Arts and Humanities Colloquium: It�s the End of the World as We Know It: Archetypal Narratives, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Fate of Civilization.

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Friday, October 20th, 2017
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

So numerous are the conversations about the various apocalyptic disasters we face, whether environmental or financial, that, on the Internet and elsewhere, the topic is now encapsulated in a well-known acronym: TEOTWAWKI, The End of the World as We Know It.

Despite the topic’s prevalence online, the connection between our apparent fascination with TEOTWAWKI and the types or genres of literature we produce is less obvious. Professor Anna Atkinson, of the Department of English at VIU, says there is a connection, and she will explore it in this talk. Using the example of the first known recorded work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from ancient Mesopotamia, her presentation will analyze the archetypal genre which coincides with the foundation of civilization: the Epic. Through it, and through the two genres which typically follow the Epic in the progress of civilization (the Romance and the Tragedy), she argues that the problem with civilization which is evident in the Epic, and which the Romance attempts unsuccessfully to mitigate, in the end inevitably leads to Tragedy (and, of course, to TEOTWAWKI).

“Buried in every epic are the seeds of the destruction of the civilization whose beginnings the epic wants to recount,” she says. “It’s something that has obvious connections to contemporary concerns of ecological collapse. The first epic ever recorded tells us everything we need to know about what’s wrong with our culture.”

https://www2.viu.ca/artsandhumanities/Arts_Humanities_Colloquium.asp