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Virus in Written Discourse: The Reception Angle and the Cultural Angle

A hundred years after the Spanish influenza pandemic (1918-1920), in March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Social distancing, restriction of interactions, self-isolation, and lockdowns were introduced to keep people safe from the fast- spreading, deadly disease. The ongoing global disaster caused by the novel coronavirus has had a negative impact on welfare and on mental health that requires an immediate international response not only from biomedicine and healthcare, but also from the humanities. In such adverse circumstances, the focus is on places in the humanities where personal frailty, weakness and vulnerability are admitted publicly, impressed into the cracks in the “subject/object” cultural construct in the socially defined space, deciphering the codes of the urban, historical and cultural spaces and their places and non-places: an active thinking code for engagement in open and public dialogue using the default canon (language and forms). This paper aims to document and materialise the beginnings of exposing COVID-19 in the humanities, using a conceptual approach, from the theoretical idea to its engagement at discourse level. It also discusses the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic as an event of relevance in the historical dynamic of the space where it is legitimised. The continual overlapping of past images (“virus in hereditate”) – the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, including an examination of Osijek’s culture landscape before and during the pandemic – with present events (“virus in fabula”) – the 2020/2021 COVID-19 pandemic in the humanities – suggests possible future events – the postmodern strategy of production and assertion of different identities (marginal, fluid and insufficient) on all text levels.

COVID-19 ; Spanish influenza ; humanities ; reception ; culturology ; illness as metaphor ; heritage ; city

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