A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

Rita Charon

Jump to Content

Chapter 1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

In: Pandemic Storytelling

Author:

Rita Charon

Rita Charon
Search for other papers by Rita Charon in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed

Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 15–36

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

Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):

€42.00€35.00 excl. VAT

Add to Cart

Redeem Access Token

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.

Citation Info

Save
Cite
Email this content

Share link with colleague or librarian

You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian:
Email this content
or copy the link directly:

https://brill.edhh.ma/abstract/book/9789004716681/BP000011.xml
The link was not copied. Your current browser may not support copying via this button.

Link copied successfully

Collapse
Expand

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

Front Matter

Back Matter

ProCite

RefWorks

Reference Manager

BibTeX

Zotero

EndNote

Metrics

	All Time	Past 365 days	Past 30 Days
Abstract Views	1456	1128	153
Full Text Views	20	13	2
PDF Views & Downloads	14	9	1

African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
Ancient Near East and Egypt	Human Rights and Humanitarian Law	Musicology
Art History	International Law	Philosophy
Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Biology	Languages and Linguistics	Social Sciences
Book History and Cartography	Life Sciences	Theology and World Christianity
Classical Studies	Literature and Cultural Studies

Subjects

Authors

Open Access

Product Information

Company

Contact

Chapter 1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion

Citation Info

Share link with colleague or librarian

Pandemic Storytelling

Table of Contents

References

Metrics

Metrics