Book contents
- Literature and Medicine
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Literature and Medicine
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Medico-Literary Pathways, Crossroads, and Side Streets
- Part I Origins: Histories
- Part II Developments: Forms
- Chapter 6 Illness and the ‘Fall’ of Language
- Chapter 7 Translating Chronic Pain and the Ethics of Reading in the Personal Essay
- Chapter 8 Physician-Poets and Vitalist Theories of Life
- Chapter 9 Healthcare Anecdotes and the Medically Anecdotal
- Chapter 10 Literary Realism and Mental Breakdown
- Chapter 11 Time and Narrative in the Age of Postnatural Death
- Chapter 12 Performance and/as Contagion in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Chapter 13 The Parallel Chart as Medico-Literary Practice
- Chapter 14 Articulating the Experiential in Graphic Medicine
- Part III Applications: Politics
- Afterword
- Index
Chapter 12 - Performance and/as Contagion in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
from Part II - Developments: Forms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Literature and Medicine
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Literature and Medicine
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Medico-Literary Pathways, Crossroads, and Side Streets
- Part I Origins: Histories
- Part II Developments: Forms
- Chapter 6 Illness and the ‘Fall’ of Language
- Chapter 7 Translating Chronic Pain and the Ethics of Reading in the Personal Essay
- Chapter 8 Physician-Poets and Vitalist Theories of Life
- Chapter 9 Healthcare Anecdotes and the Medically Anecdotal
- Chapter 10 Literary Realism and Mental Breakdown
- Chapter 11 Time and Narrative in the Age of Postnatural Death
- Chapter 12 Performance and/as Contagion in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Chapter 13 The Parallel Chart as Medico-Literary Practice
- Chapter 14 Articulating the Experiential in Graphic Medicine
- Part III Applications: Politics
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
Looking closely at significant changes in both fields – epidemiology and performance –the chapter attempts to disentangle their already naturalized interrelation in order to show their actual reciprocal relation in a new light of today’s socio-cultural context. It starts with a close reading of a recently published outbreak novel, Emily St. John Mandel’s ’Station Eleven’ (2014) which thematizes theatre as an art and way of life, albeit putting contagion and performance apart. Premised on that, the chapter demonstrates that the historically distinct epidemiological conceptualization of viruses which once inspired Artaud’s ’The Theatre and the Plague’ (1933) has little to do with the actual syndemic imaginary of viral diseases. In turn, this imaginary is employed here as a perspective from which to perceive and understand divergent performativity of today’s public space. Because it is public space where the critical entanglement of performance and contagion could be effectively spotlighted nowadays.
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- Literature and Medicine , pp. 204 - 220Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024