Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World: Speculations about the Post-Pandemic Future

Birgit Neumann

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Chapter 9 Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World: Speculations about the Post-Pandemic Future

In: Pandemic Storytelling

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Birgit Neumann

Birgit Neumann
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 165–185

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004716681_011

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The essay engages with forms of narrative literature that have evolved during the COVID19- pandemic, focussing on the genre of speculative fiction. Speculative corona fiction, the essay argues, is a potent site in which the challenges and anxieties concerning the pandemic are negotiated. Examining the relations between genre, the contemporary and pandemics, the essay provides close readings of two short-stories, one by Nigerian American writer Teju Cole, the other one by Karen Jennings, a white South African author. It reveals how, in different though interrelated ways, Cole’s “City of Pain” (2000) and Jennings’ “Coverings” (2000) respond to a pandemic that has been ongoing and that renders pertinent Raymond Williams’ suggestion to fathom the present as a process of emergence. The readings put particular emphasis on the temporality inherent in speculative elements, showing how they configure complex entanglements between the past, present and future. As modes of pandemic storytelling, both stories derive their cultural relevance from embracing the speculative to challenge readers to imagine a different, possibly more just future and of other, more sustainable forms of sociality.

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Pandemic Storytelling

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 3

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004716681

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 18 Dec 2024

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 9 Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World: Speculations about the Post-Pandemic Future

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Pandemic Storytelling

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