Apocalypse Culture (Brottman) (0003) 11:45-1:00 MTWR BH 005
There are those who believe that the end of the world will come on
the ninth day of the ninth month of 1999; for others, the world will
end on the first day of the year 2001. Even for those whose beliefs
are not so definitive or so foreboding, it is clear that we are
approaching a point of great symbolic importance in the western
astrological, astronomical, and religious calendars. "Apocalypse
culture" is a branch of cultural analysis that looks at texts,
movies, pictures, television programs, theories, real-life events and
other cultural manifestations in order to discover why such motifs
are associated so closely with the fin de siècle-and, more
significantly, with the apocalypse. All the texts have one thing in
common: they embody the prevailing gestalt; they can all be seen as
symptoms of what Adam Parfrey describes as "the dire and
phantasmogoric cast of contemporary events"; they all
contain "components of decay"; they are "the terminal documents of
the 20th century."