While I found myself getting caught up in Frank Kermode’s “Sense of an Ending,” and honestly struggling to make sense of some of it, I strongly connected to Elizabeth Rosen’s “Introduction.”
What I connected to most heavily based on these articles was the idea of interpretation in art of the apocalypse – especially Rosen’s idea of the “neo-apocalyptic,” and how unlike the typical Apocalyptic belief, it is marked by a kind of stark ending, with no hope given. This idea, while heavily marked in the writing Rosen herself refers to, harks back to a book I am reading called Life As We Know It, a young-adult-based novel (first in a trilogy) that was written in the early 2000’s. It features an apocalyptic story when a scheduled meteor shower goes awry, knocking the moon closer into orbit with the Earth – what happens, catastrophically, is marked by science. The tides flood, and cities and countries are drowned under due to tides and gravitational pull. This novel, marked with a combination of the scientific non-moral neoapocalypse, considers the ideas of more religious based reasoning, and now I want to analyze the book more thoroughly for its relevance in this area.
What I am most curious of, based on the study (and other studies I have heard of), that while America is becoming less of an organized-religion fan, is anything but secular on the whole, and yet how the combination of more “sci-fi” apocalyptic ideas mix with the “older” more moralist ones.
I too found Rosen’s discussion of the “neo-apocalyptic” fascinating. I grew up reading a fair amount of postmodern literature, and as such became well-acquainted with the bleaker than bleak, no-hope endings that its authors offered me. I think an interesting point of discussion is how and why did the postmodernists create such hopeless endings? What forces drew them to that? Surely, there are numerous historical factors, a big one being World War II and the invention and dropping of the nuclear bomb were two big factors, but there had to be scores of other ones.