Plague Writing: Representation and Repression of the Contagion in Literature
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, our world – our lives – came to a screeching halt and reeled from the effects of this rude awakening. For sure, the seemingly endless testing, quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, vaccinations, hospitalisations, deaths, suicides, unrests, economic hardships, social breakdowns, political bickering, geopolitical tensions brought untold and immeasurable suffering to billions of people across the globe. Yet, as with all human catastrophes, this pernicious post-modern pestilence also incited a return of our collective memory, a call to our shared responsibility, and a reset of our social contract – in short, a gift of death. Drawing upon (and recontextualising) this once-in-a-generation experience, we will shuttle back in time to trace the long lineage of plague literature from classical writing, through medieval narratives, to modern novels. However, the range of narrative forms (testimonial, frame, documentary, allegorical) employed by the various authors is as multifarious as the themes they devise (etiology, epidemiology, epistemology, agency, otherness, class inequity, pollution, etc.). As a point of departure, then, our study begins with Thucydides’s grisly account of the Athenian plague in the History of the Peloponnesian War (late 5th century BC?), which set the tone and tenor for much of the Western depictions of the Black Death from the fourteenth century to the early Industrial Age. Of course, we will also pay special attention to Giovanni Boccaccio’s famed frame story of a hundred tales, The Decameron (1351?), ostensibly conceived as an early humanist response to the devastating breakout of the bubonic plague in Florence in 1348. Next, we will peruse Daniel Defoe’s verisimilitudinous representation of the Great Plague of London in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a masterful historical fiction which weds eyewitness account, scientific reporting, self-help guide, and novel writing. Our survey concludes with Albert Camus’s existentialist classic, The Plague (1947), a multivalent allegory for the rise of fascism, for the desolation of the human condition, and for the absurdity of modern existence. In order to engage these texts both critically and meaningfully, we will also consider Alfred Thomas’s historicist look at the language of violence, repression, and displacement in plague literature; Susan Sontag’s scathing reflection on the moralisation, politicisation, and metaphorisation of diseases; and Jean Baudrillard’s repatriation of death from modern repression through the primal acts of symbolic exchange (sacrifice, cannibalism, feasting, etc.).
READING TEXTS:
I. Primary
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron, translated by Guido Waldman with introduction and notes by Jonathan Usher, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-954041-9) (Read Author’s Foreword, First Day Introduction, I.1, I.2, III.6, IV.5, Ninth Day Introduction, IX.1, X.8, Conclusion)
Camus, Albert. The Plague, Vintage International, 2021. (ISBN 978-0-593-08209-6)
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year, edited with introduction and notes by Cynthia Wall, Penguin Books, 2003. (ISBN 978-0140437850)
Thucydides. Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strasler with introduction by Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press, 2008. (Provided)
II. Secondary
Baudrillard, Jean. “Political Economy and Death.” Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, SAGE, 2017. (ISBN 978-1-4739-0758-4) (Read Ch. 5)
Slack, Paul. Plague: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP, 2021. (ISBN 978-0-19-887111-8) (Read Ch. 3-6)
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors¸ Picador, 2001. (ISBN 978-0312420130) (Read Ch. 1-2, 5-9)
Thomas, Alfred. “Introduction: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19.” Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp.1-41. (Provided)