Grab-bag

An interesting grab bag of links and thoughts from a morning of blog surfing:Interesting quote about authorship as the “unfolding action of a discourse” posted by Clancy Ratliff in an abstract she’s submitting to a conference:

Lunsford (1999) takes up these critiques of authorship and calls for new ways of thinking “a view of agency as residing in what Susan West defines as the “unfolding action of a discourse; in the knowing and telling of the attentive rhetor/responder rather than in static original ideas” (as cited in Lunsford, 1999, p. 185-186). Lunsford argues for “owning up” rather than owning, agency in “answerability,” and a view of self as always in relation to others.This presenter will bring these ideas to bear on weblogging communities and practices.

Dana Boyd posts about a young Live Journal user being visited by the secret service after posting a satirical anti-Bush post. anniesj, the LJ user posts a very detailed a thoughtful description of the incident on her journal page.It appears that she was dobbed into the FBI by another Live Journal user. So much for the solidarity of the blogsphere.Boyd goes on to note the difficulties in notions such as sousveillance (surveillance from below):

People often ask me why i’m opposed to sousveillance. I believe that giving everyone the right to surveillance will not challenge those in power who have such ability. I believe that it will legitimize them. Furthermore, i believe that people will use the power of surveillance to maintain the status quo. Worse, i believe that it will be used to create more hate, distrust and fear. Sousveillance in the hands of the masses will not be used to challenge authority because most people believe in the legitimacy of that authority, whether it be corporations or the government.

Good post on the need for “conceptual clarification” in fields like education by Sebastian Fiedler at seblogging:

In my humble opinion fields that deal with human affairs like education, often benefit more from thorough conceptual analysis than empirical studies, especially if the latter are simply trying to simulate natural science methodology.

The push for empirical evaluation of teaching and learning seems to be matched by what Fiedler would call foggy concepts. The classic case is the deep versus surface learning model that is supposedly validated by years of study. Yet I think if you analyse a lot of the stuff based on this concept it translates to nothing more than foggy good versus foggy bad learning.If you look at the basic attributes of the model as presented in tables like this one you will see that it is a model which is neither conceptually cohesive or pedagogically useful. The attributes on both sides of the table move dramatically from strategic learning choices (memorisation of facts/looking for patterns) to underlying attitudes (see little relevance in course/becoming interested in course). It’s a psychological model that has no material basis and doesn’t stop to ask what else might be going on in student’s lives that cause them to see/look for relevance/interest in their courses (for example!)Stephen Downes points to this brilliant journalism education project. I-elect is an integrated web/print/broadcast election coverage project put together by the journalism students at University of Illinois. What makes it particularly interesting is that the election is covered from the point of view of college students and it includes a survey commissioned by the team.

I-ELECT is a multimedia political reporting project in conjunction with the University of Illinois College of Communications. The project was undertaken by students in a journalism class and has been overseen by Department of Journalism faculty.The group of students organized in a newsroom to produce print, online and broadcast products. The group also conducted a scientific survey to drive its reporting. The idea behind the project for students practicing journalism convergence, a skill that is becoming more necessary by the day. The Daily Illini, WPGU-FM 107.1, WILL-AM 580 and others have assisted with the project.

This seems to me to be a really interesting journalism education project because it involves- practical implementation of skills learned- it is student self directed- the reporting is to a specific audience- it is produced through multimedia- it uses a range of different journalism tools from poll data to human interest stories- it aims to have real-time impact through distribution in the university community- it could then become a model for reflective self evaluation and theory/practice discussions

Cold War Presidential narratives

Two articles in the latest edition of Foreign Policy make essentially the same point: in spite of the rhetoric of the post-September 11 brave new world, the Bush administration is essentially driven by a cold war agenda and more importantly, cold war strategy. This is obviously a point that has been made before but it is made well in these articles. Firstly editor Moisés Naím:

Disappointments in Iraq also dealt a blow to a worldview that, for all its references to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as an epochal event, still hearkens back to the Cold War. Consider the two primary responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: Instead of concentrating all energies and resources to fight the strange, stealthy, and stateless network that perpetrated the attacks, the United States launched military assaults against two nation-states. First, it rightly attacked Afghanistan, a country whose government had been the subject of a friendly takeover by such networks. The second was Iraq, a country with a standing army and a dictator evocative of the Cold War era. Iraq offered a target more suited to the mindset of U.S. leaders and military capabilities than the more complicated terrorist networks operating inside powerful states, including the United States itself.

