"This volume offers unique, interdisciplinary perspectives by evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting how the past, the present, and potential futures may be affected by pandemic storytelling. It explores the interplay between various disciplines that explore COVID-19 narratives or study the influence of pandemics on storytelling. The authors invite you to delve into the intricate social, cultural, and political dynamics between anthropocentric societies, human nature, and their implications for an understanding of our interactions with others and environments. Most importantly, this volume initiates insightful conversations, highlighting that in times of crisis the most valuable thing we can hold on to is human connection"--
This volume examines the interplay between disciplines exploring COVID-19 narratives and the influence of pandemics on storytelling, emphasizing the value of human connection during times of crises.
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: What is Pandemic Storytelling?
Jan Alber, Deborah de Muijnck, and Jessica Jumpertz
PART 1: Pandemic Storytelling: Issues of Form and Structure
1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion
Rita Charon
2 Fiction, the Pandemic, and the Rhetorical Approach to Fictionality: Roddy
Doyles Life without Children
James Phelan
PART 2: The Central Role of Experientiality in Crisis Narratives
3 Illness Trauma, Life-Writing, and Pandemic Storytelling
Hanna Meretoja
4 Crisis and Creativity: Poetry in Times of Corona
Jarmila Mildorf
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
Molly Andrews and Mark Freeman
6 COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability
in Postdigital Environments
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
PART 4: Time, Temporalities, and the Process of Waiting
7 No Sense of an Ending: Narrating Pandemic Temporalities
Christoph Singer
8 Imaginary Places: Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Times of Crisis
Marina Grishakova
PART 5: Narratives as Projections of Possible Futures
9 Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World Speculations about the
Post-Pandemic Future
Birgit Neumann
10 Pandemic Stories as Crisis Narratives: Competing Narratives of the Corona
Virus Pandemic as an Epistemological Crisis and a Crisis of Forms of Life
Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning
Index
Jan Alber, Prof. (1973) is Professor of New English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University, Giessen and Past President of the ISSN. He is currently working with Alice Bell on a UKRI project on the processing of post-postmodernist fictions of the digital.
Deborah de Muijnck, Dr. phil. (1988) is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus-Liebig University. Formerly a researcher at RWTH Aachen University, she was also an Affiliate at Harvard University and a Research Fellow at Graz University. She has published on cognitive narratology, post-trauma autobiographical storytelling, and in the medical humanities.
Jessica Jumpertz, M.A. (1992) is a research and teaching assistant at RWTH Aachen University. She is currently completing her PhD thesis on the representation of highly intelligent female characters in nineteenth and twentieth century English literature.
