The Flu and the Media, Or Contagion 1918
The Flu and the Media, Or Contagion 1918
The Flu and the Media, or, Contagion 1918” discusses the 1918 influenza epidemic, during which not only public transit, but also telephone and postal services, were suspended under the threat of contagion. I analyze the novels published in the wake of the epidemic, including Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Willa Cather’s One of Ours, to suggest that the flu takes on the properties of the media, formalizing both as contagious and challenging the representational burdens of history by doing so.
Keywords: media, modernism, American literature, architecture, infrastructure, naturalism, systems theory, cultural studies, materiality
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