Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse

uses of the various apocalyptic schemata. However, in the post-nuclear resurgence of "last things" images, which are obvious analogues of religious configurations, actual literary uses show that these images tend to be disconnected from religious doctrine or, on the more popular level, their authority is likely to come from the mythology of science fiction. We are obviously dealing here with the literary exploitation of a common pool of inflated symbology where the rhetoric of the religious believer and the secular millenarian may easily converge. The 20th-century shift in emphasis brought about several important changes: the modern sense of apocalypse has been secularized to a large extent, and millennial vision has been supplanted by the annihilist or cataclysmic. What follows from these is the salient fact that by modern times the apocalyptic view conceives of cataclysm as a violent upheaval which brings no profound changes beyond being an ultimate threat to survival, thus the element of traditional optimism is curiously missing. In an age of fluid valorizations there is no such thing as the final triumph of the righteous, there is no glorious consummation. Confident expectation tends to be suppressed by mere visions of violence with no anticipation of order beyond chaos accelerated by entropic forces. In other words, the current emphasis on the annihilist dimension of apocalypse does not synthesize the apocalyptic vision of the end with the apocalyptic interpretation of the end. As L. P. Zamora has observed, [DJuring much of this century ... America's sense of its apocalyptic historical destiny has become almost universally pessimistic in outlook. In our time millennial optimism seems to have been transformed into a foreboding suspicion of the imminence of great cosmic disaster in which the world may be annihilated, with no possibility of anything beyond cataclysm. (1) A large segment of contemporary culture, where the current emphasis on the cataclysmic dimension of apocalypse, the so-called 128