Miracle Drug: Therapeutic Fantasies for Pandemic Times

Taking inspiration from COVID-era pandemic syllabi, this essay argues that pandemic fiction is doubly therapeutic: it represents medical practice, and it aids, existentially, in the mapping of pandemic spaces. This dual function appears especially in the aesthetic and ideological processes that mediate cures, or the medicines that draw some pandemic stories toward narrative closure. By comparing the cures in the film Contagion and the video game The Last of Us , this essay contends that bourgeois imaginaries of globalization provide an implicit infrastructure for therapeutic fantasies and italicizes the difference between these fantasies and the recent history of COVID.