Newspaper and arts: confluences in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries' epidemics

Abstract

The theme of this article is the relationship between art and journalism and the functions of both speeches in history’s recording and discussing. Based on this, this paper aims to establish a parallel between the literary text ‘O mez da grippe’ (1981), by Valêncio Xavier, some news published in 2020 and the series ‘Fantasmagoria’ (2020), by José Rufino, in order to consolidate art and journalism as influential vehicles in the collective memory and narrative’s formation related to two distinct epidemic contexts, in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Thus, this study, with bibliographic and comparative character, is divided into two parts: in the first section, the Valêncio Xavier’s literary production is analyzed to emphasize the multimodality between fiction and news and offer readers an overview of the Curitiba’s flu epidemic, in 1918; and, in the second part, the visual art by José Rufino and some newspapers that describe and problematize the covid-19 pandemic are presented. In the theoretical aspect, this research is based on the postulates by Linda Hutcheon, Maurice Halbwachs, Antonio Olinto, Ernest Fischer, among others. As result, very similar data were obtained, in the narratives corresponding to the two epidemic contexts, which supports the conclusion that, despite the historical distance and some specificities between the 1918 and 2020 epidemics, similarities are preponderant, revealing that the broad scope of these historical facts is intrinsically associated with the multiple character of subjective perceptions, opposing, respectively, individual memory and collective memory.