Arts
Explore your fears in this pandemic literature course next spring
By Rebecca Saloustros
On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Our lives have changed in so many ways since then, while the lives of so many others have ended. We’ve been left trying to make sense of it all. With this in mind, the Department of English decided to offer ENGL 121, From Plague to COVID: Literatures of Pandemic for spring 2021. This team-taught course will explore not only how pandemics have informed literature throughout history, but also how literature responds to and informs our experience of a pandemic.
ENGL 121 has no prerequisites and is open to undergraduates outside of the Department of English. Students who have never taken an English class before will meet an all-star cast of 10 English professors in this new course.
“We’ve been here before,” the course description for ENGL 121 tells us, and fittingly, the class begins with a 14th-century poem written during the Black Death.
“Not to take anything away from the pain and suffering of our current moment, but the Black Death was worse by every measure,” says professor David Coley, one of the ENGL 121 instructors. “By the time it ran its course, it had left about half of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa dead, and the changes resulting from that demographic collapse—social, economic, religious, cultural and literary—would ripple through the world for centuries. In that respect, the Black Death is the grisly benchmark by which pandemics tend to be measured.”
ENGL 121 moves from the Black Death to fiction that deals with other historical contagions, such as the 1918 Spanish flu and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The course reading list also includes imaginative constructions of fictional pandemics, like the zombie apocalypse horror novel, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
Professor Paul Budra, who is teaching this text, explains why he included it: “ENGL 121 is our ‘literature and culture’ course—the idea is to use literature as a tool for understanding specific cultural moments and movements. I like to teach horror fiction when I do this course because you can learn a great deal about a culture by what scares it. People also can't get enough zombies. WWZ is the best zombie novel that I've found.”
By looking at historical and fictional pandemics through literature like this, professor Ronda Arab says, “we can get glimpses into what can otherwise feel like a great unknown. We can face fears and worst-case scenarios, and we can consider our personal, psychic and societal responses and responsibilities. I feel like this course functions, as a lot of literature does, as a way to process our current social reality.”
Registration for the spring semester is open until Nov. 27, 2020.