Introduction

The coronavirus pandemic that began in late 2019 and that merged with other catastrophic global conditions to create a syndemic (see Cynthia J. Davis's note) has brought changes beyond our comprehension. Pandemic-inspired articles, novels, stories, poems, blogs, tweets, videos, songs, and artwork are being produced at a prodigious rate as we try to make sense of what we all have, to varying degrees, witnessed and experienced for the last two years and continue to confront with no clear end in sight. In this "Of Note" section we hear from two literary scholars, Davis and Stuti Goswami, who have been writing about the body, medicine, pain, and the deleterious effects of disease and other maladies for some time and who now offer their insights into how this pandemic resembles and differs from previous global health calamities. Their contributions revolve in turn around recently published work on the pandemic by other scholars, including Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb's "Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty" (Victorian Studies, Spring 2020), Walter D. Mignolo's "The Logic of the In-Visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch" (Theory, Culture, and Society, December 2020), and a multiauthored symposium titled "Thinking through the Pandemic" (Science Fiction Studies, November 2020). Even as we marshal words to assess the damage the pandemic has done, however—the deaths it has caused and the racial and health care inequities it has perpetuated and aggravated—the theme of these essays and notes is the ineffability of their impact in the end. No matter how hard we try, it seems, this pandemic defies description. The question with which Davis opens her note echoes throughout. "Should we view the COVID-19 pandemic as an inflection point or as more of the same?" she asks. Acknowledging a similar uncertainty, Goswami observes: "The imprints left behind by the novel coronavirus in the lives of people are multidimensional and constantly evolving." But write we must, and so we offer these articles and notes as a way of bearing witness to the ineffability of our loss and of making good on our obligation to scrutinize it, for without that we will never find our way to the other side of this disaster. Committed to giving a forum to as many voices as we can on the subject, ELN will also follow this "Of Note" section with a special issue dedicated to the subject of the pandemic that is scheduled for publication in 2023, at which point, we hope, the world will look a little brighter.