The comparison of Thucydides’ and Defoe’s accounts of the plague is reliant upon the type of literature that each one is created for. While one is seen as a fiction and another as an accurate description of the history of the plague, my opinion is that they are both more similar than they are different. […]
Read More →Archive for February, 2019
The Periwig Maker
Celebrated Stop Motion Short Film Inspired by Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year The Periwig Maker is a short film directed by Steffen Schäffler that represents plague-ridden London in the 1700s. Produced by Ideal Standard film and released in 1999, it went on to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short Film category. The […]
Read More →Money Matters
Reading Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, I found it interesting to compare how Defoe and Boccaccio describe society differently, and even though it is noticeable that the texts are not only separated geographically (Defoe’s in London, Boccaccio’s in Florence) but temporally (by almost 400 years), there are some similarities and differences. The general […]
Read More →In the Eyes of Contemporaries: Documentation
We mentioned today about what it means for Defoe’s piece of writing to be considered a journal, in all that it has encapsulated for us in terms of illustrating the events of the plague outbreak in London in 1665. A journal may be considered a medium of documentation of news and events in a personal […]
Read More →Public Crisis in the Modern Sense
One thing that stood out to me while reading the frame story of Decameron the backdrop of societal disintegration as well as public apathy to the sick and the dead that came along with the plague. As people abandoned their families, neglected corpses lying on the streets and fled the city or locked themselves up, […]
Read More →Everyman – A morality play
While reading Boccaccio’s Decameron, I was reminded of a play I studied in my Foundations of Literature I class last semester. Boccaccio’s introduction stated “in the face of so much affliction and misery all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished in our city”, emphasising on the […]
Read More →Some topics to consider in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
For the last few weeks, we have been reading plays, articles, novellas, historical accounts about the plague. All of them are either factual or fictional. However, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is an interesting merger of fact and fiction. Although the book is presented as a personal experience of the plague in London, […]
Read More →Immunity (As Boccaccio Describes It)
Today’s class discussion on The Decameron touched on a range of topics including fate, fortune, religion, and social hierarchy. However, one topic that could potentially diversify the conversation is that of “immunity.” As discussed last class, immunity can take on several different forms, and The Decameron proposes an entirely new, and rather contemporary view on […]
Read More →Reflecting on Decameron by Boccaccio
While the context of the Decameron is rather macabre, its story is rather uplifting and it revolves around the brigata made up of ten storytellers, predominantly women. We would like to bring to your attention the framing of this story: the contrast between the morbid plague and the peaceful garden, which brings to mind the […]
Read More →A plague
In a convener’s post for Oedipus the King I wrote for Contagion 2012, way back during the first iteration of this course, I mentioned a strain of recent scholarship on Sophocles’ play that takes the plague setting seriously: After all, the assumption on scholars’ parts has long been that Sophocles introduced an epidemic as the […]
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