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Starting with Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800) as one of the earliest representations and appropriations of yellow fever in American literature, the epidemic and pandemic spread of diseases has remained a recurrent subject in American culture. While authors may refer to actual diseases, however, these representations often function as metaphors with "built-in mythologies," as Susan Sontag has famously argued. Evoking pandemics, on the other hand, fictions may also feed into what Barry Glassner has called "culture(s) of fear."
In this seminar, we will read, (watch) and analyze a range of fictions that deal with epidemic and pandemic diseases, from extracts from Brown's writing to short stories (e.g., E.A. Poe's "The Masque of the Read Death" (1842), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's "Zerviah Hope" (1880)), to Ling Ma's Severance (2018) and the film Silent Night (2021). We will ask what cultural work these narratives perform in as well as beyond their specific historical contexts of publication (or release). |