In other words, facing the prospect of waging a new kind of war against a new kind of opponent, the Bush administration chose instead to fight a familiar enemy whose face and address it knew. Yet U.S. troops quickly found themselves fighting not enemy soldiers but what Pentagon lawyers now call “unlawful combatants”—fighters with nationalities as fuzzy as they are irrelevant to determining their leaders, their chains of command, their loyalty, and their lethal willingness to die for their cause.

So much for the certitudes and heroic assumptions about how the United States should deal with the world, as outlined in the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice may have claimed that “September 11 clarified the threats you face in the post-Cold War era.” But while September 11 might have clarified post-Cold War threats, revelations about high-level decision making regarding the war on Iraq suggest that the Cold War instincts that shaped U.S. national security strategy survived the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let’s now hope that they find their final resting place under the rubble of Iraq.

In a much longer piece Melvyn P. Leffler argues that “as controversial as George W. Bush’s policies have been, they are not as radical a departure from his predecessors as both critics and supporters proclaim. Instead, the real weaknesses of the president’s foreign policy lie in its contradictions.” He looks at Bush “innovations” such as preemption and argues that “the preemptive and unilateral use of U.S. military power was widely perceived as necessary prior to Bush’s election, even by those possessing internationalist inclinations. What Bush did after September 11 was translate an option into a national doctrine.”

Leffler’s argument is slightly different to Naim’s although their conclusions are the same. He argues that post September 11 Bush and co moved from a realist model of foreign policy that was about competitive peer states to a rhetorically driven model that ultimately fell back on cold war strategy.

In times of crisis, U.S. political leaders have long asserted values and ideals to evoke public support for the mobilization of power. But this shift in language was more than mere rhetoric. The terrorist attacks against New York and Washington transformed the Bush administration’s sense of danger and impelled offensive strategies. Prior to September 11, the neocons in the administration paid scant attention to terrorism. The emphasis was on preventing the rise of peer competitors, such as China or a resurgent Russia, that could one day challenge U.S. dominance. And though the Bush team plotted regime change in Iraq, they had not committed to a full-scale invasion and nation-building project. September 11 “produced an acute sense of our vulnerability,” said Rice. “The coalition did not act in Iraq,” explained Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]; we acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light—through the prism of our experience on 9/11.” Having failed to foresee and prevent a terrorist attack prior to September 11, the administration’s threshold for risk was dramatically lowered, its temptation to use force considerably heightened.

This conflation of both cold war rhetoric and strategy in response to present dangers is seen, Leffler believes, in the rhetorical production of Bush as Reagan’s heir:

Bush and his advisors love to identify themselves with Reagan. Bush, like Reagan, says Rumsfeld, “has not shied from calling evil by its name….” Nor has he been shy about “declaring his intention to defeat its latest incarnation—terrorism.” Moral clarity and military power, Bush believes, emboldened Reagan and enabled him to wrest the initiative from the Kremlin, liberate Eastern Europe, and win the Cold War.

However Leffler, professor of American history at the University of Virginia and a specialist in cold war history, sees this equation differently. He notes that in spite of media and neo-con hype most scholars do not agree that Reagan’s arms buildup and rhetorical pronouncements brought victory in the Cold War.

