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The Pseudo Methodios Syriac Apocalyptic Text, composed in the 7th century, constitutes a foundational work in the corpus of Syriac eschatological and apocalyptic literature. This text, which offers a series of prophecies concerning the dynamics that lead humanity toward the apocalypse and the actualization of the end times, reflects the responses of the Syriac community to the incorporation of new elements into their symbolic and holistic universe as a consequence of Islamic conquests. Among these responses, the concept of the Last Emperor--envisioned as the ruler who will unite complacent Christians under a single authority just before the advent of the Messiah--emerges as particularly significant. This article seeks to elucidate the reasons for the creation of this topos and its position within the collective memory of Syriac Christians by analyzing the sacred attributes ascribed to this figure and the roles assigned to him in the period immediately preceding the Messiah's arrival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides of comprehensive examination of the main examples of typological exegesis that substantiate the eschatological framework of Pseudo-Methodius's Syriac Apocalypse. In particular, the articles pays attention at Pseudo-Methodius's original use of earlier Syriac writings (especially the Cave of the Treasures and the corpus of early seventh-century eschatological literature centered around the figure of Alexander the Great) which offered the material for original typological exegesis of crucial events in the universal history; additionally, the article reassesses the most original motif of Pseudo-Methodius's representation of the "Last World Emperor" as the scion of the "Ethiopian" royal dynasty and provides some final remarks on the possible function and signification of the "unknown East" in Pseudo-Methodius's historical and eschatological account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together insights from different research areas by on the one hand examining the Apocalypse of Abraham in its context of ancient Judaism and on the other hand looking at the fourteenth century context of its manuscript-tradition. Special attention is given to how the Apocalypse of Abraham receives Ezekiel in order to create its distinct vision of God's throne. The copyist/redactor of the manuscript in Old Church Slavonic adds six miniatures to his codex depicting essential scenes from the Apocalypse of Abraham. However, when looking at the miniature of Abraham and the angel Jaoel before God's throne, one wonders if the miniaturist knew the text of the Apocalypse of Abraham at all or if he wanted to create his own vision of God's throne thereby correcting/adding to the meaning of the Apocalypse's vison of the throne. By examining both the original and the manuscript context of the work multiple discourses are opened and new questions of transmission of ancient Jewish texts in Christian transmission arise. The paper wants to encourage further research in the field of Slavonic pseudepigrapha and its transmission which is still a neglected field of academic endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mikhail Epstein (b. 1950) and Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018) became close friends in Moscow in 1980. Epstein emigrated in 1990 to become a professor of cultural studies at Emory University; in 1991 Sharov, trained as a historian of medieval Rus', published the first of his nine novels. With increasing urgency, both writers explored the myth, now backed by military force, that Russia is called to an apocalyptic, salvational global mission. This essay juxtaposes Epstein's quasi-novel The New Sectarianism (1993), with its plea for poor faith or "minimal religion," with the maximalist plots of Sharov's novels, peopled by NKVD informers, homespun visionaries, seekers and priests. When a philosopher writes a novel, or when an historian-turned-novelist formulates a political philosophy, how are we to balance the claims of these competing genres? The final segment discusses a highly antagonistic reading by the sociologist Dina Khapaeva of Sharov's final novel, which suggests that Sharov was emotionally complicit in the horrific events of the Stalinist era. An attempt is made to rebut this reading, and also to locate a way out for all parties that permits novelistic and philosophical art to be moral—but remain art. The essay originated as a paper presented at the 2023 ASEEES Convention, on a panel titled "Contemporary Russian Philosophy: Four Thinkers on Consciousness, Imagination, and Civilizational Crisis." The argument has been filled in but not updated, and its oral intonation retained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the results of a content analysis of the History Channel's religious programming, which shows that roughly 44% of episodes about religion from 1996 to 2020 prioritize violence. Additionally, an ideological critique of 17 selected episodes reveals that non-Christian violence is portrayed as inherent to geographic contexts outside the United States while Christian violence is portrayed as justified, heroic, and exceptional. From this we show how the History Channel's telling of religious history perpetuates the deep and troubling alliance between American identity and violent forms of white, Christian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artist and scholar Leah Modigliani presents and writes about her series of photographs Cities of God. These collages show fragments of cities destroyed by natural disasters, digitally rebuilt on the surface of micrometeors. Named after Saint Augustine's theological reckoning with the fall of Rome in