This semester we will explore the relationship between creation and destruction through texts that generate their creative force from the ashes. Apocalypse includes a spectrum of connotations ranging from individual or personal to global or universal. The texts we will read this semester can be categorized according to the scope of the apocalypse that they envision and the means that are appropriate to that scope. In the cases of theological and biological apocalypse, the human world is threatened by something inhuman. Technology, on the other hand, confronts us with the inhuman that is at the heart of humanity.
Ideology presents an even more complicated case.
As the child perpetuates the parent's existence into the future, the work of art survives the artist. The problem of survival has special urgency in apocalyptic art.