In fact, the most thoughtful accounts of Reagan’s diplomacy stress that what really mattered was his surprising ability to change course, envision a world without nuclear arms, and deal realistically with a new Soviet leader. And most accounts of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s diplomacy suggest that he was motivated by a desire to reform Communism, reshape Soviet society, and revive its economy, rather than intimidated by U.S. military power. Gorbachev was inspired not by U.S. democratic capitalism but by European social democracy, not by the self-referential ideological fervor of U.S. neoconservatives, but by the careful, thoughtful, tedious work of human rights activists and other nongovernmental organizations.

Bush and his advisors seek to construct a narrative about the end of the Cold War that exalts moral clarity and glorifies the utility of military power. Moral clarity doubtless helps a democratic, pluralistic society like the United States reconcile its differences and conduct policy. Military power, properly configured and effectively deployed, chastens and deters adversaries. But this mindset can lead to arrogance and abuse of power. To be effective, moral clarity and military power must be harnessed to a careful calculation of interest and a shrewd understanding of the adversary. Only when ends are reconciled with means can moral clarity and military power add up to a winning strategy.

In terms of my project what is interesting about all this is the constant interaction between:

– cold war rhetoric
– war on terror rhetoric
– narratives of Bush as leader
– narratives of Reagan as leader

Although these articles do not mention it explicitly the religious/apocalyptic underpinnings of these narratives are critical to their production. But I find it interesting to look at it, as these writers do, purely in political terms for a change. I am beginning to identify three interlocking yet distinct narratives which need tracing:

– the political apocalypse
– the religious apocalypse
– the popular culture apocalypse

These narratives leak into each other constantly but are none the less uniquely identifiable. The political apocalypse of Paul Wolfowitz is different from the religious apocalypse of Jerry Falwell and they are both different from the pop culture apocalypses of X-files fans and Kennedy assassination aficionados. Part of my project is to identify both the unique elements of each of these variations and then to also analyse their interactions as a “meta myth”.

This comes back to my notion of myth as a set of interconnected narrative nodes.

Blogging as associative thinking

Clancy Ratliff makes a succinct response to some of the issues raised in the Kairosnews discussion I mentioned yesterday:

If your objective is to create a learning community, weblogs can help you achieve it by giving students a space to share their writing with other students in the class, who have the opportunity to leave comments under their classmates’ posts. Weblogs are also a powerful tool for teaching students about writing for an audience, as they are public, and they reach an audience of not only the teacher and the other students in the class, but also readers outside the class who leave comments.

If your objective is to help students synthesize information and make connections through writing, weblogs can help you meet this objective by allowing students to take advantage of the Web. Weblog software makes it easy for students to create content for the Web without knowing much HTML, find online articles related to topics discussed in class, and share them easily with other students. In my experience, blogging encourages associative thinking.

She also has a good list of resource papers and some questions for further discussion such as the relative advantages of having students keep individual blogs v. one community blog for the class, issues of privacy and issues of forced (assessed) versus optional blogging.

Blogs as process not solution

I’ve been following the interesting comments on a post over at kairosnews about “falling out of love with blogging“.

I have discovered that my honeymoon with blogs is over, mostly because there really is no room for spirited interaction between my students and myself in the blogs. Yes, I can require that they respond to another person’s blog, but one student said that, compared to a discussion forum, leaving responses to blogs felt more like leaving a note for someone who is out. The discussion forum, she said, felt more like an ongoing conversation which was more fun.

It generated quite a bit of discussion with people saying they were relieved to be able to suddenly discuss their doubts about blogging in education. The complaints from teachers seem to be:

– blogs are not good tools for facilitating discussion
– students find the technological hurdles an unhelpful barrier
– assigned blogging ends up being forced writing
– blogs focus on the personal and can be “an unwholesome celebration of one’s ego”

It seems to me that any of these complaints could probably be made against any other technology such as discussion boards. And there has been a similar discussion going on at Just Tenured about the difficulties of getting some student’s involved on discussion boards.

