Architectures of the Apocalypse
The Romance Department is pleased to celebrate the successful conclusion of Professor Irit Kleiman’s conference on “Architectures of the Apocalypse.”
Apocalypse contains both end and beginning, annihilation and exaltation. The apocalyptic promises death and destruction, yes, but also knowledge and transformation. The apocalypse is above all a threshold. As an object of inquiry, apocalypse calls for the examination of perspective and perception, as much as of semiotics and the historical.
Many readers’ associations with the word apocalypse will be to the New Testament Book of Revelation. Others might think first of more recent (post-1945) literary and cinematic imaginings of the dystopian. For others still, plagues, the fall of empires, and climate emergencies will come to the fore. The character of these apocalyptic cataclysms and revelations varies not only according to the specificities of history, religion and culture; epoch or technology; genre or medium; but also in the nature of the destruction and revelations promised.
It is clear that we are living through yet another historical moment in which the concept of apocalypse has become both pressing and omnipresent. How can we take the word apocalypse itself as an invitation to transcend the obvious, and access new knowledge and new ways of knowing? Do human beings need some kind of absolute limit, an absolute that makes contingent structures possible? Nearly every religion’s imagining of time’s shape contains some form of projected ending. Contemporary astrophysics delivers its own version of the ends and beginnings of the cosmos, on equally grand scale.
This multi-day conference/workshop brought together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines to answer these questions and examine the notion of “apocalypse.”