Reading the quarantine

Abstract

This article is an attempt to approach reading and writing practices in times of emergency using the personal essay as a method; in other words, it is an investigation, based on an individual but shared experience, of the relationship between subject and text during events that modify the perception of time and space. Based on this shared experience – the more or less voluntary social distancing in the first half of 2020 due to the Covid-19 world pandemic –, we intend to investigate how an event like this transforms the way we choose and our relationship with old and contemporary, artistic and journalistic texts, with an emphasis on the reading of the diaries produced and published during the first semester of 2020. The article also intends to make an initial and subjective mapping of the published testimonies on the pandemic. The objective is not to build a timeless typology of the forms of reading or a typology of the diaries, but to describe possible reading and writing strategies mediated by the idea of emergency.