I think Charlie Lowe’s comment gets to the heart of the issue when he points out that there are at least three aspects to blogging that make it an interesting tool:

– the personal mode
– the knowledge management mode
– the community/social mode

The real challenge for edublogging, it seems to me, is to find ways that encourage students to make use of blogs in an integrated way which takes account of these different modes. It is at that point that blogging becomes a really interesting tool that has particular pedagogical impact because, used in this way, it begins to provide a technological scaffolding for an integrated method of practice.

In another post and series of comments metaspencer, myself and others have been discussing what he calls the visual rhetoric of blog “hotspots” or the indexical elements that indicate blog “validity” and/or “affiliation”. These indexical elements may be as simple as the date header, which immediately tells you something about the freshness of the blog. Others include:

* links
* comments and track-backs show reaction and connectedness
* number of visits
* the archive, which dates the blog and signals longevity or “experience”
* the blogroll: “who does this blogger hang with/aspire to connect with”
* the sidebar links functioning to contextualize “the writer and their position in the blogosphere”
* listed categories as scannable text that then maps linkable content
* and then there is the site’s name and tagline working to locate attitude
* RSS feed –
* author names – In a weblog billed as a community blog
* Foaf document
* url: does the blogger “own” the address? What’s the domain category, country code?

All these may seem like they are surface elements to a blog but they are actually critical elements in defining the feel, purpose and functionality of the blog. Blogging becomes a central part of the course philosophy not just a method fro completing an assignment, it becomes a way to talk about the way we learn, the way we write, the way we interact as a learning community and the way we develop a personal learning archive.

If teachers are finding it difficult to get students to become involved in blog basics it may seem like a tall order to get them to think about all these other elements. But maybe not. If we help students explore the full functionality of blogs maybe some of the problems disappear. Functioning RSS feeds to an aggregator might immediately help increase the communal aspect of class blogging by providing an easy form of access to each other’s blogs, functioning categories and effective sidebar link lists immediately open up aspects of the knowledge management mode.

Also if we foreground the different aspects of personal expression, group interaction and knowledge management, we are given an opportunity to foreground a pedagogical framework and assist students to become more self reflective learners.

In an old but still very relevant set of postings on blogging in the class room James McGee suggests that there are four aspects of blogging:

There are four hurdles to pass to move from willing volunteer to competent blogger: learning the technology environment, developing an initial view of blogging, plugging into the conversation, and developing a voice. These are not so much discrete phases as they are parallel tracks that can be managed.

I think that teachers often focus on the last two aspects without due attention to the first two.

It seems to me that it is an exciting time, we have passed the initial euphoria of blogs as a solution and we can now start focusing on them as part of a larger process.

Typology of Revelation

Finished off a first close reading of Revelation this weekend. I wanted to get a feel for it before I go off and look at the commentaries. First impressions:

Sense of Time

The prologue clear states that “the Time is close” (1:3) an assertion that bookends the narrative and is repeated again in the final chapter: “Do not keep the prophecies in this book a secret because the time is close” (22:10).

This sense of time related to the things that are to “take place” is also contrasted against an eternal sense of time: “I am the Alpha and Omega says the Lord God, who is, who was and who is to come”(1:8). Again this assertion is bookended by the final chapter: “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (22:13)

Catastrophe and Victory

This dialectic sense of time: the things impending meets the things impending is matched by a similar dialectic throughout of prophecies of catastrophe and doom matched by prophecies of victory.

Endurance

The book is in a sense a prison hallucination and thus has the marks of both brutalisation and escapist fantasy.

The author introduces himself: “I am your brother and share your sufferings, your kingdom and all you endure, I was on Patmos (a prison island) for having preached God’s word and witnessed for Jesus”(1:9)

This notion of endurance is a key motif and is matched by the promise of ultimate victory.

Empire

The language of an empire at war that builds alliances, colanises, invades and destroys is key to the symbolic structure of the book

The city

Babylon and Jerusalem represent key geographies of sin and innocence in both cases the materiality of these places is a key aspect of the representation of the gathering of the “evil” and the gathering of the “holy”. These symbolic cities must be recognised as two models of governance or civility and as two communal or peer authority structures.

