Confronting Mortality：Disease, Disaster, and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Introduction
Carolyn F. Scott and Min-Tser Lin

Gender Trouble in Jewish Males: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife
Shuli Chang

Life Review Weathers All? A Gerontological Approach to “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”    
Chao-Fang Chen

“Healthy” Food, Sick Bodies, and Transnational Abjects in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Shu-Ching Chen

California Apocalypse and the Memory of Genocide
Jeff Johnson

Confronting Death: On Heidegger and Levinas
Chung-Hsiung Lai

Murder in the Name of Honor?: Honor Crimes, Economics, and Ghosts in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
Pei-chen Liao

(Re-)Vamping After the Apocalypse: Conflicting Visions of Social Reconstruction in Two Vampire Apocalypse Narratives
Min-Tser Lin

“The tour upon the toft:” The Quest for Truth in Piers Plowman    
Carolyn F. Scott

Travel as a Means to Forgetfulness: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain
Pei-Ju Wu

Representing Self and Disabled Body: The Life Narratives of Disabled Women in Taiwan
Su-Lin Yu

 

Introduction

　　As one purpose of literature is to explore the human condition, mortality emerges as a significant theme across times and cultures. The inevitability of our end as individuals or as civilizations casts a shadow on our perceptions of the meaning of our lives. Not just death, but the events or experiences that remind us of our mortality often provide inspiration and insight to artists and writers.

　　The response to this confrontation with mortality is as varied as humanity itself. Some seek hope or renewal; some seek oblivion, forgetfulness, or despair; some welcome the end and some deny its reality. A type of apocalyptic imagination reveals itself in these responses. As an opening remark to his classic study of the apocalyptic (as) fiction, The Sense of an End, Frank Kermode asserts “a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance to [time]—a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end.”  Humanity often seems preoccupied with its own possible end, which it usually considers not only immanent to its historical scheme but also imminent at its current moment of existence. The apocalyptic imagination displays a paradox, a double-edged momentum: on the one hand, the apocalypse means an abrupt collapse of everything as we know it; cataclysmic changes, either natural or man-made (or combined in character), must precede it, and the End should be fearfully prepared against, if not simply avoided.  On the other hand, the apocalypse promises a chance to (re-) construct a fresher, better world than the one just destroyed. From this contradiction springs both the questions and the answers that literature considers.

　　Developing from a Ministry of Science and Technology-sponsored project to build a collection of books in the National Cheng Kung University Library centered on the theme of Disease, Disaster, and the Apocalyptic Imagination, these essays showcase the scholarship that has emerged from the acquisition of those texts. One goal of the project is to address the multifarious manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination and their historical, social, cultural, and political significances for civilization from the High Middle Ages to the present time. Another goal is to explore the means by which humans confront the disruptions of violence, disability, illness, aging, catastrophe, and social upheaval. The ten articles collected in this book engage with the ongoing scholarly discourse concerning the human response to disease, disaster, and mortality.

　　Written by scholars from the United States and Taiwan, covering literature from Europe, North America, and Asia, examining issues of aging, disease, and disability, and investigating philosophical, religious, and imaginative responses to disruption, these essays demonstrate the varied fruits of our research. Covering a range of texts, genres, and methodologies, this book considers how the apocalyptic imagination, of society or the individual, deconstructs and reconstructs the consequences of confronting mortality.