the 5th century, the artwork responds to the irreconcilable differences between an individual's place in the world and the scale of global climate disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brahma Kumaris are a Hindu religious movement whose membership consists almost exclusively of women and whose devotional practices revolve around notions of purity and celibacy. They also hold a cyclical apocalyptic eschatology, believing that the world will end in utter disaster in the near future, just as it has done in countless times past. In order to achieve their religious goals with respect to the apocalypse, the Brahma Kumaris must engage in recruitment on a massive scale. This article examines the marketing of the Brahma Kumaris. It argues that, in order to usher in the end of the world and spare others a painful post-apocalyptic fate, the Brahma Kumaris host a number of retreats and programs aimed at attracting the public to their movement. These retreats and programs, however, have little to do with celibacy and apocalypticism, but instead focus on self-help, stress reduction, and increasing self-confidence. The article examines the ways that the Brahma Kumaris brand their determinedly ascetic, apocalyptic, and predestinarian movement as a meditative tradition which offers self-help tools for the frenzied modern public. It also considers how scholars should theorize about the marketing of religious groups that have a radically different set of internal theologies than those they present to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between space, negativity, and apocalypses. Following Jacques Lacan, I introduce the distinction between ‘lack’ and ‘hole’, whereby the lack is considered in spatial terms as designating a relative nothingness within space, while the hole is defined more radically as the point at which a spatial order itself collapses, leaving nothing left but nothingness. Proceeding from these two conceptual reference points, I turn to the apocalyptic imagination. I explain how both the lack and the hole play a significant role in exploring world endings. Lack, in particular, features prominently in various fictional and non-fictional narrations of the post-apocalypse. Deserted wastelands of all kinds are pivotal when it comes to narrations of the world after its end. Apart from this, there is a second, more radical form of encounter with nothingness underlying the apocalyptic imagination. Taking cometary impacts and the sun’s death as examples, I show how the end of Earth can also be understood as a hole that marks a total breakdown of the spatial order itself. Through this dual consideration of the spatial implications of apocalypses, I seek to stress the role of geo-graphing with and without worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes to discuss how the recent turn to the futuristic in a selection of Palestinian science fiction works assumes a fatalistic tenor in that it expresses the inability and unwillingness of Palestinian imagination to move forward and confront the prospects of what seems to be inevitable epistemic erasure. The act of imagining fictional futures seemingly suspends the coming of the actual future that does not offer tenable conditions for Palestinian continuation. The essay brings together Larissa Sansour's sci-fi short film trilogy – A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2013), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) – and a selection of short stories from the recent sci-fi collection Palestine +100 edited by Basma Ghalayini. The aim is to demonstrate how the suspension of temporal progression in Palestinian imaginings structures futuristic configurations of three more or less familiar Palestinian tropes: (1) the utopic call for liberating Palestine "from the river to the sea"; (2) the dystopic implications of the (conceptual and territorial) shrinking space of a vanishing nation; and (3) continuation in the aftermath of the Palestinian apocalypse. To imagine in the cataclysmic present moment, I argue, epistemically asserts the existence of Palestine and, consequently, wards off the prospects of nonbeing as the possibility of statehood is steadily dwindling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary conspiracism draws on both long-standing traditions and the current cultural and political environment as it constructs mythic knowledge that often includes apocalyptic prophecies. Such knowledge is constantly altered and reinterpreted by the conspiracy activists who invest in its transmission and reproduction. This article examines how conspiracist mythologies emerge in the use of these activists as mythic discourse that fluidly adapts both to include past sources and to comment on late modern phenomena. Illustrative cases of Christian and popular millennial conspiracist narratives are analyzed in terms of how they construct the actors, organizations, power positions, and historical trajectories of the world. The article highlights how different conspiracist myths share features and stances, influenced by the currents of late modernity, but also contest each other based on what their sources and purposes are, and how they differ in their evaluation of the apocalyptic event's nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the connection between the ecoGothic and human subjectivity in a post-apocalyptic society is examined through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization. The concept of ecoGothic space intersects the studies of geography, ecocriticism and ecoGothic literary analysis. The ecoGothic is particularly pertinent in the post-apocalyptic visions of authors who are haunted by the spectre of climate change and climate disaster in the