Art, Power and the Social (Dis)order in Times of Plagues and Pandemics
Deborah Cohn
Spanish & Portuguese
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things … [and] things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it …; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague … Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1722), regarding the Great Plague of London (1665) Since Thucydides wrote about the plague of Athens (429-426 BC), Western cultural production has tended to cast plagues—and war—as precipitating a “world upside down” and ushering in the breakdown of “civilization” and its rituals, mores, and community-affirming structures. In early 2020, of course, the COVID pandemic suspended, upended, and transformed our own lives, while also overturning the veneer of today’s social order and bringing to the foreground questions of power and inequity that had long been marginalized. This course will examine historical and theoretical writings about and cultural representations of plagues and pandemics from ancient Greece through the present. Through close readings of texts, we will study how they use representations of plagues and pandemics to lay bare questions of power: who wields it, how they grant or deny legitimacy and structure society and social roles, and the mechanisms (e.g., surveillance), discourses, and institutions that support and enforce (the) social order. We will also explore how the texts represent pandemics in order to probe questions of revolution, masculinity, loneliness, struggles for social justice, and more.
Our discussions will be grounded in questions such as: How have plagues been studied? How are they explained, and how does power operate within and through these explanations? How have they been represented in historical, literary, and medical texts? What effects do they have on social organization as well as the human organism? How do plagues exacerbate pre-existing social and political tensions, including othering and disparities in power and resources? What effects do plagues have on power (those who wield it as well as those who do not have it)? In particular, what implications do they have—in history and literature alike—for the State and its mechanisms of control, and how do State powers respond to plagues?
Catalog Information: HON-H 233 GREAT AUTHORS, COMPOSERS AND ARTISTS