ENCW 202 Spring 2020
Posted in coronavirus, Point of View, Reality on Apr 10th, 2020
Through “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” Saunders examines the American middle class’s anxieties about social mobility and status. His story spotlights an all too real social group that lives in fear of falling victim to an ever-widening wealth gap. The rereader has to consider our own biases and prejudices through carefully constructed narrative empathy and satiric […]
Posted in Art, coronavirus on Apr 9th, 2020
Given that we have just read one of George Saunders’s stories, I thought you might appreciate the letter he recently sent to his students. It was reprinted in this week’s New Yorker: A Letter to My Students as We Face the Pandemic April 3, 2020 By George Saunders Jeez, what a hard and depressing and scary […]
Posted in coronavirus on Apr 1st, 2020
I was in Georgia for spring break with the lacrosse team. The Athletic Trainer and I were stretching out my legs a few hours before a game and I asked her about her thoughts on the topic. She said, “As long as the administration like me, Jodi and Coach aren’t worried about it then you […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, pestilence on Mar 28th, 2020
In an essay in the March 30 issue of the New Yorker entitled “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About,” Jill Lepore offers a wide-ranging, squirm-inducing discussion of the “literature of pestilence.” Early in the article she writes: The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, […]
Posted in Captivity, coronavirus, dystopia, Isolation on Mar 23rd, 2020
This morning I came across a brief article online about social distancing and its relation to Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Published at Slate, the article is titled “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era,” and the author, a D.C.-based writer by the name of Joshua Keating, draws parallels between the permanent disappearances in Ogawa’s novel and the […]
Posted in coronavirus, Fragility on Mar 20th, 2020
Here is another interesting article, one that discusses both Albert Camus’s novel The Plague and Elia Kazan’s film Panic in the Streets. The essay’s author, J. Hoberman, writes: Camus’s Plague and Kazan’s Panic are both set in port cities open to the world and feature dedicated medical protagonists who struggle against apathetic authorities. The Plague evokes the […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, fear, Isolation, Loneliness on Mar 19th, 2020
Throughout this course we have explored the realm of fantastic in fiction and the amount of varieties within the category. If we were to have read a story about a pandemic that caused mass hysteria and isolation just a couple months ago, before the pandemic became a force to be reckoned with, we would have […]
Posted in coronavirus, fear, Horror, Social Fears on Mar 19th, 2020
Upon reading many of the blog posts this week relating to COVID-19, I noticed a lot of us talked about the dystopian genre or various works of literature we were reminded of. In the class Deviant Forms and Bodies with Professor Nevison, we’ve talked a lot about how different monsters reflect different cultural and societal […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 19th, 2020
As I was reading OHYOS I kept trying to pin down the fantastic elements. But there were so so many and none of them were fantastic enough to be fantastic in my mind. No matter what I was reading (a man followed by butterflies, people paying to view ice, a girl just floating up and […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, Fragility on Mar 19th, 2020
The outbreak of Covid-19 brings the fantastic into the non-fiction. In this class, we discuss the fantastic and scary aspects of stories, not our current state. According to the CDC, the number of cases was 4,226 on March 16th for the United States. Today, March 18th, the number is 9,345. World wide the virus has infected 219,228. If […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia on Mar 19th, 2020
I read a post on social media that said: “Sometimes I feel like this year is being written by a four-year-old, a lot of people got sick so they bought a lot of toilet paper and stayed home.” This unfathomable idea, or what was supposed to be incomprehensible, of COVID-19, has set people out on […]
Posted in coronavirus, Disappearance on Mar 19th, 2020
For a moment, take yourself out of reality. Pretend that what is happening is on a television screen or the pages of a novel. It seems far-fetched, almost impossible to imagine as reality. It might even seem like a tired concept. After all, how many movies are based around a mysterious pandemic sweeping the nation? […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia on Mar 18th, 2020
In my history classes, people always joked about the fact that we were overdue for a plague, likely thinking it wouldn’t happen. Now here we are, cancelling large-scale events, closing down schools for the rest of the year, hoarding toilet paper, and locking ourselves away while preparing for the worst. Even returning to Sweet Briar […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia, Loneliness on Mar 18th, 2020
Receiving emails all stating the same thing, hearing the news all reciting the same scripts, it brings to mind a few familiarities. Naturally, the first thing that came to my mind was the movie Contagion released in 2011. The idea of a pandemic sweeping the planet and taking out certain people. But it also reminds me […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, Fragility, Loneliness, Longing for Answers on Mar 16th, 2020
This pandemic is undoubtedly fantastic. It makes me think of The Memory Police. In comparison, the current situation with the coronavirus (COVID-19) is temporary (hopefully), whereas in the novel, they were permanent, and we retain our memories of the things we have lost. Our freedom has been limited. We must practice social distancing and for […]
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia on Mar 16th, 2020
In my email this morning, I asked you to think a bit about the current circumstances we face — the pandemic created by the novel coronavirus, the social isolation being imposed on our society and throughout much of the world, and the myriad ways in which our lives have been abruptly interrupted and altered — and […]