Starting from the premise that we live in a time of potentially terminal threats to humanity, Lin Atnip’s book, From Tragedy to Apocalypse in American Literature: Reading to Make Sense of Our Endings (Lexington, 2024), asks what imaginative literature can tell us about our apocalyptic situation and how we should respond to it. Atnip proposes that literary works confront us with realities and imperatives that are ignored, denied, or distorted by dominant social conventions and habits of thought and challenge us to alternative ways of seeing and sense-making. Turning to four American authors (Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and Norman Maclean) who explore our precarious condition, Atnip shows how their texts, each in its own way, educate us to a new ground of sense and a more encompassing way of seeing—one which includes, among other things, what might be called “the apocalyptic sublime”—as well to the need for an unending effort to understand what it means to live a human life against this inhuman background. Reading and reflecting on literature, the book concludes, is itself an essential part of such an effort and such a life.
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Lecturer bio:
Lin Atnip (she/her) is a Tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe (on leave 2024-2025) and an Instructor in the Basic Program. She completed her PhD in 2019 in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a postdoctorate in the Center for Humanities and Social Change at the University of California-Santa Barbara, focusing on the question of how we are educated about the conditions of modernity (especially modern crisis) through reading and reflecting on literature. Her first book, From Tragedy to Apocalypse in American Literature: Reading to Make Sense of Our Endings, was recently published by Lexington Books. She also writes fiction and poetry. Ms. Atnip joined the Basic Program in 2015.
