HSY2600

Pursuing the millennium: dissent, apocalypse and the golden age

Peter Howard

8 points - Two lectures and one tutorial per week - Second semester - Clayton

Objectives Students successfully completing this subject should have gained a sound knowledge of the complex relationship of apocalyptic thought to religious, social and political change, and therefore to dissent and revolution, between 100 and 2000 CE. They ought also to have a grasp of the relationship of apocalyptic thought to utopianism as well as to historical understandings of time and history.

Synopsis This subject explores, in a variety of historical contexts from the first to the twentieth centuries, the fascination of the belief - recently manifested at Waco (1993), Tokyo (1995), Oklahoma City (1995) Heaven's Fate cult (1997) - that the end of the world is at hand and that in its wake will appear the inexhaustively fertile world of the Golden Age. The subject will investigate the origins of such millenarian thought in the first-century Eastern Mediterranean world and the Apocalypse of John, before surveying how and why the images therein evoked caught not only the medieval imagination(as seen in both literature and art) but also moderns like Karl Marx, Francis Fukuyama and Jacques Derrida, and representations in media and film. Special attention will be given to charting the complex relation of apocalyptic traditions to religious, social and political change, and therefore to dissent and revolution. The subject will conclude with contemporary concepts of ecology, time and change and the promise of the modern metropolis.

Assessment Essay writing exercise (400 words): 5% - Presentation and essay (1200 words): 25% - Two tutorial reports (300 words each): 10% - Essay (1800 words): 35% - Test (2 hours): 25% - Optional 2000-word essay in place of test.

Recommended texts

The Apocalypse of John (New Revised Standard Version is recommended)
Cohn N The pursuit of the millennium OUP, 1970
O'Leary S D Arguing the Apocalypse: A theory of millennial rhetoric OUP, 1994
Olsen T Millennialism, utopianism and progress U Toronto P, 1981
Thompson D The end of time Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996

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