"Aristotle’s Logic of Syllogism and Mimesis as Applied to Speculating and Imitating Pandemics in St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) and Amir Tag Elsir’s Ebola 76 (2012)"

Document Type : Original research articles

Author

English department, Faculty of Arts, New Valley University,

Abstract

This paper examines the applicability of the Aristotelian logic of syllogism and mimesis to speculating and imitating epidemics through two pandemic narratives. Two literary texts relating to two different cultures are analyzed: Ebola 76 (2012) by the Eastern Sudanese Amir Tag Elsir, which is considered a prescient of the second wave of Ebola in 2014 and Station Eleven (2014) by the Western Canadian St. John Mandel, which is also considered a prescient of COVID-19 in 2020. These viruses are logically speculated and imitated in fiction because of the certain mutation of previous similar viruses. Following Aristotle’s logic, these two novelists apply the deduction method of reasoning to speculate pandemics.  Aristotle’s logic claims that any certain conclusion should start first with two premises. In these two texts, the first premise is that there is a virus. The second premise is that this virus mutates. Then, the certain conclusion is a newly mutated virus. Thus, despite cultural differences, both novelists can imitate the past and the present just to speculate future pandemics in real life.

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics