Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

After the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in China in December 2019, information spread globally as fast as the virus. Different stakeholders confronted daily in the rhetorical arenas of social media within and across countries, thus providing a bewildering view of the impact of COVID-19 on communication. This paper aims at investigating the crisis of communication during the first wave of the pandemic, drawing upon the rhetorical arena communication model (Johansen and Frandsen 2017). This model, which entails a macro- and a micro-layer of analysis, allows us to recognize the complexity of the inter-actorial relations taking place between various “voices”, e.g., political and economic actors, international organizations, healthcare professionals, and the media, who compete or collaborate to manage the crisis. In this regard, research is carried out on a set of corpora, including press releases issued by the WHO, political speeches released by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, as well as reactions to them provided by public opinion via diverse social media outlets, in the period between January and June 2020. Attention is paid to the micro-level of the arena, in particular some specific “text” parameters, namely the verbal and visual semiotic adopted, the crisis communicative strategies of scapegoating and counterattack, metaphors and speech acts.

In March 2020, more than 100 governments around the world imposed partial or full lockdown policies prohibiting people to leave their homes except for activities deemed essential (e.g. procuring food, going to work) to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmissions. Furthermore, authorities, media and peers encouraged people to adopt physical distancing behaviors, requesting not to touch each other and even keep a distance of at least one to two meters from one another. Cultural and literary productions—so-called Corona Fictions—represent and process the multitude of ways the population perceived and coped with the lockdown situation during the pandemic and its diverse effects. While literary texts written during confinement and published in anthologies focus on emotional states enhanced by the psychological impact of the lockdown, the narratives in films such as Norberto Ramos del Val’s ¡Ni te me acerques! (2020) focus on negotiating the process of physical distancing itself. This contribution will, thus, look at the representations of physical distancing in written and audiovisual productions from the first lockdown and analyze the similarities therein. From a cultural studies point of view, we are particularly interested in the ways these Corona Fictions negotiate physical distancing, isolation and self-reflection in their narratives of the respective medium.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has produced serious consequences in social and economic terms. The speed at which this pandemic spread in the initial weeks led governments to take drastic measures in order to contain its devastating effects. To this end, lockdowns were imposed in many countries which lasted for months, affecting people’s lives in important respects. The way in which the general public was apprised of these restrictions deserves attention, as communication plays a major role at the time of implementing measures impacting on people’s freedoms. Based on these considerations, this paper provides a comparison of the rhetorical devices adopted by national governments to inform the public of the beginning of the lockdown. Specifically, the statements with which the Prime Ministers of Italy and the UK announced the implementation of lockdown measures will be examined, with a view to investigating their linguistic features in both Italian and English.

As it has been reported for other countries, Peru has also been a territory with a high percentage of deaths due to the coronavirus pandemic. The ravages of the disease have also affected various sectors of the local population, such as the economy, education, and health. However, one of the most powerful resources to confront this pandemic has been the promotion of publicity campaigns around vaccination against COVID-19 throughout the region. In this context, the Peruvian press has displayed a series of speeches that publicize immunization through a set of benefits offered by various companies (restaurants, shopping malls, mobile phone operators, etc.). These advertising campaigns, however, erase existing power relations and social gaps. Through the critical analysis of these media discourses, this paper proposes how the Peruvian press highlights a certain class of wealthy social actors but hides other social actors who have interrupted their studies, who have suffered economic losses, who have been excluded from any economic reactivation, among other aspects. In this scenario, the analysis shows who these ‘Others’ are, and, later, how they appear discursively in this context of health crisis.

Metaphor, as cognitive science has pointed out, is much more than just a rhetorical ornament. With it, a certain image of what is communicated is projected and shared. It also serves to structure thought, analyze society or generate certain expectations about reality. Hence, it has seemed to us that its research is necessary in the case of political speeches, since these are the basis of the agenda of daily social interests, from which a certain perspective of a situation is revealed. For this reason, this text aims to study the transmission of the pandemic in the speeches of Spanish politicians in the Congress of Deputies based on the state of alarm decreed by the Government. The analysis of the identifying metaphoric structures of the Covid-19 with a war conflict has been carried out. Its use has been quantified, and related to the speeches of each political leader. Finally, metaphors have been classified into semantic frames or networks that project a certain image of the disease, and also of the action taken by the Government.

