Coming to Terms with a Crisis
This volume shows how various actors reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic through specific forms of representation and storytelling in popular culture, public discourse, and science communication.
Coming to Terms with a Crisis: Cultural Engagements with COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world as a (purportedly) novel situation with which people struggled to come to terms. The contributions to this volume show how various actors reacted to this pandemic through specific forms of representation and storytelling in popular culture, public discourse, and science communication. They demonstrate how these representations both leverage new media and resort to familiar scripts and characters to make sense of the situation. Thus, they uncover the transformative potential of narratives about epi-/pandemics across different domains and their contribution to the production of knowledge as well as the recalibration of norms and values.
Table of Contents
Coming to Terms with a Crisis: Introduction (Martin Butler, Sina Farzin, Fabian Hempel, and Michael Fuchs)
Pandemics Between Material Causes and Figurative/Ideological Interpretations (Małgorzata Sugiera)
Depicting SARS-CoV-2: A Weird Icon of (and for) the Anthropocene (Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler)
Viral Commemoration: Towards a Typology of COVID-19 Memorials (Ingrid Gessner)
Corona Fictions Anthologies: On the Compilation of Hispanophone and Francophone Corona Fictions During the First Lockdown (Yvonne Völkl)
Fiction as a Tool to Imagine the Pandemic: Insights form German, British, and US-American Print Media (Fabian Hempel and Sina Farzin)
A Year of “Very Historic Breakthroughs”? Scientific Breakthrough Claims and Narratives in the Public Reporting of Coronavirus Research in 2020 (Anton Kirchhofer)
Contagious Economic Failure? Discourses Around Zombie Firms in COVID-19-Ridden Germany and Italy (Till Hilmar, Rocco Paolillo, and Patrick Sachweh)
“Vacuna o muerte”: Latinx Political Cartoons as Vehicle to Raise COVID-19 Vaccination Awareness (Anna Marta Marini)
Donald Trump’s Viral Narratives and Shifting Pandemic Communication: A Search for Playful Affordances (2014–2021) (Sara Polak)
Confronting and Assuaging Pandemic Anxieties Through Horror Media in Christina Henry’s The Girl in Red (Alena Cicholewski)
Literary Reflections on the Institution of Science and COVID-19 (Fabian Hempel)
A World After the Pandemic: COVID-19 Narratives, Environment, and Histories of the Future (Jim Scown, Keir Waddington, and Martin Willis)
