The Great Plague (050661-SoSe21)

This course will take us back to a time when a transmissible disease claimed the lives of over 100,000 people in Britain, when the rich fled the city of London, when those who remained were afraid of (or kept from) leaving their houses, and when there was ample speculation as to what had caused the epidemic and how best to fight it. While also looking at the so-called Great Plague of 1665/66 in the way historians would do, i.e. trying to identify the main historical facts of the event, we shall be even moreinterested in finding out how contemporaries and later commentators, thinkers, and historians made sense of what went on at the time. This will include reading parts of Samuel Pepys’s diary, large parts of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year(1722), bits from Michel Foucault’s work on biopower, and contemporary TV documentaries (dramatising the suffering or offering DNA and other scientific proof of the causes of the disease). Naturally, there will be constant comparison to our current crisis, the way it occurs and is dealt with especially in the UK and the Anglosphere. The class will hence also be rounded off by a discussion of Zadie Smith’s and Arundhati Roy’s essayistic representations of life in times of COVID-19.