Introduction: How Metaphors Remember and Culturalise Pandemics
-
Nahum Welang
The world responded to the proliferation of COVID-19 in 2020 with dread and despair. It had been over a century since a global pandemic of a similar scale occurred (Davis 6), and as politicians and policy makers scrambled to curb the spread of the novel contagion, scientific interventions became a prioritised, and sometimes controversial, topic of discussion (Shah) (Al-Arshani). Although the humanities were largely excluded from these pandemic discourses (Shah), artistic narratives, from famous plays like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602) to revered paintings like Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu (1919-20), have an established tradition of exploring the unique ways in which societies remember and culturalise pandemics.
The essays in this Plague as Metaphor special issue continue the storied humanistic tradition of culturalising contagion by using a plethora of multi-genre works to make a persuasive case for the validity and vitality of metaphors in plague narratives. In other words, these essays rethink Sontag’s (in)famous Illness is not a Metaphor declaration (3) by arguing that the trope of illness as metaphor endures because it is capable of addressing how we perceive and respond to the existential threats posed by the rapid spread of infectious diseases.
In “The Humanities of Contagion: How Visual and Literary Representations of the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic Complement, Complicate and Calibrate COVID-19 Narratives,” I use works of literature (D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox and Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook) and visual culture (John Singer Sargent’s The Interior of a Hospital Tent) to examine how metaphorical depictions of the “Spanish” Flu Pandemic eerily foreshadow and ethicise critical discourses about COVID-19 such as biological abnormality and collective amnesia.
Toni R. Juncosa directs our focus to the realm of poetry, where he considers the impact of HIV on spatial metaphors in Danez Smith’s verse. Titled “And the House Burned Down: HIV, Intimacy, and Memory in Danez Smith’s Poetry,” Juncosa’s paper presents a comparative analysis of Smith’s poetry by, first, focusing on the metaphors used to interrogate the penetration of HIV into the body and, second, unpacking how this transformative experience alters perceptions of intimacy and memory.
Eamon Reid’s “We’ve Forgotten Our Roots: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s speculative future” tackles discourses about biopolitics in role-playing video games by examining the implications of Mass Effect’s simultaneous critique and endorsement of liberal and conservative biopolitical tendencies. Reid ultimately argues that Mass Effect’s biopolitical discourse offers an agnostic-leaning political vision that is neither utopian nor dystopian.
And finally, in “The holobiontic figure: Narrative complexities of holobiont characters in Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague,” Teun Joshua Brandt uses Slonczewski’s novel Brain Plague as a conduit for comprehensive explorations about the narratological aspects of the holobiontic figure. While referencing the trend of newer science fiction works, which are rethinking the relationship between humans and germs in pandemic narratives, Brandt discusses essential features of the holobiontic figure and investigates what happens when a scientific concept leaves its discursive borders and exists between materials.
The valuable insights presented in this special issue demonstrate how metaphors effectively scrutinise the varied human dimensions of plague experiences and offer potential solutions, or visions, for post-pandemic societies. The global defunding of the humanities, however, poses a serious threat to the proliferation of these ideas. In the ominously titled “The End of the English Major,” Heller of The New Yorker discusses how funding cuts for humanities have contributed to historically low enrollment numbers, both in the United States and globally, for university subjects like English and history. The overwhelming feeling seems to be that in our tech-obsessed modern world, there is no “demand” for humanistic skills or insights (Heller).
The Plague as Metaphor special issue is thus a modest attempt to address this worrying trend by underscoring the societal value of the humanities. The ability of these four essays to demonstrate how plague metaphors distinctly remember and culturalise pandemic narratives ultimately reveal that the humanities can complement scientific knowledge with another kind of knowledge, which possesses the potential to rethink hegemonic perceptions about the nature, spread and impact of contagion. Because the human condition is invariably complex and often difficult to scientifically quantify, humanistic narratives are thus a vital vehicle to put pandemic-related human experiences into words and give them meaning.
-
Funding information: The author states no funding involved.
