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WiSe 22/23: Pandemic as Parabel: Contagion in the Literary Imagination

Tobias Alexander Annamalay Jochum

Kommentar

The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we live, think, imagine and situate ourselves in an increasingly uncertain world. It carries multiple, often contradictory effects, affects, and meanings: If there was hope early on that our collective response to the virus might compel a break with an entrenched neoliberal paradigm, then the lived experience of the lockdown and the asymmetrical exposure to death under racial capitalism seemed first of all to exacerbate existing inequalities and textures of life under neoliberalism. From an ecocritical perspective, the pandemic emerges as a harbinger of the Anthropocene, perhaps a "dress rehearsal" (Bruno Latour) for the pending escalation of the climate crisis. This course cautiously takes inventory of the (post-)Covid moment through the prism of literary production. Our readings will explore pandemics real and imagined, past, present and future, through a number of literary forms. The seminar opens with personal and theoretical musings on the current pandemic by a selection of artists and intellectuals (Kim Stanley Robinson, Zadie Smith, Saidiya Hartman, Bo Burnham, et. al.). We will then trace the plague motive as an allegory for social anxieties and political discontent in classical narratives by E.A. Poe and Albert Camus, as well as postmodern texts like Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín (1994) and Charles Burns' alternative comic The Hole (2005). Susan Sontag will be a central reference for thinking about the metaphoric dimensions of illness in Western culture—HIV/AIDS in particular. Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991) will provide examples for chronicling historic pandemics in the United States via literary re-imaginations. Our final thematic angle considers the pandemic in the (post-)apocalyptic imagination in Sci-Fi and speculative fiction. Reading options here include Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912), George Spencer's Earth Abides (1949) and Ling Ma's recent novel Severance (2018). Schließen