Capitalocene. Following from this premise, this article interrogates the concept of ecoGothic space in relation to the Capitalocene as a fundamental idea and subsequently upholds the concept of ecoGothic space as a tool to discover the character's dynamic spatial experiences by way of deterritorialization. By focusing on the novel Oryx and Crake by a Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, this article therefore interrogates the characteristics of ecoGothic space that are heavily embedded in Atwood's apocalyptic spaces. The article argues that although the protagonist of the novel experiences a form of deterritorialization in this novel, there is a subsequent reterritorialization happening both in the protagonist and the environment of the narrative which allows him to become reconciled to present reality. Therefore, the apocalyptic discourse in the novel is analysed in tandem with global environmental issues to interrogate the personal and psychological impact of the disruption of natural environmnent on the individual. By using an ecoGothic analytical lens in tandem with an engagement with Capitolocenic discourse as a methodology, this paper sheds some lights upon the study of ecoGothic specifically on the aspects of space and deterritorialization. This has led to the finding which demonstrates the correlation between the element of ecoGothic space with the protagonist's deconstruction of space, cultural unease, social uprooting and psychological discomfort which is symptomatic of a post-apocalyptic subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study analyzes the representation of the anomaly in Oscar de profundis by Catherine Mavrikakis. This inexplicable event is paradoxically ever-present and completely absent in end of world literature. In particular, we will examine the role of ruins in the portrayal of the post-catastrophe scenario. This paper argues that the anomaly invites the reader to investigate further. However, they will only find ruins which are a constant reminder of what was lost and not an explanation of how these memories were erased from the collective conscience. The concept of depicting the anomaly through ruins will allow us to better understand how end of world literature may propose a critique of contemporary society.

In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 comic novel Good Omens, names act as important signifiers of role and function; the act of naming can be an expression of power so strong and significant that it can literally shape reality. Here, I propose a reading of Good Omens that explores human agency through the process of naming. Focusing on the character of Adam Young, who is himself named after the first human described in Genesis, I examine how Good Omens intersects with the cultural inheritance of the Bible, and specifically with literary and popular cultural engagements with Genesis and Revelation. Approaching the novel primarily via its literary and cinematic intertexts, I position Adam Young as a literary construct who in turn names and shapes other beings out of material from his own mental library. Like his namesake, in Genesis to whom God delegated the naming of the animals, I consider how the Adam of Good Omens uses naming to define the world around him and in doing so, asserts his humanity over his supernatural origins.

The paper analyzes the artistic impact of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot on Vyacheslav Butusov, Vladimir Ponomaryov, and Konstantin Komardin, the creators of an animated music video. The soundtrack for the video is The Idiot, a musical composition by musician and poet Vyacheslav Butusov. The song explores a symbolic night for humanity, populated by weak and destitute individuals who have lost their footing and forgotten the meaning of life. The video (2020) is richer in characters, events, and content than the song (2019). The world depicted in the animation is terrifying, with extraordinary actions and an overwhelming visual sequence. It portrays a world under attack by forces of evil and overrun by cyborg killers, not just in an apocalyptic Saint Petersburg but across the entire planet. The video employs a wellknown narrative motif: a conflict between an author and one of their characters within a work of art. Often, if a character’s fate is secure and fortunate, readers lose interest. Understanding the narrative’s need for engagement, the writer complicates the plot, intensifies the drama, and subjects the character to extreme cruelty. Upon realizing the author’s radical intentions, the character decides to take control of their own destiny. This rebellion may even lead to an attempt on the author’s life. The animated clip illustrates such an incident, where Prince Myshkin, a fictional character, revolts against his creator, the writer Dostoevsky.

Religion and literature have long maintained a parallel, intertwined, and mutually influential relationship. The two novels Chaos Walking 1: The Knife of Never Letting Go and Chaos Walking 2: The Ask and The Answer by Patrick Ness, are set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic world. Through this narrative, the author reflects on pressing societal issues, highlighting that concerns about the future of the world are not only religious but also humanistic. Utilizing an interdisciplinary comparative approach, this paper explores the influence of Christianity on Patrick Ness's novels. By drawing parallels with original myths found in the Book of Genesis and Revelation in the Bible, the study aims to classify and conduct an interdisciplinary evaluation of literary archetypes. The paper will also reference Christian theological thought where necessary to analyze these unique archetypes in greater depth.