-
Conflict of interest: Author states no conflict of interest.
Works Cited
Al-Arshani, Sarah. “Fauci Says he is Polarizing.” Business Insider, 18 October 2021. www.businessinsider.com/faucitarget-supports-science-data-hard-facts-not-conspiracy-theories-2021-10.Suche in Google Scholar
Brandt, Teun Joshua. “The Holobiontic Figure: Narrative Complexities of Holobiont Characters in Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2023, pp. 20220201. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2022-0201.Suche in Google Scholar
Davis, Ryan. The Spanish Flu: Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918. Springer, 2013.10.1057/9781137339218Suche in Google Scholar
Heller, Nathan. “The End of the English Major.” The New Yorker, 27 February 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major.Suche in Google Scholar
Reid, Eamon. “We’ve Forgotten Our Roots: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s Speculative Future.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2023, pp. 20220199. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2022-0199.Suche in Google Scholar
Shah, Hetan. “Covid-19 Recovery: Science Isn’t Enough to Save Us.” Nature, 23 March 2021. www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00731-7.Suche in Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.Suche in Google Scholar
Welang, Nahum. “The Humanities of Contagion: How Literary and Visual Representations of the “Spanish” Flu Pandemic Complement, Complicate and Calibrate COVID-19 Narratives.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2023, pp. 20220187. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2022-0187.Suche in Google Scholar
© 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Issue: Writing the Image, Showing the Word: Agency and Knowledge in Texts and Images, edited by Jørgen Bakke, Jens Eike Schnall, Rasmus T. Slaattelid, Synne Ytre Arne - Part II
- Cultural Syncretism and Interpicturality: The Iconography of Throne Benches in Medieval Icelandic Book Painting
- Rousseau’s Herbarium, or The Art of Living Together
- Special Issue: Russian Speakers After Migration, edited by Ekaterina Protassova and Maria Yelenevskaya
- Introduction: Everyday Verbal and Cultural Practices of the Russian Speakers Abroad
- Failing or Prevailing? Russian Educational Discourse in the Israeli Academic Classroom
- Cultural and Linguistic Capital of Second-Generation Migrants in Cyprus and Sweden
- Russian-Speaking Families and Public Preschools in Luxembourg: Cultural Encounters, Challenges, and Possibilities
- “I’m Home”: “Russian” Houses in Germany and Their Objects
- Conceptualizing Russian Food in Emigration: Foodways in Culture Maintenance and Adaptation
- From Odessa to “Little Odessa”: Migration of Food and Myth
- Domestication of Russian Cuisine in the United States: Wanda L Frolov’s Katish: Our Russian Cook (1947)
- A Russian Aristocrat in the Principality of Liechtenstein: Life Trajectories, Material Culture, and Language
- A Russian Story in the USA: On the Identity of Post-Socialist Immigration
- Special Issue: Plague as Metaphor, edited by Nahum Welang
- Introduction: How Metaphors Remember and Culturalise Pandemics
- The Humanities of Contagion: How Literary and Visual Representations of the “Spanish” Flu Pandemic Complement, Complicate and Calibrate COVID-19 Narratives
- “We’ve Forgotten Our Roots”: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s Speculative Future
- The Holobiontic Figure: Narrative Complexities of Holobiont Characters in Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague
- “And the House Burned Down”: HIV, Intimacy, and Memory in Danez Smith’s Poetry
- Regular Articles
- Social Connection when Physically Isolated: Family Experiences in Using Video Calls
- “I’ll see you again in twenty five years”: Life Course Fandom, Nostalgia and Cult Television Revivals
- How I Met Your Fans: A Comparative Textual Analysis of How I Met Your Mother and Its Reboots
- Transnational Business Services, Cultural Transformation/Identity, and Employee Performance: With Special Focus on Migration Experience and Emigration Plan
