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Mediated Vulnerabilities: Transforming Virginia Woolf’s Characters in Corona Fictions
Paulina Pająk
Pandemic Protagonists Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions, edited by Yvonne Völkl / Julia Obermayr / Elisabeth Hobisch, 2023
“We are all Mrs. Dalloway now”, announced The New Yorker (2020), succinctly capturing the pandemic wave of interest in Virginia Woolf’s works. Diverse au-diences, writers and artists have turned to Woolf’s writings on illness, survival and death, with a new awareness of their genesis in the aftermath of not only WWI but also of the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 (cf. Outka 2019). This article examines Corona Fictions, available in their digital form to the English-speaking global audiences – a special focus is given to transtextual and transmedia protagonists, originating in Woolf’s works yet revealing reactions to the recent Covid‐19 pandemic. Drawing on current research on the poetics of vulnerability (cf. Ganteau 2015) and postmodern transformations of Woolf’s characters (cf. Latham 2021), this article argues that these pandemic works use Woolfian characters across different media to create mediated representations of vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic.
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Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions. Conference Report
Yvonne Völkl
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
The interdisciplinary conference entitled Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions was held as part of the Corona Fictions project 2 from June 1 st to June 3 rd , 2023, at Graz University of Technology. It marked the culmination of a year of joint work on the recently published volume of the same title 3 , which stood at the center of the conference. Within this framework, the organising committee 4 invited all scholars whose contributions had appeared in the volume.
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Corona Fictions Agents: Cinematic Representations of Hopeful Pandemic Protagonists in Early Corona Fictions
Julia Obermayr
Pandemic Protagonists
During the Covid-19 pandemic numerous early Corona Fictions (including films) emerged, creating a multitude of pandemic protagonists across media. The aim of this article is to examine these protagonists of two European Corona Fictions comedies: 8 Rue de l'Humanité (2021) and ¡Ni te me acerques! (2020). Applying Stuart Hall's (1997) circuit of culture lens (encoding/decoding model), as well as various concepts of hope (e.g.
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Corona Fictions Database – Documentation of a Bibliographical Structuring System
Elisabeth Hobisch
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
The Corona Fictions Database 2 is an essential part of the research project Corona Fictions. On Viral Narratives in Times of Pandemics funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (P 34571-G). The team members are Elisabeth Hobisch, Yvonne Völkl (project leader), Julia Obermayr, Tommaso Meozzi, Albert Göschl and Daniel Milkovits. 3 As a result of the Covid-19 health crisis declared as a pandemic in early March 2020 (cf. Adhanom Ghebreyesus 2020), political and media discourse focused mainly on medical and economical solutions to thwart and contain the pandemic. The public, however, largely turned to cultural productions in order to make meaning of and to cope with this unprecedented event (cf. Obermayr/Völkl 2022a). The main purpose of the Corona Fictions project is to collect, categorize and analyze the cultural production resulting from this global pandemic, in regards to its social function and constitutive power determining how we perceive this extraordinary situation. In order to understand the composition, compilation and functioning of the Corona Fictions Database, we describe in the following the corpus entering the bibliographical database, the process of data collection and structuringincluding the specific challenges encountered in this processas well as the functionality of the database. Corona Fictions When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, on the one hand, people started to consult existing 'pandemic fictions', meaning "literary and cultural productions, which rely strongly on the representation and functionalization of epi-and pandemics" (Research Group Pandemic Fictions 2020, 323). On the other hand, they started to produce their own narratives in diverse media to process these extraordinary experiences. Within weeks and months, authors and directorsprofessional and non professional alikecreated and distributed countless diaries, anthologies of essays and poems, web series and music videos, often online. Knowing that generally cultural productions not only document life as it is, but also determine and modify our view of the world, 4 the main objective of our open access database is to document Corona Fictions, understood as a constitutive factor of what people experience as the Covid-19 pandemic and as a future cultural heritage. Our main focus lies on the romance languages Spanish, Italian and French, but as the pandemicaccording to its natureis happening on a global scale, we are also inclined to additionally include cultural productions in other languages into our database.
