A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

Rita Charon

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Chapter 1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

于Pandemic Storytelling

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Rita Charon

Rita Charon
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类型:: 章节

Page Range:: 15–36

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004716681_003

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This essay provides a view of the COVID-19 pandemic from New York City throughout the siege and as the global phenomenon of SARS-CoV-2. Opening with first-person accounts of the streets of Manhattan at the onset of the pandemic, the essay recruits published voices of physicians, nurses, and emergency teams who faced the horrors of this new, fatal disease whose nature and treatment were unknown. Complexity science models are proposed as means to conceptualize the phenomenon.

As background, the essay provides a précis of the discipline of medical humanities, sometimes called health humanities, with a brief historical summary and some landmark publications and consequential events in the development of this still-emerging field. Medical humanities’ conceptual interrogation and activist critique of the so-called COVID story-telling boom observed that storytelling created the reality of COVID-19, combining the polarizing statements of the resentful with assertions of the scientific evidence. Examples of COVID activism at Columbia University are described as an effort to provide care—emotional and cognitive—to large circles of clinicians, patients, and trainees both on location at Columbia and globally through the virtual world of free Zoom.

A metalepsis in the essay searchlights the contributions of narrative scholars Hanna Meretoja, Susan Lanser, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and Sharon Marcus. Their scholarly work during and before the pandemic lend ballast to the ferocity of the pandemic while taking up the tensions among close reading, distant reading, political reading, and reading as if for death.

Following the pandemic’s temporal arc, the essay turns chronologically to George Floyd’s murder and the resultant urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, transforming the timbre of COVID from biological dread to activist protest. Powerful—mostly peaceful—protests targeted anti-Black racism and police violence along with related injustices toward persons with disabilities, refugees, incarcerated persons, and the economically disenfranchised. The essay closes with a distinction between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission, suggesting that complexity/systems approaches can help us to achieve the fusion of the sun instead of the fission of the atomic bomb as our model for proceeding into the future.

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Pandemic Storytelling

丛编： Narratives and Mental Health, 卷： 3

ISBN:: 9789004716681

出版社:: Brill

印刷出版日期:: 18 Dec 2024

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

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