Language in Limbo: Being Suspended between Consolation and Control

Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic into lockdown during intercontinental travels, the author finds herself in limbo. With help from literary precedents such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Defoe supported by a brief interrogation of contemporary utterances surrounding the master trope “virus,” she claims a chiasmic relation between the concepts “consolation” and “control.”