This article uses the concepts of "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory," along with their literary tropes, to theorize resistance to the colonial ideals of modernity in Israel and Iraq and to contest the oppressive developmental temporalities associated with this modernity. By analyzing Imīl Ḥabībī's al-Mutashāʾil (The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist , 1974) and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī's Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad , 2013), I show how tropes of conspiracism and conspiratorial thinking are deployed in both of these novels to critique myths of linear progress—often used to justify the Israeli occupation and the U.S. invasion—despite the divergent historical periods and contexts out of which the two texts emerge. In their act of contestation, the novels leverage alternate temporalities in connection to conspiracism, such as the cyclical time of suffering and exploitation, or the apocalyptic time that offers release from said suffering through ending time altogether. Yet in both cases the tropes of conspiracy are ultimately shown to have little explanatory or emancipatory value and high human cost. Both novels thus thematize the analytic and critical limits of conspiracism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Christians across the Mediterranean were experiencing the consequences of the rise of Islam and its expansion. With this challenge to Christian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Christian writers began to ask about the effect of Islamic expansion on their own lives, practices, and worlds to come. In this article, I aim to contextualize two examples of how late ancient Christians questioned their ability to remain Christian in the face of both Islamic captivity and assimilation: 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) and Anastasius of Sinai's (d. ca. 700) Questions and Answers (Questions). I divide this article into three sections. First, I place Christian anxiety over Islamic rule in conversation with Stephanie Camp's concept of the "geography of containment" to explore how some late ancient Christians understood themselves to be geographically and spatially limited by imprisonment or enslavement. I also provide an overview of recent scholarship on Christian responses to early Islamic expansion and anxiety over enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, and assimilation to Islam. Finally, I turn to 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius's Questions to analyze how late ancient Christians turned to monks and patriarchs to find answers regarding the uncertainty of Christian identity under Islamic rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the persistent association between China and the apocalypse in Western political thought. Using the 1979 film The China Syndrome as a starting point, it examines how China is depicted as the specter of global catastrophe: as a society unable to recover from its own nineteenth-century collapse, and the post-apocalyptic form assumed by Europe itself. Through the writings of John Stuart Mill and Niall Ferguson, the paper highlights how the trope of "apocalyptic China" has evolved with shifts in global power, reflecting Western anxieties about its own decline and the perceived inevitability of China's rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce a neurocognitive model as a useful analytical approach to a wide range of representations (written, oral, and/or visual) of a comprehensive and dramatic collapse of the world order (cosmic, social, and/or moral). We gather these variegated representations under the term End Time Narratives (ETN). The widespread reception of ETNs, and their popularity and variability across different periods and cultures, is evidence that these representations continually affect us and hold power over us. Prominent and well-known examples of ETNs are the Jewish and Christian apocalypses from antiquity, which have been widely influential through the centuries. This prevalence raises the question of why ETNs exercise such an influence. The reasons, we suggest, are based on the following hypotheses: (1) that the efficacy and attraction of ETNs can be traced to identifiable cognitive mechanisms, (2) that these underlying mechanisms are linked to certain emotional reactions activated by the particular structure and design of these narratives, and (3) ETNs – as cultural products – seem to be designed and structured to elicit cognitive and emotional responses through effects on the brain. To investigate the possible neurocognitive and psychological mechanisms that are simulated and enacted in recipients by ETNs, we apply the model through an "enactive reading" of a classical ETN, the Book of Revelation 14–16. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the sixteenth-century Afghan mystic Bayazid Ansari and his influence on Afghan history, religious thought and apocalyptic imagination. Topics include how Ansari's legacy challenges conventional historiography on Afghanistan; the use of apocalyptic visions as a framework for understanding Afghan identity; and the parallel drawn between this apocalyptic history and contemporary issues like climate change and colonialism.

