In Literature
Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, writes that the Universal Hero from monomyth must pass through a stage of Apotheosis. According to Campbell, apotheosis is the expansion of consciousness that the hero experiences after defeating his foe.
Arthur C Clarke's novel Childhood's End has the Overlords refer to Mankind's "apotheosis" when the world's children evolve into their union with the Overmind (see also post-human).
In Chapter 23 of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, regarding Ishmael's friend Bulkington, the term serves as a last word climax for the chapter:
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis."
In "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King, the desert which is the main setting of the first book in the series; "The Gunslinger", is referred to as "the apotheosis of all deserts".
The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson several times employs the concept of apotheosis: for Mistborn Kelsier, for the Lord Ruler, and arguably for Kelsier's Mistborn apprentice, Vin.
Read more about this topic: Divinization
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Literature must become Party literature.... Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)