Other key themes

Repent/resist
Justice of God’s retribution
deceit/idolatry as key sins

The dialectic catastrophe/victory structure of the vision, the call to resistance and endurance and the call to reject the demands of empire makes for a radical message but this same radical core can also obviously induce a sense of overly righteous fatality.

Assessing Participation

Another fascinating post from Adrian Miles about his approach to assessment:

I routinely (these days) require all my students to assess their participation. Everyone contributes ideas about what things they think they will have to do to learn through the semester, and I collate these, tidy them up, and this forms the basis of an assessment diary that they complete each week. At the end of semester they use the same form to determine their participation across the semester, and to award themselves their final mark.

The list of things is pretty constant, with interesting variations. For example my third year students in an applied research subject just completed included “getting grubby” as one of their activities, by which they meant they should get their hands dirty in thinking, making, that they should get out of their academic comfort zone.

I have tried in limited ways with some classes to talk about approaches to learning and get students to identify goals for themselves, the class and myself as tutor. But Miles’ approach provides a great, integrated model, particularly the focus on evaluating participation, which as he notes is often merely equated with attendance by both students and teachers.

One of the things that I am finding as I learn to teach in more cohesive and developed ways is that the more I foreground the process of learning and create a conversation about both content areas and learning processes, the more focused responses I get from students.

I was really pleased the other day when one of my students spontaneously wrote a 1000 word addendum to his debate contribution because he felt he had been unable to fully work through his ideas previously. He then noted: “I am really pleased with the quality of work that the assessment process in this course is getting out of me.”

I think this had something to do with his sense of ownership over his work because it had been through several processes: small group development, personal development, tutorial group presentation, debate interaction, group discussion/critique, tutor response. This became a rolling, self-motivating process that drove him to desire some sort of learning conclusion rather than just the conclusion of handing in the assignment. He became more interested in communicating his ideas fully than he did in his final mark.

The Revealer: Killing Religion Journalism

The new NYU Revealer site, on religion and the news, is an extraordinary resource that has come along at the perfect time for me. Jeff Sharlet and co are ddoing an amazing job of gathering the serious and the quirky and presenting it all in a rigerous framework that brings context and analysis.

In a reflection written to promote his new book on religion and journalism, Killing the Buddha, Sharlet writes of the central yet obscured role of religion in the news.

That’s what religion writing has to offer every other aspect of journalism: The focus on belief. That’s missing even from most religion writing. The “faith pages” languish while news stories revolving around real, actual belief, causing events in the world, occupy the front page.

I said they revolve around real actual belief. That’s what they do. They circle it. Nervously. They dip in, but they never get too close. Part of that is that nobody wants to seem like they’re declaring some truth about God. But what we need to report on is not God or the lack thereof, it’s the way people believe in these things, and what they do about them.

What do they about it? Sometimes, they run for president. Sometimes they feed other people. Sometimes they prey on little kids. Sometimes, they fly planes into buildings. Sometimes what they do defines the public sphere, sometimes, it seems to take place far beyond the public sphere’s boundaries. But that idea that belief is outside the public sphere, that it’s private, exists partly because America remains a largely Protestant country, but more importantly, for our purposes as journalists, because we fail to look for evidence of things not seen.

While part of the way religion is treated is to do with the protestant ethos, it also in large part derives from the ideology of objectivity in journalism. This working method allows journalists to give voice to a range of uncritical sources in complex debates such as gay marriage and adoption. The practice of objectivity perpetuates a natural conflict frame for these debates with spokespeople for gay organisations pitted against moral majority/family first spokespeople. Thus those who might have some evidence based comment to contribute to this debate such as child psychologists, legal scholars or sociologists are marginalised in the false two source balancing act of pitting gays against the religious right.

