The Humanities Connection: Fiction and the Virus
The Humanities Connection: Fiction and the Virus

Summary/Abstract: This essay considers aspects of how COVID-19 inflects debate about the trenchancy of the humanities. It does so through reference to Jacques Derrida’s ‘The University Without Condition’, which invokes the ‘New Humanities’. In counterpoint, reference is made also to Ali Smith’s Summer (2020), the last novel in the Seasonal Quartet, set in the real-time present. The essay proceeds through thirty discrete sections keyed to the style of a journal, offering commentary and inevitably interim reflection on the ‘X Humanities’ and their current plausibility, as well as on the representability and critique of the contemporaneous in fiction, theory and beyond.

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