Le roman de l’épidémie : l’homme nu et la société questionnée –Defoe, Manzoni, London, Saramago

Resumo

 Modern literary evocations of epidemics delineate specific anthropological views: they restore the image of a naked human being, the epidemic survivor. A Journal of the Plague Year exemplifies these views; variations of the latter are to be read in London’s The Purple Plague and Saramago’s Blindness and Artaud’s “The theatre and the Plague”. These evocations consequently define human and social potentialities, steps beyond the epidemic trauma, which blindness can paradoxically highlight. These anthropological views are associated with a double – external and internal – observation of society and epidemics: the external offers the image of the social order which should prevail; the internal one offers the direct image of the dereliction which epidemics cause. This double observation makes the narrative of epidemics reflexive and the means to question social realities, as reflected in the chapters about Firenze plague in Manzoni’s The Bethroted