William Franke

Pandemics and Apocalypse

Posted by on Sunday, September 29, 2024 in News.

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation book cover

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Table of ContentsBook DescriptionCritics’ Reviews

1st Edition

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World LiteratureThe Hope for Planetary Salvation

By William FrankeCopyright 2025

This book rereads classical narratives of plague from the Bible (Exodus) and classical antiquity, both Greek (Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles) and Roman (Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid), through the Middle Ages (Boccaccio) and Modernity (Defoe, Manzoni, Artaud, Camus) as a basis for contemplating the significance of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. It concerns how we are to confront future pandemics and other inextricably related crises, notably those of an ecological nature. Responses to Covid-19 typically set everything on defeating this “enemy,” but actually we cannot eliminate viruses without eliminating ourselves. We need to see the pandemic as revealing us to ourselves in our inherently vulnerable condition as a first step to admitting the infinite openness to one another and to our Ground—physical and metaphysical—that alone can save our world by engendering a different attitude, open and engaged, to one another and to the Earth as sources of our collective life.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

 

1. Prologue and Acknowledgments

 

Part I. Plague Literature

 

2. The Engendering of Hope from Human Helplessness

3. Myth, History, Fiction, and the Limits of Representation

4. The Mystery of the Supernatural at the Limit of Naturalism

5. From Ambiguity of Causes to Moral Certitude through Existential Conversion

6. Securing Control versus Acknowledging Grace and Vulnerability

7. Hope in a Negative Theological and Apocalyptic-Fictive Register of Wholeness

8. Theology of Hope as Negative Theology—Moltmann and Bloch

9. Partial Action Combined with Hope in Wholeness

10. Othering Hope: Postmodern, Extra-European, and Indigenous Perspectives

11. The Vision of the Whole versus Parceled Perception

 

Part II. Political Ecology

 

12. The Web of Connections: Integral Ecology, Culture, and Society

13. Pandemics and Environmental Apocalypse: Their Common Causes

14. Progressive versus Apocalyptic Perspectives on Pandemics

15. Hope in Civil Society between Private and Public

16. From Social to Cosmic Consciousness: Latour’s Apocalyptic Reading of the Coronavirus Crisis

17. Relativizing Scientific “Truth”

18. Truth and Transcendence versus Technique

19. Negative Theology of the Earth According to Bruno Latour

 

Part III. Apocalyptic Hope

 

20. Eschatology, Incarnation, Kenosis

21. Indigenous Salvation as Guide

22. From “Theology of Hope” to “Theology of the Earth”

23. Science, Faith, and Social Belief—Not Strictly Separable

24. Control and Excess in Dissembling the Unspeakable

25. Parallel Perspectives and the Novel

26. A Semiotic Model of Contagion—Viral Informatics

27. Hoping Against Hope. From Reason to Religion, or Spiritualizing Rationality

28. Conclusion: Hope-fail Enactment of Eternity

 

29. Coda: Plague and War

30. Appendix: Abstracts of Selected Plague Narratives in Literature, Classical to Modern

Bibliography

 

Index

Critics’ Reviews

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature is not just a scholarly survey but a constructive approach that gives itself the task to wrest possibilities of an eschatological hope from the night of apocalyptic despair. Written at the wake of the recent pandemics, the work deploys negative theology at its most creative possibility: it consists of an infinite affirmation of the unconditioned which nevertheless remains irreducibly ineffable. Franke brings together, without reducing their disparate character, the agonal traits of the end and the beginning, of despair and hope, of the abyss of the night and the first morning glow; and he shows, through rigorous exegesis of some of the very difficult texts, that perhaps the only task that is worthy today is to see the possibility of the radical, incalculable alterity that our history never ceases exposing us to. Dense, profound, thought-provoking…

-Prof. Saitya Brata Das, Associate Professor, JNU, India

William Franke’s history of pandemic literature, from the ancient world to COVID, helps us understand what we are all still wondering about: what exactly happened to the us in 2020? The pandemic made us all more aware of the contingency of order, and the religious significance of this awarness, while overlooked by many, is for Franke the big take away. An eye-opener.

–Prof. Sean J. McGrath, Professor, Memorial University, Canada

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