A stunning philosophical and literary account of canonical plague
tales
Many are the losses suffered and lives lost during the recent COVID-19
pandemic. Since 2020, writers around the globe have penned essays and
books that make sense of this medical and public health catastrophe. But
few have addressed a pressing question that precedes and is the
foundation of their writings: How does the very act of narrating the
pandemic offer strategies to confront and contend with the pandemic's
present dangers? What narratives have been offered during past plague
and pandemic times to ease suffering and loss and protect individuals
and communities from a life lived under the most precarious of
conditions? The philosopher and literary and cultural critic Samuel
Weber returns to past narratives of plagues and pandemics to reproduce
the myriad ways individual and collective, historical and actual,
intentional and unintentional forces converge to reveal how cultures and
societies deal with their vulnerability and mortality. The "preexisting
conditions"--a phrase taken from the American healthcare industry--of
these very cultures converge and collide with the urgent situations of
individuals confronting the plague. Texts drawn from the Bible,
Sophocles, Thucydides, Boccaccio, Luther, Defoe, Kleist, Hölderlin,
Artaud, and Camus demonstrate how in the process of narration
individuals come to reconsider their relationship to others, to
themselves, and to the collectives to which they belong and on which
they depend.
