To nie jest sprawa dla detektywa: opowieści o pandemii jako hiperobiekcie

• Authors: Małgorzata Sugiera

Title variants

EN

No Case for a Detective: Fabulating Pandemics as a Hyperobject

Abstracts

EN

Taking as its starting point Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, the article posits pandemic conceptualized as a hyperobject as a useful approach to recently published novels on pandemic which has been fabulated in the context of climate change. The article comes back to Priscilla Wald’s Contagious (2008) which bagged the inadequacy of outbreak narratives premised on detective logic to narrate epidemics in our century already in 2008 in order to support the author’s claim by offering a close reading of three recent novels – Stephen King’s „The Stand” (1990), Lawrence Wright’s „The End of October” (2021), and Oana Aristide’s „Under the Blue” (2021). Each of the novels not only depicts its fictional pandemic as a kind of hyperobject but also searches for an adequate way of fabulating this phenomenon beyond human perspective and scale.

Keywords

EN

narrating and fabulating pandemic; pandemic as a hyperobject; climate catastrophe; Stephen King’s „The Stand”; Lawrence Wright’s „The End of October”; Oana Aristide's "Under the Blue"

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański. Wydział Filologiczny
• Journal: Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 14
• Pages: 21-37

Dates

published

2022

Contributors

author

Małgorzata Sugiera

• Uniwersytet Jagielloński

• https://orcid.org/0000000349532422

References

• Aristide Oana. 2021. Under the Blue. London: Serpent’s Tail.
• Boltanski Luc. 2014. Mysteries & Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Transl. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Demos T.J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
• Ghosh Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Morton Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press.
• Morton Timothy, Dominic Boyer. 2021. Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. London: Open Humanities Press.
• King Stephen. 2012. The Stand. New York: Anchor Books [1990].
• Wald Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Wright Lawrence. 2020. The End of October: a novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Wright Lawrence. 2021. The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Identifiers

DOI

10.26881/jk.2022.14.02

Biblioteka Nauki

2215996