Elena Dugan's book, The Apocalypse of the Birds: 1 Enoch and the Jewish Revolt Against Rome, seeks to overturn the prevailing scholarly consensus that the "Animal Apocalypse" (1 En. 85–90) is a unified work, written at the time of the Maccabean revolt or shortly thereafter. She argues that it is two works and that the second part, called by her "The Apocalypse of the Birds," was written in the latter '60s C.E. It does not describe the Maccabean revolt, but the "first Jewish revolt" against Rome and the defeat of Cestius Gallus in 66 C.E. She points out that the latter part of the "Animal Apocalypse" is not attested at Qumran, and she tries to show on literary grounds that the work has two parts. She further points to many alleged deficiencies in the "Maccabean hypothesis" and strengths in her "Roman hypothesis." This review constitutes a detailed rebuttal to Dugan's book by a representative of the "Maccabean hypothesis." It also makes a new and original case for an allusion to the "Animal Apocalypse" in Jubilees 4:19, something Dugan denies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant texts of Enochic Judaism present accounts about the early history of humankind, which use the motifs familiar from the ancient Mesopotamian historiography. The different versions of the Jewish story of the Watchers originate as counter narratives about the antediluvian sages, or apkallus, which are known from the cuneiform literature. The myth of Adapa in Akkadian offers a version of the narrative in which the sage was promoted in heaven to a god-like status, which concept is corroborated with an entry in the cuneiform compendium Tintir and the Chronicle of the Esagila. This tradition also associated Adapa with the immortalized flood survivor. In the form of a counter narrative, the Enochic texts of Judaism attributed the heavenly assumption to Enoch and presented the Watchers as the demonic entities subordinated to him. The fall of the Watchers, the promotion of Enoch, and the primordial battle against evil forces are depicted in the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85–90. A very similar scenario is found in the Chronicle of Esagila, which describes the early history of humankind from the Babylonian perspective. It can be demonstrated that the Animal Apocalypse uses this or a similar cuneiform historiographic source as the basis of its counter narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cet article interroge la manière dont trois récits français contemporains, Propriété privée, de Julia Deck (Minuit, 2019), Les États et empires du Lotissement Grand Siècle de Fanny Taillandier (PUF, 2016), et Fabrication de la guerre civile, de Charles Robinson (Seuil, 2016), travaillent le motif de l'Apocalypse en l'ancrant dans une réflexion aux accents ethnologiques et sociologiques autour des territoires périurbains : cités de banlieue et banlieues résidentielles. Dans ces trois textes, à partir d'espaces pourtant bien différents, se développent des hantises partagées : la destruction des modes de vie collectifs comme du sens de la communauté, le repli sur les intérêts individuels dans une perspective du tous contre tous, jusqu'à l'explosion finale, littérale et métaphorique. Si le monde court à sa fin, c'est en banlieue que celle-ci couve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary French novelists Michel Houellebecq and Yannick Haenel may seem to have little in common, but in fact both are given to making pronouncements about the state of Western civilization, and each has been described as prophetic in this regard. Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Haenel's Tiens ferme ta couronne (2017) are both stories whose protagonists isolate in their apartments, and—from that remove—proceed to, ostensibly, see the world for what it really is. Looming in both novels is a twenty-four-hour-news-cycle culture that serves as the ultimate prophet of doom. Haenel's hero finds in solitude the critical distance from that culture needed to formulate an alternative vision of the world and exorcise the horror just enough to find hope. In Houellebecq's novel, that distance is impossible, as his hero, a self-proclaimed "telemancer," remains obsessed with cable news and as, on a deeper level, Houellebecq's style merges seamlessly with the news cycle's fearmongering logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Par la raideur intransigeante de sa posture tout autant que par la violence hyperbolique de son discours, le « tout dernier Baudelaire » de Belgique rappelle le prophète de malheurs, en sa version ancienne, vétérotestamentaire ; mais il l'annonce aussi, en sa version moderne : comme en témoignent les notes composant le dossier préparatoire de La Belgique déshabillée, il préfigure à certains égards un profil d'écrivain-journaliste qui jouera un rôle de premier plan dans l'espace intellectuel de la Troisième République et en lequel on peut reconnaître l'avatar du prophète de malheur le plus emblématique du dix-neuvième siècle, à savoir le pamphlétaire. C'est ce que nous proposons ici de démontrer, en considérant un fragment à résonance apocalyptique de La Belgique déshabillée en regard de l'introduction de La Fin d'un monde d'Édouard Drumont. