To nie jest sprawa dla detektywa: opowieści o pandemii jako hiperobiekcie

Abstrakt

Taking as its starting point Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, the article posits pandemic conceptualized as a hyperobject as a useful approach to recently published novels on pandemic which has been fabulated in the context of climate change. The article comes back to Priscilla Wald’s Contagious (2008) which bagged the inadequacy of outbreak narratives premised on detective logic to narrate epidemics in our century already in 2008 in order to support the author’s claim by offering a close reading of three recent novels – Stephen King’s „The Stand” (1990), Lawrence Wright’s „The End of October” (2021), and Oana Aristide’s „Under the Blue” (2021). Each of the novels not only depicts its fictional pandemic as a kind of hyperobject but also searches for an adequate way of fabulating this phenomenon beyond human perspective and scale.