Corona Fictions. On Viral Narratives in Times of Pandemics

The current corona pandemic is shaping the discourse in media and politics, and inspires cultural productions of all kinds (novels, series, pop songs, etc.). In her new research project, Yvonne Völkl (University of Graz, Institute of Romance Studies) and her interdisciplinary team, collect the so-called Corona Fictions to investigate their distinctive features. Why do some narratives and themes about SARS-CoV-2 spread more than others? What role do images play in this context? Which types of narratives dominate in media at large and in social media in particular? Together with her team, consisting of Albert Göschl, Elisabeth Hobisch and Julia Obermayr, Yvonne Völkl analyzes these Corona Fictions across different media (genres) originating in the Romance-speaking world and the Americas and studies the emerging dominant themes, narratological function of the virus as well as the representation of minorities. Furthermore, this research project explores how Corona Fictions navigate our perception of lockdowns, physical distancing or working from home and in what ways they may contribute to individual and collective resilience.

The focus of the project "Corona Fictions. On Viral Narratives in Times of Pandemics" were the first fictional narratives stemming from the midst of the Covid-19-pandemic. My team and I realized the compilation, categorization and analysis of 'Corona Fictions', understood as a new (sub)genre of cultural productions that "pertain to a more generally assumed genre of pandemic narratives and further form part of a global crisis discourse. [They] not only draw on everyday media and political discourse, but also on previous pandemic fiction[s], i.e. literary and cultural productions, which rely strongly on the representation and functionalization of pandemics" (Research Group Pandemic Fictions 2020, 322f.). To illustrate the interconnectedness of these elements we developed the 'pandemic circuit' (ibid. 324). It visualizes how consistent pandemic meta-narratives stemming from (early) 'pandemic fictions' enter Corona Fictions as well as Covid-19-related media and political discourses, which not only influence how we collectively perceive the Covid-19 crisis, but also, in turn, change the reception of previous pandemic narratives. The results of the Corona Fictions project demonstrate, in which ways the pandemic and especially the health emergency measures, such as lockdowns and physical distancing decrees, affected cultural production processes as well as narrative and sociocultural practices in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the comparison with traditional pandemic narratives, my team and I identified recurring meta-narratives reactivated by Corona Fictions as well as new ones introduced within Corona Fictions with respect to the canon of pandemic narratives (cf. Hobisch et al. 2021- and 2022). The reactivated meta-narratives include - next to the well-known 'outbreak narrative' (Wald 2008) - the narratives on social isolation or fear/anxiety (cf. Hobisch et al. 2022, 200f.); slightly modified due to technological changes and societal progress, the pandemic distancing practices as well as female protagonists appear abundantly in Corona Fictions across media (cf. ibid., 202ff.; ead. 2023; Obermayr/Völkl 2022b). From a cultural, literary and media studies perspective we investigated how, early on in the pandemic, textual and audiovisual productions made it possible to process the psychological and social consequences in the acute phase of the crisis. Within this perspective, we paid particular attention to differences in gender and age (cf. Hobisch 2023; Obermayr/Völkl 2022a/b; Völkl et al. 2023, Völkl 2023) and took the specificities of audiovisual and written media into account in our analyses (cf. Meozzi 2023; Obermayr/Hobisch 2023; Völkl/Obermayr 2023). We also used a Digital Humanities approach to develop an Open Access bibliographic Corona Fictions Database, which is stored in a Public Zotero Group Library. This guarantees the long-term storage of the data so that it can be reused by researchers after the end of the project (link to database: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4814225/corona_fictions_database/library).