A “Forgotten” Pandemic. Strategies of Textualization of the Spanish Flu during the Covid-19 Emergency

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate how texts related to the Spanish Flu pandemic (1918- 1920) are used to interpret the Covid-19 emergency. In particular, starting with the idea proposed by Omar Calabrese in relation to the collective “taste” of history, and taking into account a corpus of American, Italian and British online media, I consider the various semiotic strategies of “presentification of the past” and “prognostication of the future”, as well as how the texts of the pandemic past in the early twentieth century have been considered as epistemic sources to which to refer and a historical experience from which to learn.