Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19123
Carmen Marimón Llorca, Ana Pano Alamán
La pandemia por covid-19 ha tenido repercusión en todos los aspectos de la vida de los individuos, incluidas las formas de relacionarse y de establecer vínculos con los otros. La lengua, como herramienta comunicativa esencial, también se ha visto afectada por la nueva situación y, de forma excepcionalmente rápida, hablantes e instituciones han incorporado nuevos términos y dotado de nuevas significaciones a palabras ya existentes. Por su parte, los expertos -lingüistas, académicos, periodistas- se han pronunciado ante estas novedades y, al hacerlo, han evidenciado su actitud ante la lengua. En este trabajo se estudia el eco que las palabras relacionadas con la covid-19 han tenido en los medios y se analiza, desde una perspectiva crítica, la recepción de los nuevos términos, la toma de postura ideológica y los grados de purismo lingüístico y social que se manifiestan. El análisis se ha llevado a cabo sobre un corpus de columnas sobre la lengua (CSL) publicadas entre marzo de 2020 y abril de 2021 en la prensa española. El hecho de utilizar textos metalingüísticos ha permitido no solo recopilar una parte importante del nuevo vocabulario sino también analizar la toma de postura de cada uno de los columnistas, observadores y árbitros de la lengua viva de la comunidad.
{"title":"Ideologías lingüísticas y pandemia: un análisis de textos metalingüísticos en la prensa española","authors":"Carmen Marimón Llorca, Ana Pano Alamán","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19123","url":null,"abstract":"La pandemia por covid-19 ha tenido repercusión en todos los aspectos de la vida de los individuos, incluidas las formas de relacionarse y de establecer vínculos con los otros. La lengua, como herramienta comunicativa esencial, también se ha visto afectada por la nueva situación y, de forma excepcionalmente rápida, hablantes e instituciones han incorporado nuevos términos y dotado de nuevas significaciones a palabras ya existentes. Por su parte, los expertos -lingüistas, académicos, periodistas- se han pronunciado ante estas novedades y, al hacerlo, han evidenciado su actitud ante la lengua. En este trabajo se estudia el eco que las palabras relacionadas con la covid-19 han tenido en los medios y se analiza, desde una perspectiva crítica, la recepción de los nuevos términos, la toma de postura ideológica y los grados de purismo lingüístico y social que se manifiestan. El análisis se ha llevado a cabo sobre un corpus de columnas sobre la lengua (CSL) publicadas entre marzo de 2020 y abril de 2021 en la prensa española. El hecho de utilizar textos metalingüísticos ha permitido no solo recopilar una parte importante del nuevo vocabulario sino también analizar la toma de postura de cada uno de los columnistas, observadores y árbitros de la lengua viva de la comunidad.","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43964863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19180
C. Fiammenghi
Ivano Eberini, Spillover (CTU - Centro per l’innovazione didattica e le tecnologie multimediali, Università degli Studi di Milano, Podcast, 2020) di Carlotta Fiammenghi
{"title":"Ivano Eberini, Spillover","authors":"C. Fiammenghi","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19180","url":null,"abstract":"Ivano Eberini, Spillover (CTU - Centro per l’innovazione didattica e le tecnologie multimediali, Università degli Studi di Milano, Podcast, 2020) \u0000di Carlotta Fiammenghi","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41397634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19191
Ilaria Stefani
Marco Malvestio, The Conflict Revisited. The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 218 ISBN 978-1-78997-209-2) di Ilaria Stefani
{"title":"Marco Malvestio, The Conflict Revisited. The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction","authors":"Ilaria Stefani","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19191","url":null,"abstract":"Marco Malvestio, The Conflict Revisited. The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 218 ISBN 978-1-78997-209-2) \u0000di Ilaria Stefani","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42150697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19129
Alice Balestrino
This article aims at investigating two narratives about historical moments of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural crisis represented through literary descriptions of epidemics. I will focus on the subtext of the plague in one of the foundational texts of the Western canon, the Decameron, paying particular attention to the metaphor of contagion as a phenomenon allowing for the renegotiations of biopolitical borders in the Florentine society of the Trecento. Building on images of contamination as vehicles of contagion, I am interested in interrogating the roots and scope of the reconsideration of traditional norms and accustomed practices that Giovanni Bocaccio frames in biopolitical terms in the description of the 1348 plague in Florence. I will also take into consideration Philip Roth’s 2010 novel Nemesis, which is set against the background of the polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Nemesis depicts a prophylactic measure identical to the country retreat that famously frames the main narrative in the Decameron, yet in Roth’s novel it represents a failed attempt to escape contagion. Another narrative trait that Nemesis shares with the Decameron is the context: a society on the verge of essential transformations in the political, cultural, and economic realm. Indeed, mercantile Florence of the Trecento was on the brink of a new era, the Early Modern period, likewise 1944 USA was involved in WWII, fighting for the geopolitical supremacy over a new world order (the Cold War) and shaping a new socio-economic model: neoliberalism.
