Conditions for the emergence of nostalgic narrative in the pandemic: from individual symptom to contemporary emotion

Abstract

This article investigates how nostalgic feeling progressively came to be present in social narratives. That is, as an individual symptom, scientifically observed in the 17th century, it became a narrative strategy in the 20th century cultural industry and was present in current social media relations. Especially at the time of the worldwide pandemic of the new coronavirus, when the idealized memory of other times appears with greater recurrence in media expressions, in the face of social isolation to contain the spread of the virus. In order to observe this evolution, it seeks to understand, in the literature review, the concept of nostalgia and the way in which its plot is constituted, in the work of Svetlana Boym (2017). It then discusses how the fall of the archaic narrator, as noted by Walter Benjamin (2012), the end of high-sounding metanarratives, as cited by François Lyotard (2020) creates conditions for a culture that seduces through memory, as stated by Andreas Huyssen (2000). Then, it addresses the contemporary social conditions that make possible the emergence of nostalgia for a comforting home, lost with the accelerated passage of time, in the concepts of ‘Liquid Modernity’ (2001) and ‘Retrotopia’ (2017) in Zigmunt Bauman. Finally, it is possible to understand the nostalgic emergence in media cultural expressions articulated with the onset of the pandemic.