As well as treating religion as part of the complex fabric of belief in society, journalists must learn to treat relgion critically and call hatred hatred and intollerance, intollerance. This too is part of the fabric of belief. This is the ugly side of belief that is rarely covered in mainstream religion reporting, except when it presents in extreme forms such as Phelps and his “God Hates Fags” group, but the more difficult reality is that the “God Hates Fags” message is preached in much subtler and more insidious ways and these are never addressed.

Why academics blog.

Came across (via Pink Flamingo’s wonderful links page) a great set of reflections on Crooked Timber in response to a post asking why academics blog. The responses reflect the diverse satisfactions and uses of blogging.

Timothy Burke reflects on being a public intellectual through bogging and trying out experimental forms of scholarly publishing:

I try to do several things, not all of which are related to my scholarship. One, just be a “public intellectual”, e.g., someone interested in many things, willing to write about them in a communicative manner, and knowing that most of what I have to say is relatively ephemeral and unpublishable. Two, I do try to do some things that involve publishing scholarly material of various kinds; I’m about to try and start a new format of book commentaries, for example.

While Brian Weatherson reflects on a more mundane motivation:

In my case it was less because I was particularly motivated by some positive ideal, but more because I was in a writing rut and thought trying to write up 1000-1500 word notes on things I’d been reading might be a good way to get started writing again.

Matt Weiner and a number of others talk of using blogs as “pre-scholarship—I’d like to rework a lot of the ideas for publication sometime, and the blog posts are first drafts.”

One of the interesting things is that a number of the academics who responded write about a process of the blog starting out as one thing and becoming something else. Laura writes:

I had a lot of extra ideas kicking around and I needed to purge them. I never expected anybody to read it. It was mostly just to entertain a couple of close friends. Nine months later, I am still at it, because I have stumbled into a virtual community, and it’s good conversation. I’ve gotten good feedback. Actually, I’m a bit obsessed. I find myself writing my posts in my head during the day, and later running to the computer to dump the brain.

I think that one of the interesting things about blogging is that it is such a flexible form but it is a form. We can grow into the type of blog that suits us but there are other models to guide us through our contacts in the blogsphere, through the energy that happens in that contact. This is in a sense Ricouer’s notion of narrative identity as self actualised through relation with other selves, which is not about a dispersal of selfhood but the measure of its self constancy. Our story measured against the stories of others.

Presidential candidates on faith

Washington > Campaign 2004 > Transcript of Debate Between Bush and Kerry, With Domestic Policy the Topic” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/politics/campaign/14DTEXT-FULL.html?pagewanted=print&position=”>The final debate between Bush and Kerry seems to confirm David Domke’s view that Bush uses religious langauge in a unique prophetic way:

Mr. Schieffer Mr. President, let’s go to a new question. You were asked before the invasion or after the invasion of Iraq if you had checked with your dad. And I believe, I don’t remember the quote exactly, but I believe you said you had checked with a higher authority. I would like to ask you what part does your faith play on your policy decisions?

Mr. Bush First, my faith plays a big part in my life. And when I was answering that question what I was really saying to the person was that I pray a lot. And I do. And my faith is a very, it’s very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm’s way. I pray for my family. I pray for my little girls.

But I’m mindful in a free society that people can worship if they want to or not. You’re equally an American if you choose to worship an Almighty and if you choose not to. If you’re a Christian, Jew or Muslim you’re equally an American. That’s the great thing about America is the right to worship the way you see fit. Prayer and religion sustain me. I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency. I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country. Somebody asked me one time, how do you know? I said I just feel it.

Religion is an important part. I never want to impose my religion on anybody else. But when I make decisions I stand on principle. And the principles are derived from who I am. I believe we ought to love our neighbor like we love ourself. That’s manifested in public policy through the faith-based initiative where we’ve unleashed the armies of compassion to help heal people who hurt. I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That’s what I believe. And that’s one part of my foreign policy. In Afghanistan I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty. And I can’t tell you how encouraged how I am to see freedom on the march. And so my principles that I make decisions on are a part of me. And religion is a part of me.

Mr. Schieffer
Senator Kerry?

