyptic imagination foregrounded as a key constituent element in the traditional telling of modernity’s origins. According to Martin, however, apocalyptic ideas are deeply embedded in modern thinking about the nature of history, its direction, and human aspirations to shape its outcome.Martin began his research for this book intending to write a straightforward history of Early Modern Europe from the age of Columbus until the French Revolution, and that original plan can still be seen in the volume’s chronological progression and organization. All of the major historical touchstones and markers for the making of the Early Modern Era remain present, including among other developments the invention of print, the European encounter with the Americas, the rise of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the ensuing Wars of Religion. The project took a different turn, however, when Martin discerned a particular thread running through those critical centuries of transition between the medieval and modern worlds, namely, that of apocalyptic ideas and millennialist hopes for “a beautiful ending” to history—a Golden Age of justice, prosperity, and peace before the end of time.In his compelling tour of apocalypticism from c. 1400 to 1700, Martin finds numerous examples to substantiate this finding—such as the fact that the oldest surviving printed text from Europe relates to the Final Judgment; that Columbus perceived his voyages as fulfilling biblical prophecies; the strands of messianic thinking that informed Hapsburg imperial ideology; the utopian visions of authors such as Thomas More; and the battles between Protestant and Catholic reformers, which seemed to suggest the final tribulations under the Antichrist were at hand, thereby setting the stage for the ultimate triumph of the Elect.Beneath Martin’s engaging prose, there lies a long-standing and far-reaching academic debate over the relationship between (premodern) theology of history and (modern) philosophy of history, associated with the likes of Löwith and Blumenberg. Löwith argued that modern theories of historical progress (evident in the works of figures such as Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx) represented “secularized” versions of theological interpretations of history (displayed by thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore).1 Blumenberg posited instead a definitive rupture between medieval and modern temporal conceptualizations of history, as the latter jettisoned the former’s stultifying reliance on God as the architect of a foreordained historical plan that would end in the apocalypse.2 Indeed, Blumenberg explicitly flagged apocalyptic modes of thought as antithetical to modern notions of open-ended historical progress and human agency within the arena of time. Apocalypticism and modernity thus stand at odds with one another.Martin seems to adopt a far more “Löwithesque” perspective, offering his assessment that “Modernity was, in the end, a providential product” (10) and that “the apocalyptic imagination and the hope and energies it inspired played a fundamental role in the shaping of the modern world” (12). As evident in his copious notes, Martin is well aware of the greater stakes in this topic, which are part of a wider debate over secularization and modernity writ large.A Beautiful Ending strikes me as making two especially important contributions. First, Martin calls attention to the fact that Christian apocalyptic ideas, the ones that predominantly shaped European thinking, were just one strand in what he calls an “apocalyptic braid,” bound up with contemporary Jewish and Islamic ideas about the divinely ordained course of history. Admittedly, trained as an expert in Early Modern Europe, his focus remains mostly on the European tradition. But his discussion of how print enabled the dissemination of rabbinical texts on the Final Things, for example, or about the political implications of Ottoman prophecies about the end-times, provides a far richer picture of how apocalyptic ideas shaped intellectual life and culture beyond the confines of Christian Europe.Second, Martin reminds us that, while millenarian visions of the future could inspire violence, rebellion, and fear of “outsiders” as agents of apocalyptic evil, in some instances the longing for the end also generated optimism, egalitarianism, and an ecumenical spirit. That sense of optimism about the end-times seems to be the true casualty of the secular and scientific impulses that eventually came to dominate modern theorizing about time and history. While it is hard to find a “beautiful ending” in the promise of nuclear destruction or the unfolding disasters caused by climate change, perhaps, as Martin speculates in his epilogue, we can and should devise new ways of thinking about the “catastrophes that have littered and continue to litter human history without having recourse to the apocalyptic” (250). Given how deeply the apocalyptic braid is woven into the broader fabric of modernity, he seems to feel that the providential appeal of a beautiful ending is far from exhausted.

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Clara Orban. Slow Places in Béla Tarr’s Films: The Intersection of Geography, Ecology, and Slow Cinema

Clara Orban. <i>Slow Places in Béla Tarr’s Films: The Intersection of Geography, Ecology, and Slow Cinema</i>

Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath, by Jack Holloway

Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath, by Jack Holloway

Vision apocalyptique dans « Le Microbe du professeur Bakermann » de Charles Épheyre et « Une Invasion de Macrobes » d’André Couvreur

The end of the 19th century is strongly marked by the discoveries of Pasteur and the development of the germ theory of contagious diseases. Our paper briefly presents the introduction of microbe into scientific-marvelous novels, and then analyzes its attack in Charles Épheyre’s short story, Le Microbe du professeur Bakermann (1890), as well as the unexpected appearance of macrobes in André Couvreur’s novel, Une Invasion de Macrobes (1909). Professors Bakermann and Tornada are reminiscent of demiurges caught up in the frenzy of glory and power. Will they finally be able to destroy the human race, thereby ruining the ethos of a scientist? We will attempt to parallel their destinies in order to show the danger posed by excessive ambitions combined with uncommon intelligence. Fallen unjustly into oblivion, both texts deserve to be rediscovered due to the exceptional apocalyptic vision which they depict.

