![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes the structures of recognition underlying the reception of three video narratives telling stories of Covid-19 survivors. Published by top US news networks between March and April 2020, these recordings were intended to reassure the American public that the epidemic would be contained. Taking as its point of departure Priscilla Wald’s work on repetitive patterns in the formula of communicable disease outbreaks, and Rita Felski’s theory of recognition, this essay examines 832 comments associated with the videos. It argues that viewers’ engagement can be assessed looking at the new meanings commenters add to the contents of the recordings, and proposes to delineate the contours of a useful theoretical framework for future research on the relationship between reassurance, recognition, and repetition in the outbreak narrative.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In the field of medicine, see CitationCharters and McKay’s work on Covid, Rosenberg’s essay on the “dramaturgic form” an epidemic takes (2), and CitationSlack’s “Introduction” to Epidemics and Ideas (1–20). From a historical perspective, Ryan A. CitationDavis reconstructs the narrative that arose in response to the 1918 Spanish flu in order to explain and contain the disease. Other scholars have explored the pandemic narrative in the contexts of political science (CitationChigudu,), economics (CitationShiller), philosophy (CitationAgamben; CitationŽižek), digital media (CitationGesser-Edelsburg and Shir-Raz), and literature (CitationBelling; CitationOutka).
2. This case study is similar to previous ones (CitationAngulo-Jiménez and DeThorne; CitationPace; CitationWeng-Ying et al.) in that it examines first-person narratives in digital format. This study differs from previous ones in the plot (Covid-19 pandemic) and themes that arise from it.
3. See, in particular, the “Introduction” by CitationAnna Poletti and Julie Rak to Identity Technologies (3–24) for a fuller picture of new forms of digital and visual life-writing in YouTube, Twitter, and other social media as performative expressions of the self.
4. A total of 3,819 comments were published, but replies to comments (2,409) were excluded from analysis because their content was considered peripheral.
5. YouTube does not force on commenters real-name restrictions and, so, many users adopt fanciful names to disguise their identity.
6. On the difference between science and pseudoscience and the difficulty of separating one from the other in the “post-truth” world we live in, see CitationLilienfeld (xi). The distinction between those viewers who refer to real scientific advances and those who derive hope from pseudoscience does not affect the structures of recognition under analysis.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nieves Pascual Soler
Nieves Pascual Soler teaches pedagogy of modern languages at Valencian International University, Spain. Among her research interests are: cultural studies, feminism, and contemporary narratives in English. Her publications include Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018), and the co-edited collection Traces of Aging: Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative, (Transcript Verlag, 2016). Her research has been published in journals such as: Food, Culture and Society, Latin American Research Review, Animals & Society, and The European Legacy.