{"title":"Border Reconfigurations in Contagious Societies. Epidemics as Biopolitical Crises from the Decameron to Nemesis","authors":"Alice Balestrino","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19129","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims at investigating two narratives about historical moments of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural crisis represented through literary descriptions of epidemics. I will focus on the subtext of the plague in one of the foundational texts of the Western canon, the Decameron, paying particular attention to the metaphor of contagion as a phenomenon allowing for the renegotiations of biopolitical borders in the Florentine society of the Trecento. Building on images of contamination as vehicles of contagion, I am interested in interrogating the roots and scope of the reconsideration of traditional norms and accustomed practices that Giovanni Bocaccio frames in biopolitical terms in the description of the 1348 plague in Florence. I will also take into consideration Philip Roth’s 2010 novel Nemesis, which is set against the background of the polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Nemesis depicts a prophylactic measure identical to the country retreat that famously frames the main narrative in the Decameron, yet in Roth’s novel it represents a failed attempt to escape contagion. Another narrative trait that Nemesis shares with the Decameron is the context: a society on the verge of essential transformations in the political, cultural, and economic realm. Indeed, mercantile Florence of the Trecento was on the brink of a new era, the Early Modern period, likewise 1944 USA was involved in WWII, fighting for the geopolitical supremacy over a new world order (the Cold War) and shaping a new socio-economic model: neoliberalism.","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47680440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19193
Chiara Bertulessi
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese political leadership has devoted substantial efforts to shape, through media and institutional discourses, a specific narrative of its response to the crisis, framing it as a fight in which the Chinese people, under the leadership of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, promptly came together to defeat the virus. The present paper examines this dominant narrative focusing on the Chinese language section on the fight against COVID-19 of the multilingual online platform China Keywords, a project run by State and Party-affiliated institutions. Drawing on the theoretical background and analytical tools from Critical Discourse Studies, the paper provides an analysis of the discursive representation of social actors constructed by this tool. The analysis shows how different discursive strategies employed to represent specific social actors contribute to reinforce the constitutive elements of the Chinese leadership’s dominant narrative of the events of early 2020. Moreover, the paper argues that the section of China Keywords on the topic should be understood as one of the products of the multifaceted institutional efforts to “tell China’s Covid-19 story well,” both domestically and internationally.
