Journal Work in the Time of Coronavirus

Abstract

Journal Work in the Time of Coronavirus Jennifer L. Airey This is not the preface I intended to write. This preface was going to focus on our journal internships, but then a deadly pandemic upended all our lives with a speed that I could never have imagined, and a disrupted preface became the least of anyone's concerns. Now we are all working from home, socially distanced, and facing deep uncertainties about health and safety, the United States' economy, and the future of higher education itself. In such times, my natural tendency is to process life through the lens of fiction. I am hardly alone in this; movies like Contagion (2011) and Outbreak (1995) have shot to the top of the national streaming charts.1 Personally, alongside binge-watching Tiger King (2020) with the rest of America, I have been trying to cope by rereading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and feeling closer to my early modern forebears than ever before. For years, I have taught my students about the closing of theaters in times of plague and about the early modern antitheatrical belief that the playhouse was a site of both physical and moral contagion. I certainly never expected to live through a time when our own theaters and playhouses would have to shut down for the "plague," when the early modern remedy of distance would be the only hope available to us, too. I have also been thinking about Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), which I wrote about extensively in my recently published monograph, Religion Around Mary Shelley (2019).2 Shelley did not live through a pandemic, but she did experience great loss—of her husband, her children, her half-sister, and many friends—and at the age of twenty-six, she wrote the first post-apocalyptic novel to represent creatively the experience of constant bereavement. She wrote in her journal on 24 May 1824, "The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me."3 I have always loved the novel and have taught it several times, but it takes on new resonance in our current historical moment, with scenes of people calling out to a dysfunctional government to save them even as "commerce had ceased"; disease bringing out both the worst and the best in ordinary folk; the public hoping the change in season will save them from the disease (in The Last Man, characters wait for the winter to freeze the virus, while we pin our hopes on increased temperatures); and people finding in religion both solace and exploitation.4 For me personally, what resonates most in Shelley's novel is the speed and suddenness of the plague's onset. Much of the book has nothing to do with the pandemic; it spends many pages detailing the political intrigues and romantic entanglements of two main couples. [End Page 7] The disease itself does not emerge until midway through volume two, and it does not begin to affect England until the end of that volume. The plague originates in a far-away place in the east, and it does not mean anything to the novel's main characters . . . until suddenly it does. My own year has been deeply wrapped up in local concerns, serving as Faculty Senate Vice President in a time of university turmoil, and those concerns were all consuming, too . . . until suddenly they were not. On Monday, March 9—less than three weeks ago as I write this preface—I heard the first rumblings that we might need to shift to online learning after spring break. At the time, that conversation seemed overly alarmist to me, but within twenty-four hours, the stock market was in freefall, COVID-19 cases were being diagnosed in Tulsa, and we were moving immediately to social distancing and online classes. By Friday, all of our lives—faculty, students, staff, and administrators alike—had shifted in ways that did not seem possible on Monday. Now university concerns, when we can think about them, are both perversely comforting (because they are familiar, a reminder of...