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

groups have been based on urgent apocalyptic expectations,

1 almost every aspect of American intellectual life has been permeated by traditional or secular apocalyptic visions. Indeed since the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by millenarian religious groups apocalypse has always been essential to America's conception of itself. Even as recently as the Gulf War of 1991, apocalyptic expectations preoccupied a sizeable percentage of the American population. So there is continuity. Continuity, however, does not exclude radical transformations, and the historical fact is that, owing to the inevitable fragmentation, secularization and reinterpretations of the myth, by apocalyptic as it appears, say, in the contemporary novel and the popular culture of the last two or three decades, we mean something slightly or totally different from how the Biblical apocalyptists or the Puritan forefathers interpreted the concept. Before going further, for the purposes of diminishing the potential confusion about myth, at least a tentative initial clarification of the conceptually elusive term seems inevitable. In the present paper, myth will be used in two broad senses and will be treated as two related but separable configurations: time-embalmed traditional myth as sacred narrative (Mythl, or Ml) and myth as a politically expedient justifyingprojective construct (Myth2, or M2), respectively. Ml thus stands for the archaic, the traditional, and the high-prestige phenomenon; M2 for the epistemologically suspect modern, the recent, and the contemporaneous. Although Ml and M2 can be as far apart as "ultimate truth" and "bad knowledge" can, there is a deep family resemblance between the two. Firstly, and ironically, in a strict epistemological sense both Ml and M2 are suspect configurations. While in Ml we can observe the attempt of the human mind to generate constructs for the purposes of explaining the totality of reality 1 Based especially on urgent expectation of the second coming of Christ (the Seventh Day Adventists, the Latter Day Saints, the Jehovah Witnesses, and more recently the "Jesus people," in a variety of fundamentalist manifestations). 116