Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature : The Hope for Planetary Salvation - William Franke

Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature

The Hope for Planetary Salvation

By: William Franke

Hardcover | 17 February 2025

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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.

Industry 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, Delhi

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