Mr. Kerry Well, I respect everything that the president has said and certainly respect his faith. I think it’s important and I share it. I think that he just said that freedom is a gift from the Almighty. Everything is a gift from the Almighty. And as I measure the words of the Bible, and we all do, different people measure different things: the Koran, the Torah or, you know, Native Americans who gave me a blessing the other day had their own special sense of connectedness to a higher being. And people all find their ways to express it. I was taught – I went to a church school, and I was taught that the two greatest commandments are: love the Lord your God with all your mind, your body and your soul; and love your neighbor as yourself. And frankly, I think we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do in this country and on this planet. We have a separate and unequal school system in the United States of America. There’s one for the people who have and there’s one for the people who don’t have. And we’re struggling with that today. The president and I have a difference of opinion about how we live out our sense of our faith. I talked about it earlier when I talked about the works and faith without works being dead. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. And as president I will always respect everybody’s right to practice religion as they choose or not to practice, because that’s part of America.

The move in this exchnage from Bush’s: “In Afghanistan I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty” (God’s gift comes through the fruits of Bush’s war) to Kerry’s: “Everything is a gift from the Almighty” (general stance of humble greatfulness) is quite stark and revealing.

Defining the apocalyptic

Anastasia asked in a recent comment whether I have a definition of the apocalyptic.

Well I suppose the answer is yes and no. Essential to my approach is the notion of myth as a broad, living, fluid cluster of ideas and emotional colors. So to “define” the apocalyptic myth is to tie it down in a way that is counter-intuitive. What I am working toward is a “typology” that points towards how this cluster of ideas and emotional colors is currently being expressed. In my proposal I write in part:

Berger (2000:388) has argued that the twentieth century has been “thoroughly marked, perhaps even defined by, apocalyptic impulses, fears representations and events.” He outlines four principle areas of post war apocalyptic representation: “The first is nuclear war, the second is the Holocaust, the third is the apocalypses of liberation (feminist, African American, postcolonial) and the fourth is what is loosely called ‘postmodernity’.” (390). To these could be added a fifth significant area: the ecological crisis (Buell 2003).

For Berger and for other theorists of the apocalypse, these events are not merely catastrophic they are in some way revelatory. In nuclear narratives “accident and telos are intertwined” (390). For many writers and artists the holocaust “has come to occupy a central place in late twentieth century European and American moral consciousness…[it] is portrayed as the revelatory, traumatic, apocalyptic fulcrum of the twentieth century” (391); and much postmodern fiction is driven by “some revelatory catastrophe whose traumatic force reshapes all that preceded it and all that follows” (392).

This notions that the apocalyptic includes “impulses, fears representations and events” and involves both catastrophe and revelation are key to the way I am currently trying to understand the apocalyptic.

In my article on “The Apocalypse of George Bush” I note three aspects of Bush’s religious rhetoric, which I argue highlight an underlying apocalyptic worldview and link them to three themes in Revelation.

Firstly and most obviously Bush has defined the current “war on terrorism” as a battle between “good” and “evil”.Secondly he believes we are living in unprecedented times that call for fundamentally new responses. Thirdly he believes he has been chosen by God to lead.

These three themes, which can be traced across many of Bush’s public statements, find symbolic resonance in key themes of the biblical book of Revelation. It narrates the calling of prophets and leaders, a cataclysmic battle between the good “Lamb” and the evil “beast” and the saving of a remnant after a time of cataclysm and tribulation. Much of this symbolic battle is expressed in sociopolitical language of empires at war.

One of my initial tasks for the thesis is to further develop this typology of the apocalypse. One of the starting points will definitely be a close reading of Revelation as the source book for much of our contemporary Western view of the apocalyptic.

However one idea that has been occurring to me lately is that the overarching topic for my thesis is perhaps not the apocalyptic so much as the eschatalogical. Although other elements of end times philosophy/theology – such as the utopic – is inherent in any consideration of the apocalyptic perhaps I need to foreground some of this through a broader general interpretive framework.