Pandemic Storytelling

Front Cover
Half Title
Series Informations
Title Page
Copyrights Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: What is Pandemic Storytelling?
	Bibliography
PART 1: Pandemic Storytelling: Issues of Form and Structure
1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion
	1 Voices of COVID
	2 What Is Pandemic Storytelling For?
	3 A Metalepsis
	4 From COVID to Black Lives Matter
	5 And Then?
	Bibliography
2 Fiction, the Pandemic, and the Rhetorical Approach to Fictionality
	1 Introduction
	2 Thought Experiment: How to Effectively Fictionalize the Pandemic
	3 “Gone” and the Compulsion to Fictionality
	4 “Worms” and the Line between Fictionality and Lying
	5 Conclusions
PART 2: The Central Role of Experientiality in Crisis Narratives
3 Illness Trauma, Life-Writing, and Pandemic Storytelling
	1 Introduction
	2 Narrative Hermeneutics: Exploring the Dynamics of Master and Counter Narratives
	3 Confronting the Normative Narrative of Illness
	4 Writing as a Way of Practicing Agency
	5 Traumatic Anxiety about the Possibility of a Lost Future
	6 Narrative Awareness: Questioning the Dominant Battle Narrative of Illness
	7 Narrative Imagination: Warning Fires, Crossroads, and Metamorphoses
	8 Narrative Dialogicality: Towards a Sense of Shared Vulnerability
	9 Conclusions
	Acknowledgement
	Bibliography
4 Crisis and Creativity: Poetry in Times of Corona
	1 Introduction
	2 Narrative, Poetry, and the Corona Crisis: Points of Convergence
	3 Before and After: Time in the Selected Corona Poems
	4 Conclusions: Penning Poetry as Writing Cure
PART 3: The Uncertainty and Unreliability of Stories about Corona
5 Certainty and Uncertainty in Pandemic Storytelling: Tales from the US, the UK, and Beyond
	1 Introduction
	2 The Changing Story
	3 Narrative Anxiety (Mark Freeman)
	4 The View from a Different Window (Molly Andrews)
	5 “There Must Be Some Way out of Here”: Living in and with Uncertainty
6 COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability
	1 Introduction
	2 Narrating COVID-19: From Info- and Visiodemic to Subjective Evidence
	3 Stitched Narratives and Unreliable Bodies
	4 Collective Narrating and Sharing: a Transmedial Approach
	Acknowledgment
	Bibliography
PART 4: Time, Temporalities, and the Process of Waiting
7 No Sense of an Ending: Narrating Pandemic Temporalities
	1 Introduction
	2 Narrating a Sense of Lost Time
	3 “Besondere Helden”
	4 Conclusions
8 Imaginary Places: Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Times of Crisis
	1 Introduction
	2 Letters from the Post-Pandemic Future
	3 Regularities and Singularities
	4 Home, or Domestic and Non-Domestic Spaces: a Case Study
	5 Conclusions
	Bibliography
PART 5: Narratives as Projections of Possible Futures
9 Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World: Speculations about the Post-Pandemic Future
	1 Introduction: “We Are Not Numbers”
	2 The Search for Literary Models
	3 The Visitation in Teju Cole’s “City of Pain” (2020)
	4 Negotiating Togetherness: Karen Jennings’ “Coverings” (2022)
	5 Conclusions
	Bibliography
10 Pandemic Stories as Crisis Narratives
	1 Introduction
	2 The Corona Virus Crisis as a “Black Swan” and the “Battle” over Its Narrative: Pandemic Storytelling as Crisis Narratives
	3 “Crisis Compared to What?”: the Medial Crisis Scenario of the Corona Pandemic and Crisis Narratives as Diagnoses of the Present
	4 Crisis Narratives as Diagnoses of the Present: the Corona Pandemic as a Catalyst of Latent Crises, “Deep Crisis,” and/or “Patchwork Pandemic”
	5 The Corona Pandemic and the Potential of Its Contagious Narratives: the Proliferation of Crisis Narratives as Indicating an “Infodemic” and an Epistemological Crisis
	6 How Do We Want to Live? Crisis Narratives of the Corona Pandemic as a Critique of Unsustainable Forms of Life and Generator of Future Scenarios
	Bibliography
Index
Back Cover