(Un)timeliness and Catastrophe
Seminar Organizer(s):
- Paul W. Fox (Zayed University, UAE), Tiffany Townsend (Georgia Southern University)
This panel will examine the relationship of the untimely, understood in various manners, to catastrophe. How do the arts display crises and disasters as occurring at or because of particular historical moments? How are various teleologies of apocalypse related in film, literature, the visual arts and/or music? How do predictions of disaster inflect our understanding and appreciation of narrative structure? What role does fatalism and/or the prophetic play in the arts and how are these concepts understood and delivered?
Some suggestions for panel discussion are:
- Apocalypse and the Arts
- Disasters in Science Fiction and Alternative Historical fiction
- Comparative teleologies in religious/spiritual narratives
- The role of fatalistic temporalities in disaster narratives and plot
- Eschatology and the arts
- Gothic temporalities
- Chaos and the Chthonian
- Tragedy, Necessity, and the Inevitable in the arts