Pandemic Protagonists

Description

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its containment measures such as lockdowns, social and physical distancing, or face coverings hit most of us unprepared. In order to better understand the individual and collective reactions to the pandemic outbreak, many turned to existing cultural productions holding pandemic knowledge. In March 2020, the reception of existing ‘pandemic fictions’ such as Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) or Wolfgang Peterson’s disaster movie Outbreak (1995) rose drastically. Simultaneously, we saw an enormous increase in what can be subsumed under the term ‘Corona Fictions’ across different media. These written and audiovisual productions process the new life circumstances and draw on everyday media and political discourses as well as on previous pandemic fictions (cf. Research Group Pandemic Fictions: 2020). Due to their capacity to convey their “knowledge to [their audiences] as experiential knowledge which can be reconstructed step by step, or even more, can be acquired by reliving it” (Ette: 2016, 5), pandemic and Corona Fictions provide the public with a first-hand account or (previously) experienced or imagined health crises and numerous possibilities of individual and collective (re)actions, represented by a variety of fictional main characters. Each of these pandemic protagonists show distinct (re)actions to the outbreak. Taken collectively, they offer an insight on how communities at large act in and react to epidemic/pandemic situations.

Period	1 Jun 2023 → 3 Jun 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Graz, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International