Over the past few hundred years, the end of a century has become the occasion for the Western world (Europe and North America) to rehearse its mythologies of decline or progress: either we are going to hell in a handbasket or every day in every way we are getting better and better.  Now with the turn of the millennium (either 2000 or 2001 depending on your attention to detail), we now witness the spectacle of apocalypticism with particular vitality, interpreting omens of catastrophe or prophecies of prosperity. 

During the 1999-2000 academic year, I offered Thomas Nelson Community College's Survey of World Literature I-II courses on line and focus the courses' attention on apocalypses and apocalyptic or millennialist texts (entitling this offering, "Omens of Apocalypse, Visions of Millennium").  

The Hebrew scripture's Book of Daniel and the Christian Book of Revelation (known also by its Greek-derived name, Apocalypse) purport to predict the ultimate turning point of human history: its end.  Moreover, myths of catastrophic destruction and utopian perfection are found in Islam, Marxism, secularism, as well as in the mythologies of non-Western cultures.

Some terms may bear more careful definition.  I use "apocalypticism" to describe mythologies of ultimate, catastrophic destruction; "millennialism" to describe myths of future earthly utopian prosperity and progress.   In addition, the term "apocalypse" used to denote a literary genre may also be used to signify any narrative of other-worldly journeys mediated by an angel or spirit-guide.

In "AIDS and American Apocalypticism" (my doctoral dissertation revised into a book-length manuscript soon to be published by State University of New York Press) I examine five tropes or figures of thought employed in representations of AIDS: exile, the jeremiad, demons, war, and paradise.  In that study I suggest that although apocalyptic discourse seems inevitable in Euro-American discourses and is effective in mobilizing group solidarity and action, there are two risks in inherent in employing apocalypticism: its facile division of the world into binary oppositions (good/bad, saved/damned) and its insistent anxieties about sexuality (particularly female sexuality) and sexual defilement, which are counterproductive to sexual dissident AIDS activists.  In particular, religious fundamentalists (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) have tended to deploy apocalyptic tropes around homosexual relations, taking as their scriptural warrant the Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Book of Genesis.  The increasing visibility of gay and lesbian people in the 1960s and 70s revived medieval and early modern demonization of sodomy, preparing the way for even more apocalyptic vehemence with the emergence of AIDS, which I discuss in "Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and the End," a paper presented at the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.

I read apocalypticism as the Western world's most typical method of composing and rehearsing communal (and therefore individual) identity.   Adapting Judith Butler's characterization of "gender," I read apocalypse as an imitation without an original (or a terminal!), known only by its ceaseless performance.   It does so by formulating a vulnerable virtuous Self in opposition to a powerful evil Other.  Since belief is constitutive of human subjectivity (it doesn't much matter what, we need to believe in something), apocalyptic beliefs are particularly adept at making sense out of the world's and our lives' randomness, imposing cosmic order and significance on banality.  Therefore, the apparent failure of some precise apocalyptic predictions does not threaten apocalyptic faith.