UCL Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature

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Apocalypse Literature

Course code: CLITG006
Credits: 30

Course description
Visions of the end of the world are central to contemporary literature and film, and constitute a pervasive influence on philosophy, political theory, and popular culture. This course traces the historical origins of apocalypse fiction to biblical models and pursues the development of the genre over nearly two centuries, across national and linguistic boundaries. We will explore the influence of different cultural codes, from late Romanticism to Postmodernism, and the importance of social and political motivations, including efforts to prevent nuclear and environmental apocalypse. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the course will draw from sociology and cultural history, and will stress the continuity between religious and secular philosophies of history. Psychology, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis will provide important research contexts.

Course tutor: Dr Florian Mussgnug

Assessment: one 5.000 word essay

Research Questions

(a) What are the historical origins and conditions of apocalypse fiction?

(b) How does the genre evolve in 19th and 20th Century popular fiction?

(c) What is the role of satirical subversion?

(d) How is [male] gender identity formulated?

(e) How important are representations of social space and social identity?

(f) Which theories explain the concerns of apocalypse narratives?

Course Syllabus

W1: Origins of the Modern Apocalyptic

Biblical Sources: Ezekiel, Daniel, Mark, Revelation of John

W2: Romanticism and the Apocalyptic Sublime I

Jean-Baptiste Cousin De Grainville: Le Dernier Homme (1805)

W3: Romanticism and the Apocalyptic Sublime II

Lord Byron: Darkness (1816)

Mary Shelley The Last Man (1826)

W4: Popular Fiction, Romance and the Fin de-Siècle I

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)

W5: Popular Fiction, Romance and the Fin-de-Siècle II

M.P. Shiel: The Purple Cloud (1901)

READING WEEK

W6: Cold War Fictions I: Apocalypse and Utopia

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949)

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)

Arno Schmidt, Schwarze Spiegel (1951)

W7: Cold War Fictions II: The End of Future

Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957)

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7 (1959)

Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove (1964)

W8: Cold War Fictions III: Satire

Bernard Malamud, God's Grace (1982)

Kurt Vonnegut: Galapagos (1985)

Günter Grass: Die Rättin (1986)

W9: Environmental Apocalypse

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009)

W10: After the Millennium: A New Sublime?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Discussion of student projects

Bibliography

Please note: Primary texts are listed above and may be read in any available edition. Separate bibliographies for each literary text will be provided to students. Secondary reading for this course includes:

Abrahams, M.H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York: Norton, 1971.

Ahearn, Edward J., Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Alkon, Paul K., Origins of Futuristic Fiction, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

---. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology [1994], London: Routledge, 2002.

Baldick, Chris, In Frakenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Barkun, Michael, Disaster and the Millennium [1974], new edition, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

---. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Beaumont, Matthew, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.

Berger, James, After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Bernstein, Michael André, Forgone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age [1985], second ed. with new preface by the author, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

---. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Broderick, Damien, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, London: Routledge, 1995.

Bull, Malcolm (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995.

Burdon, Christopher, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700-1834, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Cohn, Norman, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, London: Yale University Press, 1993.

Collins, Adela Yarbro, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984.

Collins, John J., The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity, New York, Crossroad, 1984.

Cook, David, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

Daly, Nicholas, Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Dellamora, Richard, Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

---. (ed.), Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Dewey, Joseph, In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1990.

Dowling, David, Fictions of Nuclear Disaster, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.

Edkins, Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return, transl. Willard R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Emmerson, Richard K., and Bernard McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Ferns, Chris, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.

Fiddes, Paul S., The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Friedlander, Saul, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx, and Eugene Skolnikoff (eds), Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.

Frykholm, May Johnson, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

Goldsmith, Steven, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

James, Edward and Farah Mendleson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005.

Kaplan, Ann E., Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Keller, Catherine, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Kerrigan, John, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.

Krah, Hans, Weltuntergangsszenarien und Zukunftsentwürfe: Narrationen vom “Ende” in Literatur und Film 1945-1990, Kiel: Ludwig, 2004.

LaCapra Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Lefanu, Sarah, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, London: Women’s Press, 1988.

Leigh, David J., Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Luckhurst, Roger, Science Fiction, London: Polity, 2005.

---. The Trauma Question, London and New York: Routledge, 2008

Maier, Harry O., Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.

Matthew, Robert, Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a Changing Society, London: Routledge, 1889.

Newport, Kenneth G.C., and Crawford Gribben (eds), Expecting the End: Contemporary Millennialism in Social and Historical Context, Baylor: Baylor University Press, 2006.

O’Leary, Stephen D., Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Parrinder, Patrick, Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

Parrinder, Patrick (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Quinby, Lee, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

---. Millennial Seduction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Rabkin, E.S. (ed.) The End of the World, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Reeves, Marjorie and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Roberts, Adam, The History of Science Ficton, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmilan, 2005.

Roe, Nicholas (ed), Romanticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Seed, David (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

Sprengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte [1917/1922], München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972.

Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Politics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

---. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.

Wagar, Warren W., Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Wheeler, Michael, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Williamson, Arthur H., Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World, Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger, 2008.

Wolmark, Jenny, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism, New York and London: Harvester Press, 1994.

Zizek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times, Lodon and New York: Verso, 2010.