Of Bodies, Families, and Communities: Refiguring the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Hovanec, Caroline

doi:10.1353/lm.2011.0314

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…She makes a good claim about how the text presents "a carefully fictionalized version of [the author's] experience" (366) -which this article will examine in order to explore the text as a specifically modernist response to trauma. However, it is no less true that critics such as Catherine Belling (2009), David Davis (2011) and Caroline Hovanec (2011) have advanced quite insightful studies focused on reading the story as a record of personal trauma, motivated by biographical accounts such as Givner's, which Davis summarizes as follows:…”

Section: Unearthing Memories Of a Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Illness from “The Dead Cold Light of Tomorrow”: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Times of COVID-19

Valverde

2022

Miscelánea

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The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), considered by many as the paradigmatic American narrative of that pandemic. Following the trend set by most critics of Porter, this article explores the intersections of memory and fiction in the novella, but shifting attention to our present-day response, assessed as a critical tool that provides renewed insight into the mysteries of Porter’s late-modernist text. Revisited in a context in which cultural memories of the 1918 influenza have been awakened by our own traumatic experience with COVID-19, this article seeks to probe the uncertainties in Porter’s aestheticized trauma narrative. The aim is to investigate the hypothesis that our contemporary reading of Pale Horse, Pale Rider illuminates the modernist obscurities in the text and, in consequence, raises the possibility of transcending the limitations of language and myth exhibited in the text, providing new meanings through connection and remembrance.

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Section: Unearthing Memories Of a Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Illness from “The Dead Cold Light of Tomorrow”: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Times of COVID-19

Valverde

2022

Miscelánea

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“…Other narrative plays were based on historical epidemics, such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year or Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron ( Wigand, Becker, and Steger 2020 ; Withington 2020 ). The biggest pandemic in the last century, the so-called ‘Spanish Influenza’, has been described as not very fruitful in this sense, even if it produced famous novels such as Katherine A Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider or John O’Hara’s The Doctor Son ( Honigsbaum 2018 ; Hovanec 2011 ). The overlapping with another disaster like World War I has been argued as one of the reasons explaining this scarce production of fictional works ( Honigsbaum 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A mirror in fiction: drawing parallelisms between Camus’sLa Pesteand COVID-19

Pérez-Romero

2021

Med Humanities

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COVID-19 represents one of the most challenging global health issues in modern times. However, as epidemics have affected humans since our origins, many before us have described how significantly they compromise human lives. Leaving apart the aspects more linked to medicine and health sciences, we focus here on analysing how epidemics force people to change their habits, what type of emotions and behaviours they promote, and which roles are played by different social actors. For such a purpose, especially if we wish to draw some parallels between past epidemics and COVID-19, historical records seemed to be more suitable than literary works. Nonetheless, we have taken this approach relying on La Peste (Albert Camus, 1947), a novel based on a fictional epidemic of plague in the Algerian town of Oran. Far from creating a barrier separating fiction from reality, this reading allowed us to establish several links with our current situation. Recognising that context and solutions vary widely between the two scenarios, core matters concerning epidemics seemed to remain invariable. The important role of data and statistics, the leadership acquired by health authorities, the separations of relatives or the negative effects on trade and business are some issues which took place in Oran as well as nowadays. Besides that, epidemics also affect humans at an individual level, and certain thoughts and feelings in La Peste’s main characters may make us identify with our own fears and desires.

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Reflecting on Health and Illness Through the Lens of the HIV Epidemic in Uganda

Seeley

Mugisha

2022

Aging With HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Of Bodies, Families, and Communities: Refiguring the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Cited by 9 publications

References 19 publications

Reading Illness from “The Dead Cold Light of Tomorrow”: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Times of COVID-19

Reading Illness from “The Dead Cold Light of Tomorrow”: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Times of COVID-19

A mirror in fiction: drawing parallelisms between Camus’sLa Pesteand COVID-19

Reflecting on Health and Illness Through the Lens of the HIV Epidemic in Uganda

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