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Narrar la pandemia. Una introducción a formas, temas y metanarrativas de las Corona Fictions
Elisabeth Hobisch
Pensamiento, Pandemia y Big Data
En marzo de 2020, cuando la OMS declaró la pandemia de COVID-19, 1 de repente, las sociedades del mundo entero se encontraron en estado de emergencia. Mientras la política empezó a consultar a especialistas médicos, tales como virólogxs, epidemiólogxs y expertxs en salud pública, la gente empezó a gestionar la situación consultando producciones culturales existentes sobre situaciones similares. Hubo, por ejemplo, una lectura pública en línea de La peste (1947) de Albert Camus en Austria 2 y en las librerías se agotaron los libros relacionados con enfermedades y epidemias. A la vez, la gente se puso a escribir con el fin de documentar la situación, de consolar y entretener, 3 pero también para mejor gestionar las propias experiencias traumáticas que resultaban de la pandemia. 4 Sin embargo, debido al actual paisaje mediático, la repercusión de la situación experimentada como excepcional-hubo siempre epidemias, enfermedades
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Uplifting Corona Fictions: No tengas miedo, Ya pasará and Andrà tutto bene
Julia Obermayr
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic continuously affects people around the world, exposing the already existing social interconnectedness and economic interdependencies of our times. Revisiting pandemic fiction, as well as, crises narratives in literature and other cultural productions in general, has suddenly become a coping strategy to counteract the effects of physical distancing, but in particular the experiences of lockdowns. Interestingly, since the early stages of the pandemic in the Western world in spring 2020, numerous artists have not only dissected the reality of confinement across diverse genres but more so provided the public with uplifting content in various audiovisual formatssuch as short films, web series, and music videos. In this article we will mainly take on the latter producing material about the pandemic during the pandemic, portraying the human need for connection, uplifting narratives and images. Across national, cultural, and linguistic borders, Corona Fictions (cf. Research Group Pandemic Fictions 2020) demonstrate how fragile our social fabric is while, at the same time, strengthening the feeling of solidarity, togetherness/ unity, and cohesion. Hence, this article will examine Corona Fictions music videos for their understanding and depiction of uplifting narratives in these challenging times.
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From Pandemic to Corona Fictions: Narratives in Times of Crises
Yvonne Völkl, Albert Göschl, Julia Obermayr
in Marina O. Hertrampf: "Corona: crisis or change? How crises unsettle and change cultures.", PhiN, 24 (Beiheft), 2020
After the announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020, the corona crisis discourse quickly turned into a global pandemic crisis discourse. This discourse was and still is not limited to media and politics, but also penetrates into fictional productions constituting a new corpus, which can be subsumed under the term Corona Fictions. However, Corona Fictions pertain to a more generally assumed genre of pandemic fiction, i.e. literary and cultural productions, which rely strongly on the representation and functionalization of pandemics. Thus, Corona Fictions not only draw on everyday media and political discourse, but also on previous pandemic fiction. Analyzing Corona Fictions as part of pandemic fiction, this paper reveals parallel structures between pandemic narratives and the classical drama.
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Lockdown-Corona-Fictions als Seismograph für sozialen Zusammenhalt
Julia Obermayr
Sozialer Zusammenhalt in der Krise
Fiktionale Erzählungen dienen als Spiegel der Welt. Egal ob in Liebes-, Helden-oder Katastrophengeschichten, zumeist erzählen sie vom zwischenmenschlichen Miteinander. An solchen Geschichten lassen sich das Ausmaß sozialer Beziehungen, emotionaler Verbundenheit sowie von Gemeinwohlorientierung innerhalb von Gruppen ablesen, die als Determinanten für sozialen Zusammenhalt angesehen werden können. So geben auch die fiktionalen Werke, die im Zuge der Corona-Krise entstehen, sogenannte Corona Fictions, Indikationen dafür, wie gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt vor allem in der Anfangsphase der Krise er-und gelebt wurde. Ebenfalls zeigen sie, dass die globale Ausnahmesituation zu kreativen Formen des Miteinanders unter den Literatur-und Kulturschaffenden geführt hat.
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Protagonisti in cerca di una nuova agency: la pandemia di Covid-19 nella letteratura italiana
Tommaso Meozzi
Pandemic Protagonists, 2023
Through the concept of 'agency', the article analyzes three works published in Italy at the beginning of 2020 which focus on the psychological and social consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic-Come il mare in un bicchiere by Chiara Gamberale, the anthology Andrà tutto bene, and Nel contagio by Paolo Giordano-, highlighting the strategies through which the protagonists try, despite the crisis, to maintain a coherent narrative of themselves that integrates past, present and future. The following aspects are analyzed in particular: the temporal structure of the narratives, the dialectic between autobiography and references to the dystopian genre, the recovery of a shared symbolic plane and the use of metaphors expressing collective agency.
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Einleitung. Menge und Krankheit. Narrative Muster
Milan Herold
Menge und Krankheit, 2023
É coutant, en e�fet, les cris d'allé gresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allé gresse é tait toujours menacé e. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu'on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaî t jamais, qu'il peut rester pendant des dizaines d'anné es endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu'il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-ê tre, le jour viendrait où , pour le malheur et l'enseignement des hommes, la peste ré veillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.1
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