Lockdown Cultures : : the arts and humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21 / / edited by Stella Bruzzi, [and three others].

• TeilnehmendeR: Bruzzi, Stella,
• Place / Publishing House: London, United Kingdom : : UCL Press,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xxvi, 319 pages) :; illustrations
• Notes: Includes index.

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020-21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities' reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.

Table of Contents

List of figures</i><br><i>List of contributors<br>Foreword<br>Acknowledgements</i></p><p>Introduction<br><i>Maurice Biriotti</i></p><p><b>Part I: Politics</b>1 'Give me liberty or death'<br><i>Lee Grieveson</i>2 Translating Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the Montreal-area Hasidic community<br><i>Lily Kahn, Zoë Belk, Kriszta Eszter Szendrői, and Sonya Yampolskaya</i>3 Shakespeare and the plague of productivity<br><i>Harvey Wiltshire</i>4 The decolonial option and the end of the world<br><i>Izabella Wodzka</i>5 Distant together: creative community in UK DIY music during Covid-19<br><i>Kirsty Fife</i>6 Now are we cyborgs? Affinities and technology in the Covid-19 lockdowns<br><i>Emily Baker and Annie Ring</i></p><p><b>Part II: History</b>7 Reflections on Covid-like pathogens in ancient Mesopotamia<br><i>Markham J. Geller</i>8 Handwashing save slives: producing and accepting new knowledge in Jens Bjørneboe's Semmelweis (1968)<br><i>Elettra Carbone</i>9 Experience and coping with isolation: what we can see from ethnic Germans in Britain 1914-18<br><i>Mathis J. Gronau</i>10 Unexpectedly withdrawn and still engaged: reflections on the experiences of the Roman writer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero<br><i>Gesine Manuwald</i>11 The Gallic Sack of Rome: an exemplum for our times<br><i>Elizabeth McKnight</i>12 On Spinalonga<br><i>Panayiota Christodoulidou</i></p><p><b>Part III: Performance, identity and the screen</b>13 The thing itself<br><i>Alexander Samson</i>14 Towards a new history: The corona-seminar and the drag king virus<br><i>Helena Fallstrom</i>15 'In spite of the tennis': Beckett's sporting apocalypse'<br><i>Sam Caleb</i>16 Screening dislocated despair: projecting the neoliberal left-behinds in <i>100 Flowers Hidden Deep</i><br><i>Nashuyuan Serenity Wang</i>17 A digital film for digital times: some lockdown thoughts on <i>Gravity</i><br><i>Stephen M. Hart</i>18 The Great Plague: London's Dreaded Visitation, 1665<br><i>Justin Hardy</i><i> </i></p><p><b>Part IV: Literature and writing</b>19 Lessons for lockdown from Thomas Mann's <i>The Magic Mountain</i><i>Jennifer Rushworth</i>20 The locked room: On reading crime fiction during the Covid-19 pandemic<br><i>Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen</i>21 The weight of the shrinking world<br><i>Florian Mussgnug</i>22 A voice-mail lyric for a discipline in crisis: On Ben Lerner's 'The Media'<br><i>Matthew James Holman</i>23 20,000 leagues under confinement<br><i>Patrick Bray</i>24<i> </i>Reflections on Guixiu literary cultures in East Asia<br><i>Tzu-Yu Lin</i></p><p><b>Part V: Personal reflections</b>25 At home: Vaughan Williams' 'The Water Mill; and new meaninsg of 'quotidian'<br><i>Annika Lindskog</i>26 The habit of freedom<br><i>Naomi Siderfin</i>27 Pandemic dreaming<br><i>Adelais Mills</i>28 In pursuit of blandness: On re-reading Jullien's <i>In Praise of Blandness</i> during lockdown<br><i>Emily Furnell</i>29<i> </i>Blinded lights: going viral during the Covid-19 pandemic<br><i>Sarah Moore</i></p><p><b>Part VI: Visual responses</b>30 Morphologies of agents of the pandemic<br><i>SMRU (The Social Morphologies Research Unit : Davdi Burrows,Martin Holbraad, John Cussans, Kelly Fagan Robinson, Melanie Jackson, Dean Kenning, Inigo Minns, Lucy Sames, Hermione Spriggs, Mary Yacoob)</i>31 Wildfire<br><i>John Thomson and Alison Craighead</i>32 Poems from <i>Gospel Oak</i><br><i>Sharon Morris</i>33 I have a studio (visit) therefore I exist<br><i>Carey Young, Alice Channer, Anne Hardy and Karin Ruggaber</i>34 Inventory<br><i>Jayne Parker</i>35 After a long time or a short time<br><i>Elisabeth S. Clark</i>36 When the roof blew off<br><i>Joe Cain</i></p><p><i>Index.