Molecular Mimicry, Realism, and the Collective Memory of Pandemics.: Narrative Strategies of COVID-19 Fiction

From Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) to Jim Shepard’s Phase Six (2021), contemporary pandemic fiction relies largely on narrative strategies of continuity and the familiar, including authenticity or “reality effects” (Roland Barthes), reliable narrators, focalizers with backgrounds in medicine or science, and a structural pattern of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative.” This paper reads conventional narrative patterns of pandemic fiction figuratively as a form of “molecular mimicry,” akin to the biomedical strategy by which viruses override immune systems and gain access to the interior of cells. Like Trojan horses, I argue, frameworks of narrative reliability and authority tend to be more successful in wheeling in specific normative representations, which stabilize given hierarchies. By contrast, The Decameron Project (2020), a “collective narrative” of twenty-nine short stories written in response to the COVID-19 situation in 2020, exhibits a significant increase in narrative and cognitive uncertainty. My analysis of stories by David Mitchell, Liz Moore, Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, and others traces various functions of unstable narration through multilayered realities, unreliability, intertextuality, and self-reflexiveness, ultimately uncovering what may be a literary analogy to mRNA vaccines. The Decameron Project, I argue, not only diagnoses a growing unease with discourses of tacit objectivity, but it marks an important contribution to the emerging cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic

Molecular Mimicry, Realism, and the Collective Memory of Pandemics. Narrative Strategies of COVID-19 Fiction

From Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) to Jim Shepard’s Phase Six (2021), contemporary pandemic fiction relies largely on narrative strategies of continuity and the familiar, including authenticity or “reality effects” (Roland Barthes), reliable narrators, focalizers with backgrounds in medicine or science, and a structural pattern of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative.” This paper reads conventional narrative patterns of pandemic fiction figuratively as a form of “molecular mimicry,” akin to the biomedical strategy by which viruses override immune systems and gain access to the interior of cells. Like Trojan horses, I argue, frameworks of narrative reliability and authority tend to be more successful in wheeling in specific normative representations, which stabilize given hierarchies. By contrast, The Decameron Project (2020), a “collective narrative” of twenty-nine short stories written in response to the COVID-19 situation in 2020, exhibits a significant increase in narrative and cognitive uncertainty. My analysis of stories by David Mitchell, Liz Moore, Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, and others traces various functions of unstable narration through multilayered realities, unreliability, intertextuality, and self-reflexiveness, ultimately uncovering what may be a literary analogy to mRNA vaccines. The Decameron Project, I argue, not only diagnoses a growing unease with discourses of tacit objectivity, but it marks an important contribution to the emerging cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic

“Untenanted by any tangible form”

In the current Covid-19 crisis, masks have become a ubiquitous sight in social situations. As visual signifiers of both protection and containment, they emblematize the very risk which they serve to prevent. Departing from the multiple functions of the mask in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” — a story published decades before the emergence of modern virology — this paper reads recent fictionalizations of pandemics as diagnostic tools of larger social, political, and cultural shifts. Taking Poe’s story as a programmatic blueprint, my interest is particularly in the correlation between (narrative) representation and political power in contexts of illness. Given that minorities are often disproportionally affected by, and blamed for, epidemics, my analysis targets not only the discursive and semantic strategies of “outbreak narratives” (Priscilla Wald), but the complicity of these strategies in notions of cultural difference. Through the trope of the mask, I argue, the nexus of “the visible and invisible” that Foucault sees at the heart of modern medicine can be reconceptualized along narratological lines. In addition to more detailed analyses of Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (2020), my reading also relies on novels by other contemporary authors

Transnational Debts: The Cultural Memory of Navajo Code Talkers in World War II

Even 70 years after it ended, World War II continues to endure in the global imagination. In the United States, images of the “Good War” prevail, and memories of the soldiers have been widely translated into displays of national heroism and glorification. At the same time, the celebratory narrative of national unity and democratic triumph is undercut by the counter-histories and experiences of the 44,000 Native American soldiers who served in this war. Their experiences and memories—in oral histories, interviews, as well as in fiction and film—challenge the narrative of a glorious nation in unison, especially in light of the historical conflicts between American nationalism and Native American political sovereignty. This paper investigates the specific memorial debt owed to the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II. Focusing on John Woo’s film Windtalkers (2002), Joseph Bruchac’s novel Code Talker (2005), and Chester Nez’s memoir Code Talker (2011), I will inquire into the field of tension between tribal, national, and transnational identities and explore the ways in which these tensions are negotiated at different sites of commemoration, especially in contrast to the distorted, consumer-oriented memory produced by the Hollywood industry. Through codes of orality, communal identity, and historicity, I argue, counter-strategies of narrating and remembering World War II not only decisively shape a revisionist writing of recent history and enrich the multicultural narrative of ‘America’ by Indigenous voices, but they also substantially contribute to current debates about transnational American identities

Gender and the Performance of Local and Global Conflicts in Postmodern and Contemporary Drama: LeRoi Jones, José Rivera, David H. Hwang

Raussert W. Gender and the Performance of Local and Global Conflicts in Postmodern and Contemporary Drama: LeRoi Jones, José Rivera, David H. Hwang. In: Achilles J, Bergmann I, Däwes B, eds. Contemporary Drama In English: Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English. Trier: WVT; 2003: 85-103