Literature of epidemics: a study in the light of cultural criticism

Abstract

Abstract: This study looks on a distinct literature, which is literature of epidemics and pandemics. However, the study doesn’t focus on this literature topic, language or aesthetics. It rather deals with it from a critical and cultural perspective for the sake of revealing its implicit cultural contents, since they’re implicit systems behind the explicit linguistic and aesthetic ones. The descriptive analytical method has been used for clarifying the mechanism of studying cultural criticism within various texts in literature of epidemics and working on revealing these implicit systems’ role in forming the ego awareness of itself and reconstructing it again. Cultural criticism studies are so important in reading texts and revealing their implicit contents, which are significant in opening up a new field of critical studies in general. Literature of epidemics isn’t a historical text about a pandemic or an epidemic throughout a certain period of time, and it doesn’t only describe man’s suffering. Its texts contain important cultural systems describing societies’ life, cultural, political, social and religious aspects, which went hand in hand with the emergence of this literature. Studying literature, in general, and literature of epidemics, in particular, according to the critical criticism perspective, gives critical studies a new propelling and opens up a significant field for attaining the important implicit political, social and cultural systems behind the texts’ linguistic and artistic structures. Revealing these cultural contents demonstrates the fact that literary texts of this genre are deeply linked to man’s ego and existence, and they’re not merely an artistic luxury. These studies in cultural criticism have also brought the academic literary criticism out of its ivory tower at the academic institutions so that it serves society, in general, through revealing the ego awareness of itself and reconstructing a new one, which attempts to surpass and correct the previous failures either at the level of this ego or at the level of the relationship between the ego and the parallel or the ruling other. This would contribute to the improvement of living situation and consolidating literature and literary studies’ placement in man’s life. Keywords: literature of epidemics, cultural criticism, implicit systems.