A Separate Epidemic

International Journal of English and Literature, 2020

The endeavour of the present paper is to trace the outlook of literature, and, also of the human culture, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Has literature lost its value and utility in the current troubled situation? Has Covid-19 announced the death-knell of literature and literary culture, in a country where they were fast receding; at least for quite a considerable period now? Or, should literature rather rise up to the occasion, and, try to evolve in a new form and manner to the human society; provide us with a new message, and shower us with new hope and new light amid the general gloom? If it does, then what can be the desired form/s? Is the concept of the ‘alienating self’ something new in literature and human culture, or, has it already been introduced to us through several literary texts? What are the possible advantages and drawbacks of self-alienation in society and human culture? How should the publication industry/publication market survive in such a critical time?...

Quarantine, isolation, loneliness are some words we hear frequently in the Covid-19 pandemic situation. These bring with them nothing but questions about constant fear and existential crisis. There is anxiety, despair, hopelessness, and of course meaninglessness of existence. It is necessary to find a means of grasping the reality and gaining an ability to cope and heal mentally, physically, emotionally and socially. Researchers are working hard in providing prophylactics in the light of this novel yet not new viral pandemic. There are many philosophical questions which need to be answered so as to cope up in this situation like, constant fear of being affected, especially when among people; problem of self-isolation; selfalienation; not finding moral support during and after being affected from the disease; some citizens' selfinterest and immoral behavior. These problems are taking the psychological form. Literary works are replete with many such prevalent issues and problems. Literature has, since ages, been a means of escape from the reality as well as a strong and effective way of facing the reality in a rehabilitative manner. In this paper the aim is to read and reread some selected literary works which give glimpses similar to the current pandemic and study how the tragic literary heroes become role models and help finding answers to some questions on existential anxiety.

Literature has always been the strongest medium to express the nerve of social, political and historical forces since time immemorial. Be it the time of political crisis, economic upheaval or pandemic, literature has always tried to provide soothing balm to the bruised bosoms of humanity. An artist is the most helpless and the most powerful being on this blighted planet of ours. Physically he/she can't do anything but his/her written words on pages can create miracles. Life is not worth living, literature makes it worth living with the coating of imagination. That's why imagination is far better than knowledge simply because the world of knowledge is limited but the world of literature encompasses everything. A good piece of literature can transport us into a different world where there is no pain, no problem, no torture and no death. The present paper shows haw literature can sustain us even in the most critical time of the pandemic. It deals with two texts-The Plague by Albert Camus and Years of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks. Both the books show how life keeps going even in the toughest situations, evil may be omnipresent but it cannot annihilate humanity completely.

Social and Technological Aspects of Art: Challenges of the ‘New Normal’, 2022

The Literary Space in the COVID-19 Pandemic Literature's position in the COVID-19 pandemic is fairly peculiar compared to many of the other arts. While the pandemic caused an almost complete standstill of the performative arts and many of them are facing even a kind of gradual process of rebuilding after performances with full live audiences are permitted again, literature has remained strangely unaffected. In fact, the effects of the pandemic on literature have been partly quite contrary to those of the other arts. The basic reason is simple: both the production and experience of literature requires very little, if any, real-world human contact. The uneventful life caused by the pandemic also created a fertile ground for the consumption of literature, as people now had more time to read. Although much more research is needed for a comprehensive account of the effects of the pandemic on literary culture, some preliminary data already support these assessments: many people do report having increased the time devoted to reading. 1 The pandemic also shows up in the renewed interest that works like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967) and Albert Camus' The Plaque (La Peste, 1947) have engendered in readers globally. The attitude people have taken toward literature during the pandemic, however, seems partly divided. For some, the freed time for literature has meant the possibility to explore new territories of literary culture, while for others literary stories have formed a source of comfortable escape amid an unsafe world. It is still too early to make any serious predictions about the long-term effects of the pandemic on people's reading habits and the literary culture in general, but it could, of course, mean a welcome 1 The background material for the introduction of the article has been gathered from the following online sources: "New Stanford study finds reading skills among young students stalled during the pandemic"

Multidisciplinary Journal of School Education

The Covid-19 crisis has led to a re-definition of our lives and a significant de-stabilization of our mental condition. Research shows that we tend to conceive of challenging realities in terms of war and battle: thus, we have struggled with depression, lower spirits and a lack of human interactions. If so, how can we counteract such depressive tendencies? Although today it seems both writing and reading are efficient in mitigating feelings of loneliness, historical records of the reactions to the Spanish influenza pandemic (1918) reveals that silence and evasion are also possible. Using the method of wide reading, I first examine the divergent responses to crisis. Through close reading, I then explore the manner in which literature may be therapeutic for both writers and readers. Finally, I argue that the literary choices of the reading public, recently re-directed towards auto/biographical fiction, may soon impact on the canon within education. This, in turn, prompts a final hypot...