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baudelaire, prédisant notre « ruine universelle », déclarait platement: « le monde va finir »; Duras jugeait que la seule politique du monde était qu'il « aille à sa perte »; Houellebecq, titre après titre, poursuit l'examen d'un anéantissement jugé irréversible. Des jérémiades du poète face à la catastrophe imminente aux imprécations du chroniqueur réactionnaire et paniqué face à un présent décadent où se devine déjà la fin, du romancier dystopique en passant par le mélancolique ressassant les révolutions perdues et contemplant un avenir sans horizon qui chante, la littérature regorge de prophètes de malheur. Nombreux et nombreuses sont ceux et celles qui, depuis deux siècles, se sont voulus Cassandre et ont fait de leur œuvre le lieu de prédictions diverses sur l'avenir incertain du monde—et souvent, du même geste, celui de la littérature. C'est à eux que ce numéro de Romanic Review est consacré. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a theoretical exploration that works through a global Indigenous consciousness. As a critically reflexive story work and auto-ethnographic contemplation it begins by confronting a presumed genealogy in a post-apocalyptic world of coloniality through a global Indigenous lens. Extending beyond racially legalised genealogical ancestry, the metaphysics of indigeneity in the context of Western modernity can be re-positioned as a metaphor of past future human-being-ness or person/people-hood. Global Indigeneity and Indigenous metaphysics are framed as a portal and entry beyond coloniality through fugitive sociality and subversive relationality. Confronting the tensions of colonially purist and racially essentialist categories of indigenous identity, lineages of the post-post-apocalyptic world are forming in the enduring social connections embodied in an Indigenous genealogical consciousness of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An apocalyptic imaginary appears so frequently in debates on climate change and the Anthropocene that it might be considered the dominant historical narrative of our time. However, when dealing with apocalypticism, biblical references are not always appropriate. In this article, I argue that we are dealing with two different concepts of apocalypticism, and that the new apocalyptic history is not a negative version of the religious apocalypse. Second, I also argue that the new apocalyptic history nevertheless seems to revolve around the idea of the promise as a specific historical way of binding the past, present and future into a coherent history that, ironically, seems to open up a dialogue with the history of theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barnett responds to three articles that put the thought of Søren Kierkegaard in conversation with modern popular media. He argues that each of these pieces demonstrates that Kierkegaard's criticism of the burgeoning free press remains relevant today, particularly in the areas of journalistic practice, mental health, and political responsibility. At the same time, however, Barnett wonders if the radical nature of the Dane's critique has been fully considered. For Kierkegaard, in other words, it is not just that popular media have flaws in need of correction; it is that the media constitute "the evil principle in the modern world." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes the category of “apocalyptic avant-garde” that is to capture the paradoxical relationship between innovative art and the process of destruction, understood as a common social experience of the first half of the twentieth century, along with the symbolic disintegration of aesthetic and cultural systems of the time. As one of the most important currents of avant-garde literature and art, it was especially catastrophism that captured the experience of radical transformation of the world, whose effect was the transformation of people. Therefore, war was not only the source of the avant-garde vision of the world, but also the determinant of its aesthetics and anthropology, becoming a matrix for texts with a very different ontological status, representing various axiological systems and political options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse which, according to Jacob Taubes, always has to choose one of the two fundamental options: either in favour of the apocalypse ("from above," as in early Schmitt, or "from below," as in Taubes himself), or against it in the katechonic defense against the apocalyptic chaos and destruction (late Schmitt). In Taubes's account, apocalypse is simultaneously revelatory and destructive. By assuming the standpoint of the Last Judgment, it passes an ultimate verdict without appeal over the world – as indeed in Taubes's most famous statement: "I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it come down." It is precisely this form of position assuming the uncompromising perspective of the Last Judgment, which will occupy me in my essay. I want to approach critically the most recent phenomenon of what we may call an absolute judg-mentaility – or, in Nietzschean terms, a "mentality of judgment" – which takes apocalyptic form of a violent negation, exposing the whole "world as it is" to the scorching light of the verdict and leaving no space that would be free from adjudication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Christian mystical tradition approaches the apocalyptic as praxis – a way of living that renounces the world as it