Telling Our Stories
The Story of COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Esther Kentish
COVID-19 has reshaped our outlook on the future, especially in terms of healthcare and pandemic management. This paper delves into the impact of doctor narratives, patient stories, and fiction novels on the NHS's response to the successive waves of COVID-19. It examines the differences in approach between Wave 1 and Wave 2, emphasizing the importance of integrating critical medical humanities. The discussion explores the evolving roles of medicine, medical professionals, and patients-turned-professionals. Emphasizing the significance of patient narratives, the paper asserts that stories facilitate a nuanced understanding of historical and situational contexts, bridging literary criticism, medicine, science, and English. It scrutinizes COVID-19 from an epistemological standpoint and breaks down patient experiences. Variations in responses, particularly among patients in care homes, are highlighted. The paper showcases and analyzes COVID-19 responses, unveiling the experiences of doctors and caregivers across the UK. It questions how health professionals managed the pandemic, suggesting a need for literary critics' perspectives. The methodology involves Rita Charon's narrative writing techniques, Mike Bury's approach to uncover underlying themes, and Cole's method to contextualize patient narratives. The recorded patient accounts offer direct insights into their experiences.
The Itinerant Mistral: Reflections on the Other and Reconstructions of the Self View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jacqueline Nanfito
In this paper I examine the recados of Gabriela Mistral, and their contribution to the establishment of a new feminine consciousness in Latin America. Mistral’s lyrical compositions have been canonized as consummate expressions of the most lofty of feminine virtues, particularly those of chastity, magnanimity, and selflessness. Only recently have critics reconsidered Mistral’s prose writing, in critical re-readings of her essays which attempt to establish the relationships between gender and genre, and to identify the coordinates of an alternate canon which, while maintaining dialogue with the established tradition of the male canon, transgress those established boundaries in order to chart a new landscape of Latin American cultural production. Through the essay, Mistral is able to reconfigure the space of interpretive practice, once the exclusive domain of male writers within the context of Latin American patriarchal hegemony. The essay’s shifting, porous nature proved the perfect discursive form for Mistral to freely express her opinions on a diversity of topics, and to construct a sense of self or subjectivity, to chart a new topography of feminine self-identity through the representation of others in the text. Mistral, the essayist, appropriates the public sphere of male critical discourse by infusing the traditionally distant, objective essay form with the informal, intimate and anecdotal, in order to engage in untraditional practices of interpretive power, to identify and respond to the concerns of a rapidly emergent feminine readership, and ultimately to reconfigure women’s place within the cultural cartographies of Latin America.
From the History of the Colonial Policy of the Cultural-literary Materials Isolation in the Caucasus Region
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tamar Paichadze, Anna Dolidze
The colonial policy of the Russian Empire of the 19th century was based on intense control mechanisms and strategy towards the nations under its rule (the Caucasus region in particular). One of the aspects of the identification of such political-ideological control mechanisms is a special approach to literature imported from abroad and to any type of printed products, their verification for a certain purpose – to what extent these materials involved the Information irrelevant to imperial/dictatorial politics. This extremely important position for imperial rule was subject to centralized administration; in St. Petersburg, the then capital of Russia created the department of "Foreign Censorship". The mentioned censorship committee compiled lists of permitted and prohibited foreign literature entering the empire and sent them to provincial censorship offices. Any material of the printed word entering the Caucasus region was translated, checked and then sent to the addressee. If the material by its essence and idea was unacceptable for the totalitarian political model, then it was "enclosed", i.e. They forbade handing it over to the addressee. Accordingly, similar literature was destroyed. The materials of the Caucasus Censorship Committee perfectly represent the colonial character of the cultural and educational policy of Imperial Russia and its management systems. These facts reveal the history of the Georgian people's struggle for freedom of expression. Along with this, they present the principles and trends of the Russian Empire's influence and manipulation of public opinion at the time, which acquires special importance in the context of modern "information wars".
