academia
In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019).[1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than a blast. In examining these gaps and silences, Outka draws out experiences that are hiding in plain sight.
As Janine Utell writes of her experience in the opening post of this forum, reader reports can helpfully push our work forward towards publication. But she also points out that they can (perhaps unintentionally) dismantle our attempts to draw attention to what is excluded from conventional scholarly inquiry.