{"title":"China’s narrative of the fight against COVID-19: a case study of the representation of social actors in China Keywords","authors":"Chiara Bertulessi","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19193","url":null,"abstract":"Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese political leadership has devoted substantial efforts to shape, through media and institutional discourses, a specific narrative of its response to the crisis, framing it as a fight in which the Chinese people, under the leadership of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, promptly came together to defeat the virus. \u0000The present paper examines this dominant narrative focusing on the Chinese language section on the fight against COVID-19 of the multilingual online platform China Keywords, a project run by State and Party-affiliated institutions. Drawing on the theoretical background and analytical tools from Critical Discourse Studies, the paper provides an analysis of the discursive representation of social actors constructed by this tool. The analysis shows how different discursive strategies employed to represent specific social actors contribute to reinforce the constitutive elements of the Chinese leadership’s dominant narrative of the events of early 2020. Moreover, the paper argues that the section of China Keywords on the topic should be understood as one of the products of the multifaceted institutional efforts to “tell China’s Covid-19 story well,” both domestically and internationally. \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41614471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19113
Asunción Escribano Hernández
La metáfora, como ha señalado la ciencia cognitiva, es mucho más que un simple adorno retórico. Con ella se proyecta y comparte una determinada imagen de lo que se comunica. Sirve, igualmente, para estructurar el pensamiento, analizar la sociedad o generar unas determinadas expectativas sobre la realidad. De aquí que nos haya parecido que su investigación es necesaria en el caso de los discursos políticos, ya que estos son la base de la agenda de los intereses sociales cotidianos, a partir de los cuales se da a conocer una determinada perspectiva de una situación. Por ello este texto tiene como finalidad estudiar la transmisión de la pandemia en los discursos de los políticos españoles en el Congreso de los Diputados a partir del estado de alarma decretado por el Gobierno. Se ha llevado a cabo el análisis de las estructuras metafóricas identificadoras del Covid-19 con un conflicto bélico. Se ha cuantificado su uso, y relacionado con los discursos de cada líder político. Finalmente, se han clasificado las metáforas en marcos o redes semánticas que proyectan una determinada imagen de la enfermedad, y también de la acción tomada por el Gobierno.
{"title":"Una enfermedad es una guerra: las metáforas bélicas políticas sobre el COVID-19","authors":"Asunción Escribano Hernández","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19113","url":null,"abstract":"La metáfora, como ha señalado la ciencia cognitiva, es mucho más que un simple adorno retórico. Con ella se proyecta y comparte una determinada imagen de lo que se comunica. Sirve, igualmente, para estructurar el pensamiento, analizar la sociedad o generar unas determinadas expectativas sobre la realidad. De aquí que nos haya parecido que su investigación es necesaria en el caso de los discursos políticos, ya que estos son la base de la agenda de los intereses sociales cotidianos, a partir de los cuales se da a conocer una determinada perspectiva de una situación. Por ello este texto tiene como finalidad estudiar la transmisión de la pandemia en los discursos de los políticos españoles en el Congreso de los Diputados a partir del estado de alarma decretado por el Gobierno. Se ha llevado a cabo el análisis de las estructuras metafóricas identificadoras del Covid-19 con un conflicto bélico. Se ha cuantificado su uso, y relacionado con los discursos de cada líder político. Finalmente, se han clasificado las metáforas en marcos o redes semánticas que proyectan una determinada imagen de la enfermedad, y también de la acción tomada por el Gobierno.","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46668656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Galina Rymbu, Žizn’ v prostranstve (Vita nello spazio)","authors":"Erika Parotti","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19162","url":null,"abstract":"Galina Rymbu, Žizn’ v prostranstve (Vita nello spazio) (Moskva, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018, 128 pp. ISBN 978-5-4448-0909-9) \u0000di Erika Parotti","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46403173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19131
P. Della Valle
The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as “speculative fiction” and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidly-spreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Māori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different cultures―Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a “Pacific” person―he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Māori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.