- Rethinking Agency in the European Debate about Virginity Certificates: Gender, Biopolitics, and the Construction of the Other
- The Mirror Image of Sino-Western in America’s First Work on Travel to China
- Strategies of Localizing Video Games into Arabic: A Case Study of PUBG and Free Fire
- Aspects of Visual Content Covered in the Audio Description of Arabic Series: A Corpus-assisted Study
- Translator Trainees’ Performance on Arabic–English Promotional Materials
- Youth and Intergenerational Transmission of Cultural Intelligence in Latvia, Spain and Turkey
- On the Happening of “Frank’s Place”: A Neo-Heideggerian Psychogeographic Appreciation of an Enchanted Locale
- Rebuilding Authority in “Lumpen” Communities: The Need for Basic Income to Foster Entitlement
- The Case of John and Juliet: TV Reboots, Gender Swaps, and the Denial of Queer Identity
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Issue: Writing the Image, Showing the Word: Agency and Knowledge in Texts and Images, edited by Jørgen Bakke, Jens Eike Schnall, Rasmus T. Slaattelid, Synne Ytre Arne - Part II
- Cultural Syncretism and Interpicturality: The Iconography of Throne Benches in Medieval Icelandic Book Painting
- Rousseau’s Herbarium, or The Art of Living Together
- Special Issue: Russian Speakers After Migration, edited by Ekaterina Protassova and Maria Yelenevskaya
- Introduction: Everyday Verbal and Cultural Practices of the Russian Speakers Abroad
- Failing or Prevailing? Russian Educational Discourse in the Israeli Academic Classroom
- Cultural and Linguistic Capital of Second-Generation Migrants in Cyprus and Sweden
- Russian-Speaking Families and Public Preschools in Luxembourg: Cultural Encounters, Challenges, and Possibilities
- “I’m Home”: “Russian” Houses in Germany and Their Objects
- Conceptualizing Russian Food in Emigration: Foodways in Culture Maintenance and Adaptation
- From Odessa to “Little Odessa”: Migration of Food and Myth
- Domestication of Russian Cuisine in the United States: Wanda L Frolov’s Katish: Our Russian Cook (1947)
- A Russian Aristocrat in the Principality of Liechtenstein: Life Trajectories, Material Culture, and Language
- A Russian Story in the USA: On the Identity of Post-Socialist Immigration
- Special Issue: Plague as Metaphor, edited by Nahum Welang
- Introduction: How Metaphors Remember and Culturalise Pandemics
- The Humanities of Contagion: How Literary and Visual Representations of the “Spanish” Flu Pandemic Complement, Complicate and Calibrate COVID-19 Narratives
- “We’ve Forgotten Our Roots”: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s Speculative Future
- The Holobiontic Figure: Narrative Complexities of Holobiont Characters in Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague
- “And the House Burned Down”: HIV, Intimacy, and Memory in Danez Smith’s Poetry
- Regular Articles
- Social Connection when Physically Isolated: Family Experiences in Using Video Calls
- “I’ll see you again in twenty five years”: Life Course Fandom, Nostalgia and Cult Television Revivals
- How I Met Your Fans: A Comparative Textual Analysis of How I Met Your Mother and Its Reboots
- Transnational Business Services, Cultural Transformation/Identity, and Employee Performance: With Special Focus on Migration Experience and Emigration Plan
- Rethinking Agency in the European Debate about Virginity Certificates: Gender, Biopolitics, and the Construction of the Other
- The Mirror Image of Sino-Western in America’s First Work on Travel to China
- Strategies of Localizing Video Games into Arabic: A Case Study of PUBG and Free Fire
- Aspects of Visual Content Covered in the Audio Description of Arabic Series: A Corpus-assisted Study
- Translator Trainees’ Performance on Arabic–English Promotional Materials
- Youth and Intergenerational Transmission of Cultural Intelligence in Latvia, Spain and Turkey
- On the Happening of “Frank’s Place”: A Neo-Heideggerian Psychogeographic Appreciation of an Enchanted Locale
- Rebuilding Authority in “Lumpen” Communities: The Need for Basic Income to Foster Entitlement
- The Case of John and Juliet: TV Reboots, Gender Swaps, and the Denial of Queer Identity