is, lives proleptically into a counter-world of God's reign and practices indifferent freedom in the meantime to love God and neighbour. Although concerns about the ethical viability of such a disposition have merit, this essay demonstrates its constructive possibility through recourse to two archives: the writings of Evagrius of Pontus and the witness of Francis of Assisi. By recovering a scriptural distinction between world and creation, and by emphasising the posture of holy indifference, apocalyptic praxis offers a resource and guide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the central metaphysical scene of The Idiot, marked by events from the strange “capture” of a knife lying on the table by Myshkin, which Rogozhin takes away from him twice, becoming increasingly irritated, to the moment when this knife in Rogozhin’s hand falls on the prince — and does not reach him. The central part of this scene contains a direct reference to chapter 10 of the Revelation of John the Theologian, the only chapter in which the prophet has to conceal and not write what he heard. The only key to the hidden becomes the Angel’s oath that “there will be no more time” — and that after the trumpet of the seventh Angel, “the mystery of God will be fulfilled, as He preached in the gospel to His slaves the prophets.” Dostoevsky comments on the words of the Angel directly in the novel’s text in an unusual way for that time. The mystery of the new existence of mankind beyond time was pondered by Dostoevsky back in 1864, in the record “Masha lies on the table...” — a record that underlies the main idea of The Idiot. In the crucial metaphysical scene of the novel, Dostoevsky shows how the mode of being beyond time can be realized already within the limits of “the proximate and the visible in its flowing immediacy.”

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba experienced an unprecedented crisis. This period, officially designated by the euphemism «Special Period», was experienced as a cataclysm by the population. The writers of the island took literary ownership of this apocalypse while the official organs refused to evoke it. The works of the 1990s become the few testimonies of this daily nothingness. By challenging the revolutionary identity, they contribute to forge the collective memory of the radical changes that reshaped the Cuban society.

Methodologically connecting the experience- and interpretation-based aesthetic approach to popular culture (Juraj Malíček) and the pragmatist aesthetics (Richard Shusterman) on one hand and the views of what is called arch-textual thematology (Mariana Čechová) on the other, the paper seeks to observe the ties between arch-texts, in particular the final book of the New Testament — the Book of Revelation, and ‘pop-texts,’ i.e. such popcultural works of art (films, TV series, literary texts, comics etc.), within the frame of which the end of the world images appear in one way or another and which can be labelled with the agnomen ‘pop.’ Various appearances of a reanimation of the apocalypse-theme in various (popcultural) works of art become in the paper, an example-based exposition of the topic, referentially object of interest — from catastrophic films directed by Roland Emmerich and the post-apocalyptic comic book series Y: The Last Man written by Brian K. Vaughan to TV series like, for instance, Ragnarok (from 2020) and literary works like the pre-apocalyptic novel trilogy written by Ben H. Winters or other iconic genre fiction (for example, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road).

It has long been recognized that paratexts – those liminal features that accompany the main text in a book – perform a primary role in interpretation since they mediate the text to the readers. They function like a commentary, trying to influence and guide readers to a better comprehension of the text. At the same time, they are artifacts of reception because in the pre-modern period, paratexts are the product of scribes and reading communities. Thus, by studying paratexts, one can have access to how the text was received and how readers shape the reading practices of subsequent users. The study of paratexts in the field of biblical studies has been a booming area of research, while the study of these features in the so-called apocryphal literature is only in its dawn. This article intends to help to remedy the situation by studying the titles of the 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John. Since this text exerted a huge amount of influence in shaping the eschatological imagination of many Christians in Late Antiquity and given the scarce amount of information that we have on its reception, studying the paratexts of the manuscripts – titles, specifically – is the safest bet to recover its reception/interpretation and the reading practices of its readers. Based on the study of 1 Apocr. Apoc. John’s titles, this article concludes that (1) 1 Apocr. Apoc. John was read as an apocalypse; that is, readers thought that the text mediated hitherto unknown divine knowledge; (2) readers of 1 Apocr. Apoc. John believed that it was an authentic work of John the apostle and thus authoritative and true; (3) readers were guided to navigate 1 Apocr. Apoc. John as dealing primarily with classical eschatological topoi: the antichrist, the second coming, and the end of the world.

