Document Type

Article - preprint

Department

Romance Languages and Literatures (Pomona)

Publication Date

11-25-2022

Keywords

chronotope, COVID-19, humor, memes, pandemic

Abstract

Memes have been described as textual forms of “(post)modern folklore” (Shifman, 2014: 5). Photos or short videos, they highlight current cultural phenomena, and they spread exponentially through person-to-person sharing on social media platforms. For this article, I created a corpus of memes that circulated in March 2020, during the first weeks after statewide lockdown orders were issued in the U.S. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Bakthin’s (1981) concept of the chronotope, I analyze a subset of these memes that specifically addressed the experience of time in confinement, illuminating two interrelated trends: the disruption of temporal order in the present and the projection of chronotopes of the future in which this present gets resolved as past. Through detailed textual analysis, I show that the memes reveal both a widespread sense of disorientation and a corollary impulse to mitigate it through the imagination of spatiotemporal realms. I argue that such chronotopic projections can serve as a response to temporary but profound uncertainty, caused in this case by the public health crisis in its initial stages.

Comments

This is an author accepted manuscript of an article published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Language, Culture and Society on November 25, 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.22003.div.

Rights Information

© 2025 David Davita

Terms of Use & License Information

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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