Artist Lecture Spring #5: Apocalyptic Writings

Today I went to a lecture that was about apocalyptic writings. There were four questions that the lecturer wanted us to discuss. Why is the end of world such a popular topic in American literature? How might this relate to America’s sense of its own newness and its sense of providential destiny? What causes do these authors imagine might bring about the end of the world? Is the end of the world a welcome event for American authors?

The apocalypse is popular in American Literature for a couple of reasons. Most of these apocalyptic stories emerge during times of upheaval, hence the reason that they are so popular right now. In places such as England, there is already a call for the novel, a very popular notion that holds a tradition in places like that.

We looked at artists such as Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire “Destruction,” 1836. It was the last of four in a series. He believed that the American Empire would be destroyed as the Roman Empire had years before. Another one I really enjoyed was “The Last American” by John James Mitchell. By 1902 we had started to get other reasons as to why the world was going to end.

Apocalypse is a good way to show class, gender, etc. through a text. On a literary stand point the fast burn apocalypse works better then the soft apocalypse. The fast ones are more hopeful and the slow ones are more depressing and more like a cautionary tale. The fast endings tend to critique society, leaving to recover and start over. It is defiantly more exciting then the slow apocalypse where people tend to die and a lot of the times it is because of some type of sickness. In the 1950’s it was considered irresponsible for a person to think of any other ending of the world besides a nuclear war. It is scarier now because we don’t know where the threat is coming from. Apocalypses work very well in film.