This paper is an attempt to highlight the rebellion against involuntary conformity and the hive mind in Stephen King's apocalyptic horror novel Cell. A mysterious Pulse is broadcast over the global cell phone network and those who use the phones become vicious zombie-like beings, killing each other and destroying everything in their field of view. The "phoners" or "phone-crazies" involuntarily conform to the new norms and mimic the behaviour of birds. They flock together establishing telepathic communication among themselves. They possess a group mind or a hive mind which wipes out individuality and autonomy and they function as complementary units of a single brain. The hero Clayton Riddell and his team of survivors brave the odds and destroy a flock of phoners. This automatically makes them outcasts and they are targeted by the phoners to be executed. Clay teams up with other flock-killers and daringly uses the very same cell phone which led them to trouble, to eliminate the trouble, breaking the telepathic connection, thereby, uncaging humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages with two novels about European memory, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973 in French, English trans. Norman Shapiro, 2011 best-seller after being recommended by Marine le Pen) and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2020 in Bulgarian, English trans. Angela Rodel, 2023 winner of the International Booker Prize). The novels dramatize the sense of European crisis as the choice of “a Europe of the past” driven by “a critical deficit of future,” but they differ fundamentally in the ways they portray “Europe” and the possible ways out of its current predicament. While Time Shelter concerns itself with the European Union’s legitimacy crisis, exacerbated by the proliferation of neonationalisms that it understands through the conceit of an epidemic of memory disorders, The Camp of the Saints imagines a migratory apocalypse leading to the end of the West. The essay argues that Raspail’s and Gospodinov’s novels help readers parse out the dangers of myths about national and racial communities, shedding light on the ideological uses of memory in competing versions of the past, hence of Europe’s future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NadeemAslam's The Blind Man's Garden(2013) is a replica of the political chaos which prevails in the South Asian region in the wake of 9/11. The present research aims at exploring the conflict of ideas manifested through binary oppositions in the novel in the light of Jaques Derrida's theory of deconstruction. Warring ideologies bring forth the conflict between two major entities of the torturers and the sufferers, former are the Americans and warlords, while Pakistanis and Afghanis make the latter group in The Blind Man's Garden. The analysis of binary oppositions reveals that the binary traits ultimately manifest a constant conflict beyond the apparent opposition of politically powerful groups, i.e., the USA, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The conflict lies between the freedom and imprisonment, humanity and bestiality, world of nature and the world of man, tolerance and intolerance, tradition and modernity etc. The research amplifies Nadeem Aslam'sprovocation for the need of humanity to be inculcated for the amelioration of the apocalyptic occurrencesin the South Asian region involving innocent lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article dissects the entanglement of the pandemic fear with anthropogenic destruction in the futuristic novum London creates in his SF novella The Scarlet Plague. By situating the story in its historical and cultural context, the article examines the reliability of Granser's narration of his post-pandemic memory and observes the multi-faceted unsustainability of America at the turn of the 20th century. The article then argues that London actually laments the loss of the transcendental lifestyle based on self-reliance and simplicity, in the hope of reviving it as the remedy both for curing his contemporary social ills and for the world-rebuilding after a possible apocalypse in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to explore the concept of world as it has been formulated in some Western apocalyptic narratives. I will tackle the notion of world from what Taubes has defined as a keyword of apocalypticism: alienness or exile. Although barely explored, the notion of alienness runs through the main Western philosophic-political traditions, from ancient Gnosticism to modern revolutionary movements, and still echoes today as the feeling of estrangement in an ecologically devastated earth. However, far from being a unified and all-encompassing concept, alienness is two-sided. On the one hand, it expresses the Gnostics' hatred of the world as well as modern apocalyptic nihilism based on a dualistic ontology that completely separates man from the world; on the other hand, it represents a certain Stimmung that is also typical of the apocalypse but, unlike the first, signals the need for an ontological restructuring between man and the world. Against the first narrative, which has been majoritarian in Western metaphysics, I will explore the posthumous work of the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino The End of the World as a way to rearticulate the relationship between the man and the world on a non-dualistic metaphysical basis. Lastly, I will frame the feeling of alienness inside our current ecological catastrophe, showing that while a Gnostic understanding grounds the hatred toward the world and nature, the second one provides, on the contrary, a broader view of being-in-the-world that asks for a community reunion with the surrounding nature and the fellow nonhuman beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]