Nuclear Shakespeare: Apocalypse and Annihilation in King Lear and Hamlet Recent scholarship on Shakespeare's plays centres around the question of their relevance for the present day. Feminist, Marxist and post-colonial analyses speak to our globalised political context; post-structuralist methods explore the relationship between language and power; historicist methods look at the construction of modernity in Shakespeare's day; presentism considers the plays from a self-consciously present-focused perspective; and the recent eco-critical approach reads Shakespeare's plays in the light of the so-called "Anthopocene." In this thesis, I use an updated method of Derridean nuclear criticism, combined with materialist feminist critique, to examine the relevance of King Lear and Hamlet to today's heterogeneous threat of annihilation (including nuclear destruction, genocide, and ecological disaster through climate change), focusing on the implications of annihilation for artistic representation - literature, in particular. I also look at King Lear and Hamlet in their context of early modern Christian apocalypticism, taking apocalypticism as a possible precursor to today's discourses of annihilation. I argue that the spectre of annihilation problematises traditional realist mimesis, revealing the complex and...

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Refugees, a novel in progress, begins in the collective first-person with a group of people who live on the same residential street of middle-class homes in an east coast American city and are experiencing the most exquisitely vivid aurora borealis to appear in recorded history. But they quickly learn that this gorgeous wonder is a harbinger of civilization's demise and possibly the end of all life on the planet, because the solar storms causing the sky's fantastic nightly coloring is also slowly stripping away the atmosphere and leeching oxygen into space. This "we" narrative switches to third person, moving between two characters—Julie and Amira—as the narrative moves forward. The first chapter covers the first few months of this apocalyptic crisis, and Julie and Amira are central as they are forced decide if they still have the strength and the will to even attempt survival in these new and brutal circumstances. The second chapter, also told in third person, picks up seventeen years in the future with Aya, Amira's daughter who was six during the initial atmospheric disaster. A small group survived in an underwater refuge, recently discovered the atmosphere above had healed over time, and sent an excursion group, including Aya, to evaluate the changing environment. This chapter reveals the history and particular struggles of these characters living in this complex society, both residual and nascent. The third chapter returns to the group of neighbors—including Julie and Amira—seventeen years prior, immediately following the catastrophic event as their story continues to unfold. This chapter opens, like the first chapter, in the "we" voice, tracing the movement of the group south in a search for help and a desperate, though orderly, effort toward survival. This next phase of their journey introduces fresh conflicts and new characters and points to approaching challenges and the persistent hope for survival. Two short stories, unrelated to the novel and each other and entitled "Awake" and "Her," are also included.

Over the course of his fifty-year career, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco has almost habitually written poetry about environmental themes especially those related to pollution, extraction, deforestation, and other related themes of destruction. Simultaneously, his work has engaged with questions of temporality, namely the passing of time and the inherent violence of such questions. In this essay, I examine a selection of Pacheco's poetry from the 1970s to the early 2000s, demonstrating Pacheco's marrying of the two concepts: environmental degradation and time. This marriage results in a provocative synthesis of eco-apocalypse, a phenomenon that details a paradoxical end that never actually arrives, but only consistently worsens. I illuminate Pacheco's work by incorporating Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence”, which informs my reading of the poetry by calling to its imaginative power. This power allows it to depict that which is imperceptible, either because it moves too slowly or too broadly to be witnessed by the human observant. In short, Pacheco's poetry addresses human-perceived time and natural or deep time in light of the ongoing apocalypse, which, despite the morose tone of the poetry, obliquely urges the reader towards an awareness of eco-apocalypse.

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As the only extant detailed world map of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Anglo-Saxon map, c. 1025, presents a unique opportunity to explore a sense of Anglo-Saxon social identity as evidenced in this graphic worldview. The Anglo-Saxon map has most often been dismissed as an ill-fitting illustration when viewed solely in its manuscript context or an equally poor navigational tool when considered in the context of modern cartography. The purpose of this thesis is to present the argument that the Anglo-Saxon world map is neither simply a bad illustration nor a poorly rendered map intended for travel, but is rather a richly articulated graphic and linguistic representation of a particularly Anglo-Saxon sense of social identity as it is explored in the midst of a belief in a divine creation, secular origin, and inevitable social apocalypse. This reading of the map is supported by a comparative study of these same three foundational themes as they occur in Old English elegiac literature. The goal of this study is to read the Anglo-Saxon world map in the context of the theoretical framework of social identity demonstrated in Old English elegiac literature. In so doing, a concept of Anglo-Saxon social identity, a cultural expectation of the pull of history and the future, will be presented as it is expressed across artistic genres in Anglo-Saxon England. When viewed in the context of this greater elegiac artistic tradition, the Anglo-Saxon map can be seen as a participatory exploration of Anglo-Saxon identity in the context of the themes of creation, origin, and apocalypse. As such, the map can rightly be viewed as an artifact which was created to be, and remains even now, a carrier of the memory of Anglo-Saxon identity for future generations.

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Cette thèse porte sur le Codex V de Nag Hammadi en tant que produit d’une compilation copte dans l’Antiquité tardive. Nous le comparons à un autre groupe de textes qui circulaient à la même époque en copte, les hagiographies. Cette comparaison démontre l’existence de plusieurs thèmes et motifs littéraires communs aux deux corpora. Cela illustre qu’un lecteur copte connaissant les hagiographies en question pouvait également avoir de l’intérêt pour les textes du Codex V, étant donné que ce dernier contenait plusieurs thèmes et motifs en commun avec ce corpus. Ainsi, loin d’être un livre à saveur gnostique et hétérodoxe, étranger à la culture copte chrétienne – comme généralement suggéré par la recherche – le Codex V était un livre bien intégré à l’ambiance littéraire de l’Égypte de l’Antiquité tardive. De plus, suivant la théorie de la réception telle que théorisée par Jauss – en particulier son concept de « horizon of expectations » – nous utilisons ces thèmes et ces motifs littéraires pour interpréter les textes du Codex V à la lumière de leur contexte copte. Autrement dit, nous offrons une lecture copte du Codex V, et non pas une lecture « gnostique ». / The present dissertation deals with Nag Hammadi Codex V as the product of a late antique Coptic compilation. We compare it to another group of late antique Coptic texts, the hagiographies. This comparison shows the existence of many points of contact concerning literary themes and motifs between both of the corpora in question here. This demonstrates that a given Coptic reader – who knew the hagiographies in question – could also be interested in Codex V, since it displays many literary themes and motifs to which he was accustomed when reading Coptic hagiographies. Consequently, far from being a volume with a Gnostic and heterodox taste and alien to a Coptic context – as generally pictured by scholars – Codex V was very well placed in the literary environment of late antique Egypt. Moreover, following the theory of reception as it was theorized by Jauss – in particular the concept of “horizon of expectations” – we make use of these literary themes and motifs to interpret Codex V in the light of its Coptic context. In other words, we offer a Coptic reading of Codex V, instead of a “Gnostic” one.