2019 | 2

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  • Article
    Western Apocalyptic Time and Personal Authentic Time
    Nir, Bina (2019) , S. 95-116
    The concept of time is culturally dependent. During different periods in the history of Western culture, differing conceptions of times competed for primacy, sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes complementing each other. Modern Westerners, I will claim, live on two timelines – a linear, historical and cultural timeline directed to the “end of days” and a personal, authentic timeline. The Bible is a central cultural source for the linear conception of time: in the entrenched Judeo-Christian Western conception, time has a beginning, “In the beginning,” and an end, “in the end of days”. Time is directed in its entirety to this final event, to the establishment of God’s kingdom. In our modern consumer society, which is wholly concerned with personal time, collective time has lost its purpose and its reason for being preserved. The relationship to time started to gradually change from the general conceptions of linear, collective time which is external to us to a more subjective, personal conception of time. In consumerist capitalism, time becomes personal. I demonstrate the representations of these two concepts of time in the paintings of Chaya Agur.
  • Review
  • Article
    Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion”: Discourse of “the West and the Rest”
    Taira, Teemu (2019) , S. 119-139
    Religion has been absent from the study of James Bond films. Similarly, James Bond has been absent from studies on religion and popular culture. This article aims to fill the gap by examining 25 Bond films through the lens of “religion”. The analysis suggests that there are a number of references to “religion” in Bond films, although religion is typically not the main topic of the films. Furthermore, there is a detectable pattern in the films: religion belongs primarily to what is regarded as not belonging to “the West” and “the West” is considered modern, developed and rational as opposed to the backward, exotic and religious “Rest”. When religion appears in “the West”, it is seen positively if it is related to Christianity and confined to the private sphere and to the rites of passage. In this sense, representations of religion in Bond films contribute to what Stuart Hall named the discourse of “the West and the Rest”, thus playing a role in the maintenance of the idea of “the West”. This will be demonstrated by focusing on four thematic examples from the films. This article also provides grounds for suggesting that reading Bond films through the lens of “religion” contributes to both Bond studies and studies on religion and popular culture.
  • Article
    Editorial
    Ornella, Alexander D. (2019) , S. 7-14
    This editorial shows the impact of apocalyptic images and topoi referring to the ongoing Brexit-process in the United Kingdom and, thereby the editorial builds a bridge to the articels of this issue that analyse how diverse contemporary media adapt, critically question and represent apocalyptic imageries.
  • Article
    Just Popular Entertainment or Longing for a Posthuman Eden? The Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
    Bender, Stephanie (2019) , S. 31-50
    In the context of the ecological crisis, tales of the apocalypse have become a regular feature of the contemporary cultural imaginary, be it in popular feature films, non-fictional texts, or dystopian novels. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy investigates this curious form of entertainment by both employing the template of the apocalypse itself, and reflecting on its cause and effect at the same time. The novels reveal how worlds and their respective compasses of good and evil are constructed through story-telling, and that the apocalypse is also a story which functions either as a moral structuring device or as an anaesthetic for the estranged subjects of late capitalism. Assuming a meta-perspective, the MaddAddam Trilogy engenders ethical reflections on possible futures, incorporating recent philosophical strands like transhumanism and posthumanism.
  • Article
    Mr Robot: Hacking the Apocalypse
    Lynch, John (2019) , S. 15-30
    This paper is concerned with the American TV series Mr Robot and its imaginative articulation of key theological and philosophical questions pertaining to authority, reality and belief. As a work of imagination and critique it provides engaging and useful insights into the process of attempting to challenge the technological system that has infiltrated all personal and social relations today, whilst drawing upon a range of key religious ideas and concepts. The article, firstly, locates the series within a frame defined by the concepts of habit and hope as a way of engaging with its form and content. Secondly, it considers the apocalyptic event around which the drama revolves as a system re-set and new beginning that is revealing of a certain kind of truth alongside the subject who speaks to this truth. Thirdly, The central character Eliot's extraordinary ability for computer coding and encryption links to certain ideas about secrets and their role in the notion of authority as that sustained by being in possession of a key that can unlock and, by logical extension also lock, the sanctified data. Lastly, the article addresses perhaps the most powerful aspect of the drama, Eliot’s paranoia and psychical fragmentation as he occupies this place on the edge of the system that sees him experience a mental and perceptual breakdown as the cost of his commitment to this act of erasure.
