Pandemic discourse and cultural healing

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has brought new social and discursive contexts with the metaphorization and gothification of the virus for many purposes ranging from reporting to politics. This discursive reality is similar to Lawrence Buell’s notion of toxic discourse. The discourse of the pandemic, like toxic discourse, is both useful and harmful in the ‘risk society’ that is exposed to both the infection and economic downslide. While on the one hand this discourse is integral in raising awareness and infection control measures, it also results in the monsterization of virus in press, social media and political rhetoric. This paper attempts to analyze various texts that have emerged in the backdrop of the pandemic to show how the social media humor, advertisement metaphors, masking and sanitizing of language and the serio-comic use of language have evolved as discursive strategies of the contemporary pandemic-hit society. The study also focuses on how literary/poetic use of language becomes a part of cultural healing. Linguistic and literary tropes that have mutated and evolved in the pandemic time are also analyzed.