This conference marks the culmination of a year of joint work on the eponymous edited volume and represents another milestone in the FWF project on Corona Fictions (P 34571). The presentations take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Hereby, they offer a diverse array of impressions into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.

On Friday, you can attend the conference in person; on Saturday, you can join online. If you wish to participate, in both cases please register with: daniel.milkovits[a]tugraz.at.

PROGRAM:
Thursday I 01.06.2023
Conference Warming

Friday I 02.06.2023
OPENING & OFFICIAL BOOK LAUNCH

PANEL I
Małgorzata Sugiera (Kraków): Human-Viral Hybrids as Challenge to the Outbreak Narrative and Neo-Liberal Biopolitics
Julia Obermayr (Graz): Corona Fictions Agents: Cinematic Representations of Hopeful Pandemic Protagonists in Early Corona Fictions

PANEL II
Justyna Ziarkowska (Wrocław): La novela de la pandemia como una modalidad de la novela de la crisis. El caso de La madre del futbolista de Pablo García Casado
Ana Carolina Torquato (São Paulo/Cologne) & Aureo Lustosa Guerios (São Paulo): The Role of Animals in Pandemic Narratives: Forewarning Disaster, Causing Outbreaks, Conferring Immunity

PANEL III
Aureo Lustosa Guerios (São Paulo): The Crowd as a Pandemic Character: Determinism, Entertainment and Transgression in Literature
Louis Mühlethaler (Paris): Immunity and Community: The Role of Immune Protagonists in Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (1995) and Roth’s Nemesis (2010)
Luana Bermúdez (Genève): ‘¿Te importa?’ Entre soledad y olvido: la representación de los ancianos en el teatro español durante la pandemia de COVID-19

PANEL IV
Martina Stemberger (Vienna): Corona Palimpsests: Pandemic Protagonists as Readers
Tommaso Meozzi (Graz): Protagonisti in cerca di una nuova agency: la pandemia di Covid-19 nella letteratura italiana

Saturday I 03.06.2023 (hybrid panels)
PANEL V
Fleur Hopkins-Loféron (Paris): ‘C’était quelqu’un de toute façon’ : les personnages humains et non humains dans le roman animaliste Les Métamorphoses de Camille Brunel
Anna Isabell Wörsdörfer (Münster): Bloody Investigations. Scientists as Ambiguous Pandemic Protagonists in the Dystopian Streaming Series La Valla and La Révolution
Elisabeth Hobisch (Graz): Hysterical Men and Reasoning Women? On Gender Roles and Agency in Corona Fictions

PANEL VI
Paulina Pająk (Wrocław): Mediated Vulnerabilities: Transforming Virginia Woolf’s Characters in Corona Fictions
Claire Demoulin (New Haven): Germs as Social Protagonists: (In)visible Enemies and the Fear of Epidemic Invasion in Classical Hollywood Cinema

FINAL DISCUSSION