  • Article
    Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
    Powell, Russel C. (2019) , S. 167-185
    While most interpretations of Terrence Malick's 2011 The Tree of Life concentrate on the film's theological resonances, I focus here on The Tree of Life's political vision. I locate this vision in the fraught relationship between two influential strands of American religio-political thought, Augustinianism and Emersonianism. The Tree of Life's theological concerns are undoubtedly Augustinian, yet it takes up a similar radical politics as what Emerson did in his best-known essays. The result, I argue, is a cinema of religio-political possibility with important implications for a potential rapproachment between religionists (namely evangelical Christians) and secularists, particularly on the topic of environmental conservation and sustainability.
  • Article
    Totalitarian Opportunism: Cataclysm, Nietzschean Thought and Cultural Transformation in J.J. Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923)
    Woodward, Jennifer (2019) , S. 51-68
    J. J. Connington’s 1923 British disaster novel Nordenholt's Million is an extreme, proto fascist work that responds to the interwar context of economic decline and social unrest in Britain. It utilises an apocalyptic scenario (soil denitrification) to draw an analogue of contemporary Britain and is uncompromising in its critique of conventional government systems and social decline. The novel depicts a situation where, to enable survival, the weak, dissenters and the unskilled are sacrificed in a drive towards creating a utopian future. Accordingly, in Nordenholt's Million the apocalypse is a transformative opportunity. It offers a wish fulfilment tale involving the emergence of strong, decisive leadership - based on many of the qualities of the Nietzchean Übermensch - to instigate a highly efficient, eugenically constructed ‘ideal’ post-apocalyptic society. At the conclusion, a new civilisation emerges in which what the novel has framed as the social, political and economic problems of Britain have been overcome. Drawing upon Nietzchean ideas and the appeal of extreme politics, Nordenholt's Million tackles the morality of its politics by emphasising the necessity – and even desirability - of dictatorship in difficult circumstances. It presents dictatorship as the political solution to weak government and contemporary crises. Such a positive representation of dictatorship, even one apparently justified by catastrophe, could only have been written in a pre-World War II context. However, less than a century later, the extremes that the text presents as so appealing are echoed in in new social and political arenas informed by fear and discontent. Nordenholt's Million is then, a revealing and disconcerting novel that explores the appeal of fascism during periods of social and economic unease.
  • Review
    Book Review. Anthony Hatcher: Religion and Media in America
    Chiou, Grace (2019) , S. 193-197
  • Review
    Festival Review. 72nd Festival de Cannes
    Mayward, Joel (2019) , S. 204-213
  • Journal Issue
    Apocalyptic Imaginings
    (2019)
  • Article
    On (Dang) Quesadillas and Nachos: Mexican Identity and a Mormon Imaginary in the Films of Jared Hess
    Dalton, David S. (2019) , S. 141-165
    Across his cinema, the US, Mormon director Jared Hess has represented the Mexican Other in ambiguous ways that affirm the humanity of the US’s southern neighbors while at the same time signaling them as irreconcilably different from—and perhaps simpler than—their North American counterparts. This holds especially true in Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Nacho Libre (United States 2006), his two most commercially successful films. The Mexican protagonists of both movies win the audience’s affection in part by playing to stereotypes that rigidly separate them from US culture at large. Mexico’s oversized role in Hess’s aesthetic is obvious even to the casual viewer; however, few critics have attempted to reconcile the director’s combination of paternalism and solidarity with people from south of the US border. In this article, I argue that Hess’s ambiguous representation of Mexican peoples and cultures reflects a type of “benevolent racism” that is common within white, North American Mormon communities who paradoxically view people of Mexican descent both as Others and as the physical and spiritual heirs of the peoples of the Book of Mormon.
  • Article
    Apocalypse as Critical Dystopia in Modern Popular Music
    Calvo-Sotelo, Javier Campos (2019) , S. 69-94
    The last book of the New Testament has inspired countless narratives and cultural productions. In the realm of popular music the Apocalypse was embraced as synonymous of imminent catastrophe, generating a dystopian discourse. As a tool for analysis, the concept of “critical dystopia” has built a useful bridge between apocalyptic menaces, re-enchantment of the world, and social protest. On the other hand, “authenticity” is a sacred dimension within rock, the antidote of commercialism. This paper has two parts: first a conceptual review of the state of the questions and debate involved; and second, an exposition of selected songs, followed by a summary of their main traits.
  • Review