{"title":"Chris Baker’s Kokopu Dreams: A Prophetic View of a Disrupted Post-Pandemic World","authors":"P. Della Valle","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19131","url":null,"abstract":"The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as “speculative fiction” and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidly-spreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Māori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different cultures―Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a “Pacific” person―he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Māori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43846018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/19111
Alicia Mariscal Ríos
En este trabajo, enmarcado en el ámbito de la lingüística aplicada y del análisis crítico del discurso, llevaremos a cabo un análisis contrastivo multilingüe a partir de los discursos emitidos en el primer trimestre del año 2020 por los líderes políticos de España, Reino Unido, Italia y Portugal, en los que anunciaban duras medidas para afrontar la crisis sanitaria originada por la COVID-19. Partimos de la hipótesis de que en sus discursos se emplearán recursos lingüísticos para persuadir a la audiencia, puesto que en los inicios de la pandemia los partidos políticos unieron sus fuerzas para convencer a la ciudadanía de la necesidad de trabajar juntos para afrontar la crisis. El objetivo principal de la investigación es recurrir a muestras de lenguaje real para tratar de detectar similitudes y diferencias, así como formas de persuasión y/o manipulación mediática en los textos analizados, y comprobar si en ellos se aprecia la ideología del emisor. Para ello, el análisis cualitativo de los cuatro discursos será complementado con los datos obtenidos mediante el programa Sketch Engine, para detectar las palabras de uso más frecuente y las colocaciones en cada corpus. Los resultados muestran que, aunque con pequeños aspectos diferenciales en lo que respecta a la apelación al miedo, en general todos recurren a técnicas de persuasión similares, con mensajes que apelan al patriotismo, la unidad en la lucha contra el virus y la responsabilidad social.
{"title":"El poder del lenguaje en la comunicación política en tiempos de COVID: análisis contrastivo multilingüe de los discursos de Pedro Sánchez, Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conte y António Costa en los inicios de la pandemia","authors":"Alicia Mariscal Ríos","doi":"10.54103/2035-7680/19111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/19111","url":null,"abstract":"En este trabajo, enmarcado en el ámbito de la lingüística aplicada y del análisis crítico del discurso, llevaremos a cabo un análisis contrastivo multilingüe a partir de los discursos emitidos en el primer trimestre del año 2020 por los líderes políticos de España, Reino Unido, Italia y Portugal, en los que anunciaban duras medidas para afrontar la crisis sanitaria originada por la COVID-19. Partimos de la hipótesis de que en sus discursos se emplearán recursos lingüísticos para persuadir a la audiencia, puesto que en los inicios de la pandemia los partidos políticos unieron sus fuerzas para convencer a la ciudadanía de la necesidad de trabajar juntos para afrontar la crisis. El objetivo principal de la investigación es recurrir a muestras de lenguaje real para tratar de detectar similitudes y diferencias, así como formas de persuasión y/o manipulación mediática en los textos analizados, y comprobar si en ellos se aprecia la ideología del emisor. Para ello, el análisis cualitativo de los cuatro discursos será complementado con los datos obtenidos mediante el programa Sketch Engine, para detectar las palabras de uso más frecuente y las colocaciones en cada corpus. Los resultados muestran que, aunque con pequeños aspectos diferenciales en lo que respecta a la apelación al miedo, en general todos recurren a técnicas de persuasión similares, con mensajes que apelan al patriotismo, la unidad en la lucha contra el virus y la responsabilidad social.","PeriodicalId":42544,"journal":{"name":"Altre Modernita-Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46410542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-30DOI: 10.54103/2035-7680/18772
Lellida Marinelli
It may be argued that writing about contemporaneity risks being a mere description of what Braudel would term ‘episodic time’—the short-term perspective of newspapers and chronicles. However, when political and social events spread into literature, there is a nuanced language of presence (Barthes). By not being bound to a specific mode of narration, the essay’s brevity and incisiveness seems particularly suitable to decipher the contemporary. This paper presents a comparative reading of personal essays published between April and July 2020 by Olive Senior, Deborah Levy, and Zadie Smith, and it argues that there are two main ways of resisting: the choice of writing in itself, and the choice of topics and issues. The immediate response of writers in the form of essays published in book form, in online magazines, or special sections of the websites of publishing houses is a clear example of how literature—and indeed the literary mind—can be a space for thinking about the present and putting things into perspective. By overcoming the possible limitations represented by the thematization of the pandemic, the writers open towards what may appear as a different, but still very close, temporality: that of physical and discourse-based violence on female bodies, on black bodies, and on the Earth. This paper will then come to the conclusion that writing is an act of resistance and that literature has the power to narrate the real “interpret[ing] the world […] one word at a time” (Senior, “Cross Words”).
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