Epidemics have been a part of world literature whether in the form of a plague or an outbreak with catastrophic consequences at personal and socio-economic levels. Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year are considered some of the pioneer works which deal with epidemics. In the 19th and 20th century, widespread diseases continued to garner the attention of the authors and readers as serious illnesses ravaged human populations across the globe. In my presentation, I will investigate various human reactions in the face of death and widespread illnesses in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912), and Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s Hakka Sığındık (1919). As Susan Sontag studies the impact of the epidemics or serious diseases on human mind in her book titled Illness as Metaphor (1978), she puts forward the idea that most people are inclined to form punitive or sentimental fantasies in relation to being afflicted with a disease. Rather than investigating the physical effects of the illnesses, Sontag prefers to look into the meanings of these diseases as metaphors. I will be using Sontag’s method to explore the metaphoric meanings and receptions of widespread diseases and death in three different literary texts from world literature written in the 19th and 20th century

PIONEER: Journal of Language and Literature

This paper contextualizes the role of literature during the current state of Covid-19 outbreak. As representation of plague has been a stable in literature across time and space, reading literature about pandemic offers important insights in dealing with the changing period. This study offers a reading of ‘The Marque of Red Death’, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe which dramatizes the outbreak of titular plague. Poe’s narration contextualizes the horrifying aspects of plague and also criticizes the social inequality concerning the ability of different social classes to cope with pandemic. Hence, this depiction asserts that ecological problem is inseparable with social problem and racial inequality. This study is conducted under ecocritical framework which emphasizes the reorientation of human and non-human relationship through the imaginary literature. The findings suggest that the non-human entity in form of plague is depicted as a disruptive force that abolish the progress...

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

Imagine the dystopia created by this viral holocaust. Incendiary piers start, burning bodies in wastelands. At night wastelands reportedly turn into a mass crematorium. At a University hospital in New Jersey, the bell rings every half an hour, announcing the passing away of a Covid victim. Ideas of nation states, frontiers, countries have only enclosed people in prisons of illusion. Such unreal lineations become fault lines for nationalism, migrations, war and hierarchical exclusion. The Corona virus however is not impeded by such boundaries. It transmits from human to human; it affects people without distinction of nationality, economics, franchise, and turns humans into targets with a kind of Dawkinsian indifference.

Deleted Journal, 2023

Writing in a Time of Epidemic One can talk about trauma, and perhaps also about disassociation. About the unbearable and the unresolved. Fear of collapse (whether conceivable or not). The ability to contain. Defenses. Their breakdown. Survival versus extinction (what survives? what becomes extinct?). Subversion and reconstruction. Regression. The attempt to convert psychosis into neurosis. Either way, reality evades the stubborn attempt to understand it. What good would words do. But at certain moments the need to talk is felt, and of all things, in terms of standing at the threshold of a black hole. And then of falling into it. 1 This passage from Dana Freibach-Heifetz's book, In the Desert of Things ("Numbers, Deuteronomy") not only contains short and fragmented sentences, and uses many periods, as if the speaker is short of breath, but also generates a fast pace that fuels anxiety. The text staccatos "Collapse. Breakdown. Extinction. standing at the threshold of a black hole". Freibach-Heifetz's book was written in February and March 2020, In the midst of the first wave of COVID19, when no one knew how it would change the world, and millions of people were quarantine. This book was thus one of the first to confront the trauma of the pandemic. The book is composed of 113 fragments in various genres, encompassing a range of voices, sights and senses of life during the epidemic that range from everyday details (e.g. eating) to more cultural and philosophical concerns (like the concepts of inside and outside), and combines realism with the world of dreams and fantasy that portray the archetype of a plague. The book was published in two versions, one of which includes 36 color photographs by Yoram Kupermintz that create a rich dialogue with the texts. This talk examines Freibach-Heifetz's text to articulate the relationship between the stylistic features of this book-such as using fragments, different genres and points of view, the combination of texts with visual images-and its thematic components, with the fact that it was written dead center in the eye of COVID storm.