Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is currently Francesco de Dombrowski Professor in Residence at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (Villa I Tatti) and Senior Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics. He has been Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macao, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, and Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg. His books include On What Cannot Be Said (2007); Poetry and Apocalypse (2009); Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013); A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014); The Revelation of Imagination (2015); Secular Scriptures (2016); A Theology of Literature (2018); The Universality of What is Not (2020); The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso (2021); The Vita Nuova and the New Testament (2021); Dantologies (2024); and numerous others.

List of Illustrations

1. Prologue and Acknowledgments

Part I. Plague Literature

2. The Engendering of Hope from Human Helplessness

3. Myth, History, Fiction, and the Limits of Representation

4. The Mystery of the Supernatural at the Limit of Naturalism

5. From Ambiguity of Causes to Moral Certitude through Existential Conversion

6. Securing Control versus Acknowledging Grace and Vulnerability

7. Hope in a Negative Theological and Apocalyptic-Fictive Register of Wholeness

8. Theology of Hope as Negative Theology—Moltmann and Bloch

9. Partial Action Combined with Hope in Wholeness

10. Othering Hope: Postmodern, Extra-European, and Indigenous Perspectives

11. The Vision of the Whole versus Parceled Perception

Part II. Political Ecology

12. The Web of Connections: Integral Ecology, Culture, and Society

13. Pandemics and Environmental Apocalypse: Their Common Causes

14. Progressive versus Apocalyptic Perspectives on Pandemics

15. Hope in Civil Society between Private and Public

16. From Social to Cosmic Consciousness: Latour’s Apocalyptic Reading of the Coronavirus Crisis

17. Relativizing Scientific “Truth”

18. Truth and Transcendence versus Technique

19. Negative Theology of the Earth According to Bruno Latour

Part III. Apocalyptic Hope

20. Eschatology, Incarnation, Kenosis

21. Indigenous Salvation as Guide

22. From “Theology of Hope” to “Theology of the Earth”

23. Science, Faith, and Social Belief—Not Strictly Separable

24. Control and Excess in Dissembling the Unspeakable

25. Parallel Perspectives and the Novel

26. A Semiotic Model of Contagion—Viral Informatics

27. Hoping Against Hope. From Reason to Religion, or Spiritualizing Rationality

28. Conclusion: Hope-fail Enactment of Eternity

29. Coda: Plague and War

30. Appendix: Abstracts of Selected Plague Narratives in Literature, Classical to Modern

Bibliography

Index