COVID-19 narratives and layered temporality

Abstract

The essay outlines the ways in which narrative approaches to COVID-19 can draw on imaginative literature and critical oral history to resist the ‘closure’ often offered by cultural representations of epidemics. To support this goal, it analyses science and speculative fiction by Alejandro Morales and Tananarive Due in terms of how these works create alternative temporalities, which undermine colonial and racist medical discourse. The essay then examines a new archive of emerging autobiographical illness narratives, namely online Facebook posts and oral history samples by 'long COVID' survivors, for their alternate temporalities of illness.

Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty

“…The concept of the liminal period has been applied in the health field where considerable research has been conducted (Azim and Salem 2022;Kralik, Visentin, and van Loon 2006). Liminality has particular relevance in the context of COVID-19, characterised by contested information and medical uncertainty: especially in relation to issues of how best to protect populations from infection/reinfection, the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection and how to treat long COVID symptoms (Howell 2022).…”

“…Recent literature indicates that first-person narratives of COVID-19 illness are required in order to understand the ongoing and debilitating temporality of the illness and allow for documentation of the continuous human impact of the pandemic (Howell 2022). Roscoe (2009) reflects on the writing of poetry and prose as therapeutic acts of witness and posits that we make sense of our experiences by consigning them to story form, resulting in 'collective acts of sense-making'.…”

“…Since the advent of the COVID-19 crisis, scholarship using creative and arts-based methods such as visualisations created from indepth interviews (Lewis et al 2023), imaginative literature (Howell 2022), graphic narratives (Boileau and Johnson 2020;Venkatesan and Joshi 2022), diary writing (Gammel and Wang 2022) and photographic documentation of signs and outdoor spaces (Lupton 2022;Mosteanu 2021) have vividly portrayed the socio-spatialities, affective forces, multisensory dimensions and materialities of everyday life during the pandemic. In this article, we adopt an approach bringing together autoethnographic, dialogic and poetic inquiry to witness the suffering and document feelings of liminality, uncertainty and moral distress caused by COVID-19 from the perspective of a mother/carer.…”

A Qualitative Phenomenological Philosophy Analysis of Affectivity and Temporality in Experiences of COVID-19 and Remaining Symptoms after COVID-19 in Sweden

“…By so doing, the article contributes insights into medical humanities and the qualitative phenomenological philosophy of illness experiences. From early on in the pandemic, medical humanities studies emphasized the role of patient knowledge in the conceptualization and understanding of COVID-19 (e.g., Callard and Perego 2021) and pointed to "layered temporalities" of COVID-19 narrations focused, for example, on fragmentation and chronicity (Howell 2022). Further, past studies on the lived experience of symptoms following COVID-19 or of PCC (or Long-COVID) have included experiences of a wide range of symptoms, how the illness fluctuated over time, a sense of shame related to having remaining symptoms, fear (e.g., of not recovering and losing one's job), and how living with the remaining symptoms impacted on one's self-understanding (Cooper et al 2023;Callan et al 2022;Macpherson et al 2022), and, for example, feelings of guilt (Engwall et al 2022).…”

Health Preparedness and Narrative Rationality: A Call for Narrative Preparedness

“…It is important to stress at the outset that by narratives we do not mean works of fiction, as is often the case in the scholarly literature on narratives in the medical humanities, 10 , 11 nor is our understanding of narrative restricted to genres such as patients’ accounts of illness, as most recently evident in Howell 12 and is commonly the focus of narrative medicine. 13 , 14 Instead, we understand narrative as “the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world.” 15 Rather than a type of discourse, narration must be understood as a type of logic, a fundamental interpretation of the world that is articulated through all forms of discourse and inhabits our thinking.…”