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

The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as “speculative fiction” and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidly-spreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Māori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different cultures―Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a “Pacific” person―he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Māori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.

The initial outburst of the pandemic, in early 2020, forced China and the rest of the world into seclusion, anxiety, social alienation. In the Sinosphere, a human response to the aporia of isolation is the lyrical production, a prosperous literary activity through which the individual gives shape to a collective consciousness. The present paper examines a collection of Sinophone verses sprung from the Covid-19 threat and dismay, as a psychic necessity to re-organize the perception of the outer world. Specifically, it studies a body of fifty-two poems composed by twelve lyrical Sinophone voices, published in Chinese in a spring number of the respected literary journal Jintian 今天. This investigation primarily focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, and psychological value of a lyrical polyphony embodied by unchained Sinophone voices, which sing against the background of a common predicament. In parallel, it reads the collection as a collective memory and a cultural repository, engendered by a narrative projection of experience: to that end, it combines a narratological approach with the observation of certain lyrical features of a “poetics of distress”.

The discourses surrounding the COVID-19 vaccination are extensive and have been prolific over the last eighteen months. There has been particular debate among groups of vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals discussing health benefits and a sense of civic duty in order to protect oneself and those around us as well as considering the extent to which a state really can oblige citizens to uptake the vaccine through a vaccination mandate. This study investigated the discourses regarding choosing to undergo the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination or otherwise and how these discourses are framed within the global and Italian contexts. The role of information channels, including the media, was also investigated along with the power balances revealed among the vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals’ discourses. An online ethnographic poll was designed and distributed through online channels and follow up focus groups using semi-structured interviews were recorded for transcription and linguistic analysis. Results show some interesting linguistic findings regarding potential discrimination due to the vaccination pass mandate along with the narratives that surround these.

This paper proposes an analysis of the storytelling of the COVID pandemic in Wuhan in the first months of 2020 as depicted by two TV dramas: Heroes and With you. This analysis will be carried out by identifying the elements common to the two TV series in the description of their protagonists and the way in which they dialogue with real people and about real facts, also in relation to the presentations offered by television producers to the press, and those published in specialized or party magazines. The dramas are therefore considered as spaces of interpretation of the individual experience in a collective sense, and as discourses in which memory exerts a fundamental role in the definition of the social and cultural self, in order to understand whether the COVID pandemic is regarded in China as a cultural trauma.

Para una ‘ética pragmática’ Una conversación con Julián Herbert (8 de Marzo de 2021) por Giorgio Sebastiani

Martin Alonso Pomare Howard, El clamor de las islas. San Andrés y Providencia bajo el gobierno colombiano (Pittsburgh, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh; Cali, Ofrenda Editorial, 2021, 294 pp. ISBN 978-958-49-3352-2) por Simone Ferrari

La peste nel gran circo di Permunian: recensione a Giorni di collera e di annientamento (Francesco Permunian, Giorni di collera e di annientamento, Milano, Ponte delle grazie, 2021, 178 pp. ISBN 833-331-639-4) di Domenico Lonigro

Two faces of the feminist dystopia in the United Kingdom: Sophie Mackintosh and Rebecca Ley A conversation with Sophie Mackintosh and Rebecca Ley by Marta Olivi

Maria Teresa Chialant, Racconti d’amore  al tempo della Regina Vittoria (Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2020, 208 pp. ISBN 978-88-495-4195-3) di Elena Ogliari

Pietrini Daniela, La lingua infetta. L’italiano della pandemia (Roma, Treccani, 2021, 240 pp. ISBN 978-881-200-890-2) di Roberto Laghi