APOCALYPTIC CRISIS IN NIKOLAUS LENAU'S EPIC POEM "DIE ALBIGENSER"

Nikolaus Lenau’s (1802–1850) Die Albigenser (1842) is one of the most important German-language political poems. The Albigensiansis a religious epic poem dealing with the history of the Middle Ages. The culmination of this period comes in the crisis of the Crusades and the persecution of heretics. In the research to date, Lenau's Albigensians have been portrayed as those devoted to the worship of the spirit. In its rejection of the physical, this dualistic heresy had incalculable social consequences. One of these consequences was the overthrow of an established order, which Lenau himself shows as unjust in his epic poem. The rites of the Albigensians are not only religious but primarily political acts. The defense and explanation of the Albigensian doctrine represents a rebellion against the Catholic Church of the time, seen as morally degenerate and in the service of a detested monarchical power. The Cathars and their fate allow Lenau to express his own revolt aptly. In the famous final verses, the revolutionary line is drawn from the Albigensians through Hus and Luther to the "stormers of the Bastille, and so on". Thus, the political accusation points beyond the historical events of the crisis into one's own present and even into the future (Deutsche Dichter 430–431). In this paper, Lenau is shown to transcend the religious, political, and social planes to form a commonly accepted universal idea. This article will address the idea that Lenau describes a time of crisis, to emphasize that with crises of this and/or a similar kind, a general upheaval of society and culture arises. The helplessness, defenselessness, and isolation of a group and/or an individual leads to a general dependency. Lenau depicts such a lack of freedom apocalyptically. The reaction to the existing reality and the consequence of crisis is the state of inner and outer dependence of the individual and the group, which is what first leads to the realization that independence and progress are in danger, which then leads to an apocalyptic vision of the future. Lenau's Albigensian poetry belongs to the tradition of German apocalyptic literature. And not only that, but in his epic poem the ideas are also represented that will only appear later in contemporary literature.

‘Still Repeated Circles’: William Cowper’s The Task and the Shape of Habit

Weaving between georgic, satire, and religious epic over the course of six books of blank verse, William Cowper’s The Task (1784) would not seem to reward the reader who hunts for a presiding argument or theme. It does, however, offer a set of motifs as a means of guiding the reader through its network of associations. The most prevalent of these motifs is the rural walk, which appears as both a narrative device and a recurring metaphor of poetic form. Book III, for example, opens with the speaker describing himself It is a fitting simile, as Cowper steers his argument away from the apocalyptic visions of Book II and back onto the homely ground of rural retirement and cucumber production. However, it is also somewhat misleading. Books I, V, and VI of The Task narrate Cowper’s experience of his regular walk through the village of Olney and the neighbouring estate of Weston Underwood, as he associatively interweaves descriptions of landscape with personal, religious, and political reflections.2 In contrast to Cowper’s sense of the ‘rambling’ nature of poetic composition, those parts of the poem that actually narrate his walks reveal a powerful concern with habit and repetition. In Books I, V, and VI, he portrays walking as a practice which he cultivates for the purpose of maintaining both bodily and mental health. These sections reveal a preoccupation with what we might call the ‘shape’ of habit:

