Poetry and Apocalypse

Download or read book Poetry and Apocalypse written by William Franke and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Poetry and Apocalypse, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.