Federal troops razing Canudos, Bahia, 1897

We're not a melting pot -- we're a Petrey dish. Cultures of millenarianism - of the end of history as we know it and the beginning of a radically different reign - have proliferated luxuriantly in this New World of unlimited opportunities and endless glass ceilings. Some say the world will end with ice; others say with fire. Some foretell the second coming of Christ; others foretell the collapse of civilization into racial warfare and genocide. These ideas of apocalypse has been as powerfully stimulating to authors' imaginations as it has been disturbing to the guardians of political order.

When I went to Jonestown I believed I was going to make the world a better place. Fed up with racism and poverty in America, I was looking to create a utopian society where people of all races and classes could create a community. -- Tim Stoen, former follower of Jim Jones

In 1978, Jim Jones and 914 followers of his People's Temple committed suicide after assassinating Representative Leo Ryan and four of his aides on a Guyana airstrip.

Rockwell Kent, "Queequeg: Light-Bearer"

This interdisciplinary seminar will treat the topic of apocalypse as it appears in the history, religious writing, music, and literature of the Americas. We will move historically and geographically from the Millerites of the "burned-over region" of upstate New York (and their descendants, the Branch Davidians) to the Bahian "poorest of the poor" who founded and fought to the death for Canudos, the New Jerusalem of the Brazilian interior (razed to the ground exactly 100 years ago this Fall). We will examine its literary manifestations from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mario Vargas Llosa.

We will hail the French Revolution, as shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that Nature is preternatural; if not divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is not Reality; that it has to become Reality, or the world will take fire under it, --burn it into what it is, namely Nothing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended...
Thomas Carlyle, On Great Men

Authors treated may include:

• John of Patmos, Revelations (including the Dürer woodcuts!)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Earth's Holocaust"
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões
• Bob Dylan, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
• Margaret Atwood,The Handmaid's Tale
• Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World