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Unsettling Epiphanies: Rereading José Saramago’s <i>Blindness</i> in the Time of Covid-19

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Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

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Abstract

As the entire world finds itself in the grip of Covid-19, interest in reading and rereading novels about pestilences, diseases and crises has become a shared endeavour. In many instances, it has even become a coping mechanism with a world that seems to be irredeemably disintegrating. A case in point is the Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago's dystopian novel Blindness (1995). Blindness is particularly chosen for the way it offers an epiphanic insight, unsettling as it is, into humanity in times of adversity through the paradoxical implications of a blindness epidemic that illuminates more than it obscures. This paper thus seeks to present a hub for self-reflection on how personal experiences with calamitous situations can alter one's outlook on oneself and the ambient world, and enhance one's identification with fictional works. To achieve this end, it will endeavour to show that the historical meandering of infectious diseases one has read about in fiction is no longer in the realm of the distant and the impersonal. It is now transmuted to the realm of the present and the personal, making literary works about pandemics/epidemics more relatable, and making dystopian fiction, not only a theoretical framework for this paper, but also a most apt background against which one can reread Blindness in the time of Covid-19.

DOI

10.21608/cse.2022.46070.1068

Keywords

Pandemic/epidemic, COVID-19, Blindness, Epiphany, dystopia, self-reflection, humankind, precariousness adversity

Authors

First Name

Jaidaa

Last Name

Hamada

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

English Department, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt.

Email

jhamada79@gmail.com

City

Alexandria

Orcid

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Volume

2021

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

30225

Issue Date

2021-12-01

Receive Date

2020-10-12

Publish Date

2021-12-01

Page Start

101

Page End

123

Print ISSN

0575-1624

Online ISSN

2682-2504

Article File

CSE_Volume 2021_Issue 2_Pages 101-123.pdf

PDF . 321.7kB

Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/article_217018.html

Detail API

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=217018

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7

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Original Article

Type Code

738

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Cairo Studies in English

Publication Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Unsettling Epiphanies: Rereading José Saramago’s <i>Blindness</i> in the Time of Covid-19

Details

Type

Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023