'A Matter Of Common Decency': What Literature Can Teach Us About Epidemics
Authors explore questions of morality, evil, solidarity and survival in Albert Camus' The Plague, Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers.
Professor Alice Kaplan has been scrambling to revise her lectures for the French literature class she teaches at Yale University.
On the syllabus, coincidentally, for her online class is The Plague, Albert Camus' 1947 novel about a plague epidemic that ravages a quarantined city in Algeria.
"I never imagined I would be teaching this novel in the midst of an epidemic," Kaplan says. "I never imagined I'd need to give a trigger warning for teaching Camus' The Plague."
Kaplan has students taking her class virtually from Hong Kong and from Wuhan, China, the city that was the early center of the global COVID-19 pandemic. "They're really feeling this in a way that no other readers have
