With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself returning in my thinking, reading, writing, and teaching to the classical understanding of plagues as messages from the gods that something was out of order in the social world. The pandemic has highlighted many aspects of the social world in the United States (and elsewhere) that are out of order, including structural racism, socioeconomic inequities, climate change and environmental devastation, and inadequate and unjust health-care systems. The authors of these essays, of course, did not need a global pandemic to spotlight those concerns, but the pandemic has made clear the imperative to address them and has forced us, through necessary adaptations, to take the time to think differently about our habitual practices in our work as scholars and teachers of literature and culture.
The word crisis has its origin in medical terminology—from medieval Latin, by way of Greek krisis,...