Vulnerabilità e resilienza: Voci e pratiche dai margini a cura di Albana Muco, Giorgia Testa e Francesca Volpi

This work by Julio Llamazares, halfway between chronicle and travel book, focuses on several main themes of the author, namely the description of nature, the longing for rural life and the importance of the natural environment. The Leonese writer takes advantage of the exceptional circumstance of the 2020 pandemic to chronicle his own experience during the spring of that year, which the author spent with his family in an isolated house in the middle of the fields in Extremadura. Faced with the collective trauma experienced by humanity, the author attends the glorious spectacle of the rebirth of nature, that he observes with both joy and embarrassment, since he enjoys himself in a moment of general anguish. In this paper we will study how the writer establishes a series of rhetorical strategies to protect his own image aimed at excusing himself before the reader, either through the use of concrete linguistic elements of attenuation in order to safeguard his face, or through the shield of the literary tradition, with the memory of a literary background (Boccaccio and Virgil, mainly) that brings together people in moments of anguish and retired life.

Nell’alveo della cosiddetta ‘seconda ondata’ del femminismo, che già linguisticamente viene raccontata in termini di diffusione epidemiologica, si inseriscono due racconti di Buzzati e di Levi in cui l’emancipazione muliebre assume i tratti fantastici di una malattia prodigiosa e pericolosamente contagiosa. Posta a conclusione della ‘sfortunata’ raccolta Le notti difficili, “La moglie con le ali” è una delle rare incursioni nel femminile in cui Buzzati manifesti una complice e sarcastica insofferenza verso i prototipi matrimoniali della società contemporanea. Le ali che spuntano sulla schiena della giovane e bellissima moglie del conte Giorgio Venanzi, terrorizzato dall’idea di uno scandalo, le concedono una evasione, seppur momentanea, dalla quotidiana e routinaria vita coniugale a cui si consegna giovanissima. Il prodigio del volo è misteriosamente concesso, in circostanze molto simili, anche a Isabella, protagonista leviana de “La grande mutazione”, scrupolosamente ispezionata da un medico che ne rileva il rischio di alta contagiosità. Superata la vergogna iniziale, la piccola donna assapora a pieno i vantaggi della libertà che misteriosamente le viene concessa e finisce per uscire allo scoperto. L’evento è vissuto con mortificazione e vergogna dal padre che, contagiato insieme al medico e ad altri compagni di classe, opterà per l’amputazione.

This article aims at investigating two narratives about historical moments of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural crisis represented through literary descriptions of epidemics. I will focus on the subtext of the plague in one of the foundational texts of the Western canon, the Decameron, paying particular attention to the metaphor of contagion as a phenomenon allowing for the renegotiations of biopolitical borders in the Florentine society of the Trecento. Building on images of contamination as vehicles of contagion, I am interested in interrogating the roots and scope of the reconsideration of traditional norms and accustomed practices that Giovanni Bocaccio frames in biopolitical terms in the description of the 1348 plague in Florence. I will also take into consideration Philip Roth’s 2010 novel Nemesis, which is set against the background of the polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Nemesis depicts a prophylactic measure identical to the country retreat that famously frames the main narrative in the Decameron, yet in Roth’s novel it represents a failed attempt to escape contagion. Another narrative trait that Nemesis shares with the Decameron is the context: a society on the verge of essential transformations in the political, cultural, and economic realm. Indeed, mercantile Florence of the Trecento was on the brink of a new era, the Early Modern period, likewise 1944 USA was involved in WWII, fighting for the geopolitical supremacy over a new world order (the Cold War) and shaping a new socio-economic model: neoliberalism.

Wuhan. Diari da una città chiusa narra il quotidiano vivere in lockdown della città simbolo di inizio pandemia di Covid-19 del 2020. L’autrice, Fang Fang, non ha mancato di esprimere nei suoi resoconti giudizi sull’inerzia burocratica della macchina statale cinese e sull'inosservanza dei doveri da parte di diversi funzionari amministrativi. L’opera è uno straordinario successo editoriale internazionale, eppure non sono mancate critiche degli internauti cinesi connesse alla mancanza di autenticità dell’opera, alla narrazione definita come ‘unilaterale’ e soprattutto alla decisione dell’autrice di far varcare i confini nazionali ai suoi Diari, scelta percepita da una parte dell’opinione pubblica cinese come un vero tradimento alla nazione. Numerose invero sono state anche le voci a sostegno di Fang Fang, al suo coraggio per aver messo nero su bianco diverse questioni sociali e politiche. Ciò nonostante, l’opera pare non soddisfi appieno il desiderio di ‘energia positiva’ del quale il popolo cinese avrebbe avuto necessità durante l’inizio dell’epidemia. Proprio la decisione di pubblicazione del volume all’estero è rea di aver esposto la sofferenza dei cittadini di Wuhan a livello globale e ciò riporta a tutte le considerazioni connesse alla concezione culturale millenaria di preservazione della ‘faccia’, un comportamento considerato in sé e per sé una sconfitta nazionale. Wuhan. Diari da una città chiusa, è quindi sia la storia di una città che tradimento alla nazione?