Demanding The Impossible: Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth

Demanding The Impossible:Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) As writer and educator Erica Meiners suggests: "Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design." It's time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible. —Mariame Kaba1 This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. —N. K. Jemisin2 The prologue of The Fifth Season, the first novel in N. K. JEMISIN'S Broken Earth trilogy, begins with the end of the world. Or, to be more accurate, it invokes "the end of the world" across repetition and revision through shifting frameworks of scale. "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" the unnamed narrator asks. The reader then encounters multiple endings. First, the reader [End Page 625] witnesses a woman's world end when she sees her dead son, obviously killed by her husband. Next, they witness an unnamed man wielding unfathomable power literally crack the earth's surface. Then the narrative gaze scans upward, from ground to sky, only to be brought crashing back down to revisit the first ending and introduce the protagonist Essun's name. This repetition and revision of the world's end establishes apocalypse as a governing logic of the ensuing narrative economy and as a concept mappable across shifting scales of time and space. There is more than one world in/on the planet, and these worlds happen at different scales of time and space, including the individual body and personal lifespan, the borders of nations and empires and the historical time of Civilization, and the epochal scale of geologic, planetary time. And yet, these worlds overlap, such that apocalypse becomes at once "relative," because it happens to different worlds at different scales, and paradigmatic, because if you place these many scales appositionally you are faced with CHRISTINA SHARPE'S question about catastrophe: "How, after all, to split time?"3 Through shifting scales, The Fifth Season's prologue opens the "event" of apocalypse to unbounded time; that is, it eschews framing the end of the world as a singular moment with a discernible beginning and ending. This essay examines how this opening of apocalypse beyond bounded event-time through such shifting scales orients Broken Earth within what I call "abolition time" and thereby trains readers toward abolitionist thought through the literary emplotment of apocalyptic imagination. I understand abolition as a long tradition of liberatory work grounded in Black radical thought and resistance from the eras of chattel slavery to the present, and here I focus on how abolitionist thought is a kind of apocalypticism. Whether it be the Christian rhetoric of David Walker's Appeal, Angela Davis's imperative to "act as if it were possible to radically [End Page 626] transform the world," or George Jackson's fiery demand for the dissolution of the entire regime of property itself in Blood in my Eye, the abolitionist project carries the demand to, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's words, "change everything."4 What Mariame Kaba calls "the horizon of abolition" requires a "jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible."5 It envisions a world where carceral regimes of violence and control are rendered obsolete by networks of care and accountability currently unimaginable within the horizon of the law's imagination of retributive justice.6 Abolition is thus a refusal of inherited terms of the possible and a demand for the impossible: to bring a different world into being. In this way, it is both a utopian and a world-ending project. And since, as Sami Schalk writes, speculative fiction can "open up for us new ways of being in the world that may not yet exist, but could," I follow her lead here to ask what Jemisin's Afrofuturist novels can open up for us as we jailbreak our imaginations.7 Broken Earth tells its story through...

Gothic Elements in Representations of a Pandemic: Borislav Pekic’s Rabies

The paper deals with the Gothic elements in the representation of a pandemic based on the 1983 novel Besnilo (‘Rabies’) by Serbian author Borislav Pekic. The authors start from the premise that the elements ‘borrowed’ from the Gothic genre play a key role in creating the main plot of the novel: a catastrophe caused by an extremely contagious and deadly man-manipulated version of the rabies virus. The theoretical framework is based on Fred Botting’s (1995) and Jerrold E. Hogle’s (2002) views of Gothic writing as a diffused mode that exceeds genres and categories and contributes its various elements to various literary forms. Furthermore, Gothic elements characteristic of Gothic science fiction, such as madness, monstrosity, the Mad Scientist, people meddling with nature with catastrophic consequences, the apocalyptic vision of human future and “the removal of man from his natural, living state and entry instead into a state of being neither completely human or monster, and neither fully alive or completely dead” (MacArthur 2015: 79) are traced in the novel and analysed in the context of literary representations of a pandemic. As Pekic’s novel is a mixture of various genres and is often defined and described as a horror thriller novel, an attempt is made to offer a new reading that would consider its constituent Gothic elements against a backdrop of the deeply and inherently human drama of the everlasting struggle between good and evil. Thus, pandemics are represented as a kind of catalyst that exposes both deeply human and rational, and deeply inhuman and irrational, impulses, leaving the final outcome of that struggle uncertain.

The Apocalyptic Visions in the Poems of SP Lohani, GM Hopkins and VS Rai

This article explores some textual and contextual evidences on how Shreedhar Lohani’s ‘Gaia’, G.M. Hopkin’s ‘God’s Grandeur’, and V.S. Rai’s ‘Corona Says’ reveal figures of speech and their underlying suggestions with current environmental crisis, specially focusing on the topics of contemporary environmental discourse related to environmental apocalypticism or catastrophic changes. Relevant environmental, ecological and mythical perspectives have been incorporated to substantiate the argument. The discussion integrates ideas from theoretical insights, textual evidences, contextual cases and views of the inhabitants of affected areas. The discussion critically reads the texts with regards to the claim and key theoretical concepts like Gaia as Earth mother, the arcadias in nature, degraded landscapes like Brownfields, environmental as well as mythical apocalypticism, nature as instrument to gratify human needs and desires and other relevant outlooks. Based on the findings of analysis, the conclusion of the discussion cogently establishes the argument rather than forming certitudes on the poems. The selected texts suggest that the anthropocentric rational framework and a serious self-destructive denial of ecological limits is leading us to eco-catastrophic ends. So, it’s high time we give up our chauvinism and live in harmony with nature and fellow creatures. The conclusion is expected to open avenues for further discussion as well as contestation on the same or similar discourses.