{"id":4280,"date":"2024-09-29T19:42:11","date_gmt":"2024-09-30T00:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/williamfranke\/?p=4280"},"modified":"2026-02-26T18:46:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T23:46:55","slug":"pandemics-and-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/williamfranke\/2024\/09\/pandemics-and-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Pandemics and Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\"Pandemics<\/a><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
\n
\n

COMING SOON<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
<\/i>Table of Contents<\/a><\/i>Book Description<\/a><\/i>Critics’ Reviews<\/a><\/div>\n
\n

1st Edition<\/p>\n

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World LiteratureThe Hope for Planetary Salvation<\/h1>\n
By\u00a0William Franke<\/a>Copyright 2025<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

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 \u201cenemy,\u201d 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\u2014physical and metaphysical\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Table of Contents<\/h2>\n

List of Illustrations<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Prologue and Acknowledgments<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Part I. Plague Literature<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

2. The Engendering of Hope from Human Helplessness<\/p>\n

3. Myth, History, Fiction, and the Limits of Representation<\/p>\n

4. The Mystery of the Supernatural at the Limit of Naturalism<\/p>\n

5. From Ambiguity of Causes to Moral Certitude through Existential Conversion<\/p>\n

6. Securing Control versus Acknowledging Grace and Vulnerability<\/p>\n

7. Hope in a Negative Theological and Apocalyptic-Fictive Register of Wholeness<\/p>\n

8. Theology of Hope as Negative Theology\u2014Moltmann and Bloch<\/p>\n

9. Partial Action Combined with Hope in Wholeness<\/p>\n

10. Othering Hope: Postmodern, Extra-European, and Indigenous Perspectives<\/p>\n

11. The Vision of the Whole versus Parceled Perception<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Part II. Political Ecology<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

12. The Web of Connections: Integral Ecology, Culture, and Society<\/p>\n

13. Pandemics and Environmental Apocalypse: Their Common Causes<\/p>\n

14. Progressive versus Apocalyptic Perspectives on Pandemics<\/p>\n

15. Hope in Civil Society between Private and Public<\/p>\n

16. From Social to Cosmic Consciousness: Latour\u2019s Apocalyptic Reading of the Coronavirus Crisis<\/p>\n

17. Relativizing Scientific \u201cTruth\u201d<\/p>\n

18. Truth and Transcendence versus Technique<\/p>\n

19. Negative Theology of the Earth According to Bruno Latour<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Part III. Apocalyptic Hope<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

20. Eschatology, Incarnation, Kenosis<\/p>\n

21. Indigenous Salvation as Guide<\/p>\n

22. From \u201cTheology of Hope\u201d to \u201cTheology of the Earth\u201d<\/p>\n

23. Science, Faith, and Social Belief\u2014Not Strictly Separable<\/p>\n

24. Control and Excess in Dissembling the Unspeakable<\/p>\n

25. Parallel Perspectives and the Novel<\/p>\n

26. A Semiotic Model of Contagion\u2014Viral Informatics<\/p>\n

27. Hoping Against Hope. From Reason to Religion, or Spiritualizing Rationality<\/p>\n

28. Conclusion: Hope-fail Enactment of Eternity<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

29. Coda: Plague and War<\/p>\n

30. Appendix: Abstracts of Selected Plague Narratives in Literature, Classical to Modern<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Index<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Critics’ Reviews<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature\u00a0<\/i>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\u2026<\/p>\n

-Prof. Saitya Brata Das,\u00a0<\/b>Associate Professor<\/i>, JNU,\u00a0India<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

–Prof.\u00a0Sean J. McGrath<\/b>,\u00a0Professor<\/i>, Memorial University, Canada<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

William Franke meditates on the currently constitutive crisis of human materiality, as it manifests in the collective imbalance symptomatized by an epidemic. and crashes in on every shoreline of our ecological future. In his distinctive reading of the unspeakability of our circumstance through apophasis, and the intensity of the crisis through apokalypsis, fresh insight breaks through for more spirited collective response.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u2013Prof. Catherine Keller<\/strong>, G.T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew Theological School, USA<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/section>\n