Bollington, Lucy;
(2023)
Red Alerts: A Reflective Assemblage.
Modern Languages Open
, 2023
(1)
, Article 18. 10.3828/mlo.v0i0.410.
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Abstract
This article considers the resonances between Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy” (1842) and our contemporary moment and pandemic context by drawing this story’s central deployment of the colour red into relation with the “red alerts” of twenty-first-century crises. I place “The Masque of the Red Death” in connection with the UK government’s COVID-19 alert level chart, in which red announces the most serious level of risk, as well as the US Homeland Security Advisory System chart produced following 9/11, which the UK alert chart closely resembles. Marshalling Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda’s work on the cultural meanings tied to the colour red, and Brian Massumi’s reflections on the US Homeland Security Advisory System and contemporary power, politics, and affect, I discuss how the red alerts assembled in this article are each infused with stress, fear and uncertainty and subtended by exclusions and erosions of care.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Red Alerts: A Reflective Assemblage |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3828/mlo.v0i0.410 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.410 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10167641 |
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