Living in lockdown: Can literature help?

With the closing of the campus in March, I decided to offer an online mini-course on literary works and films set in pandemic or quarantine. My hope was to give students who had suddenly found themselves back home some bearings to help navigate the strange silent waters of life in lockdown.

I had some misgivings about my idea; as a rule, I feel that literature doesn’t usually work well as an instruction manual you pull off the shelf in case of emergency. The help that reading fiction gives is stealthy and slow-burning, not immediate.

However, it became clear right way that reading accounts of living through pandemics – even with hundreds of years of distance – offered a great deal of comfort. It is hard to get a good mental handle on a situation that has no precedent in our own memories or those of anyone we know. But literature does not leave us alone: Plagues have always happened, and over the centuries, people have left us their thoughts about how best to live through them.

Even if almost everything else changes – science, medicine, technology – one thing that seems not to change all that much is what being on lockdown feels like. The students – majoring in all sorts of fields, from accounting to pre-med to theater – reported that they found the course enormously helpful in giving them a broader context to understand the pandemic and tools to manage its many psychological challenges. For this reason, I have been working with Kylemore and the NDAA and other campus partners to make this series open and available to the wider Notre Dame community.

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