How Could F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ NOT Mention the Flu Pandemic of 1918?
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his literary contemporaries ignored the 1918-1919 pandemic. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Reading Pandemics
Colonial Pandemics and Indigenous Futurism in Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor
Concepts within indigenous futurism such as Native slipstream, First Contact, Indigenous Science, and Native Apocalypse, help shape emerging narratives about Indigenous futures.
Distance Remakes the Heart in Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’
Throughout Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez depicts love as an infectious disease. Must we quarantine from it?
Parable Pandemics: Octavia E. Butler and Racialized Labor
Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, informed by a deep understanding of the intersectionality of dying ecologies, disease, and structural racism, exposes the ways capitalism's insatiable hunger for profit eclipses humanitarian responses to pandemics.
Pandemic, Hope, Defiance, and Protest in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
Shakespeare's well known romantic tale Romeo and Juliet, written during a pandemic, has a surprisingly hopeful message about defiance and protest.
AIDS Play ‘The Normal Heart’ Is a Guide During COVID-19 and Political Indifference
When national leadership isn't addressing a pandemic as it should, Larry Kramer, as playwright and activist, pens the only viable response: "Everyone's entitled to good medical care. If you're not getting it, you've got to fight for it."
Parallels of HIV/AIDS in Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ and COVID-19 in Trump’s America
Tony Kushner's Angels in America foreshadows our current state of sick politics and bodies and, in particular, the presence of Trump in a time of plague.
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Cookbooks and Contagion: Recipes for Caring from Fannie Farmer
Cookbooks are rarely read as political or even narrative texts. However, alongside the recipes and lists of ingredients is often rich information about the ideologies and social structures that the foods are consumed within.
Pandemic from the Janitor’s Point of View
Timothy Sheard's murder mystery One Foot in the Grave explores pandemic in a hospital from the point of view of the lowliest, aka "essential", staff.
Chaucer’s Plague Tales
In 18 months, the "Great Pestilence" of 1348-49 killed half of England's population, and by 1351 half the population of the world. Chaucer's plague tales reveal the conservative edges of an astonishingly innovative medieval poet.
Poe, Pandemic, and Underlying Conditions
To read Edgar Allan Poe in the time of pandemic, we need to appreciate a very different aspect of his perspective—not that of a mimetic artist but of the political economist.
Taking a Page About Community and Responsibility from Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’
Initially, the city of Oran does not take care of its most vulnerable populations in Camus’ The Plague, and as a result, the city suffers for it. This parallels today’s COVID-19 world.