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Article published In: Chronotopes and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Language, Culture and Society 4:2] 2022
► pp. 162–188

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Memes from confinement

Disorientation and hindsight projection in the crisis of COVID-19

 | Pomona College
Published online: 25 November 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.22003.div
Abstract
Memes have been described as textual forms of “(post)modern folklore” ( (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 5). Photos or short videos, they highlight current cultural phenomena, and they spread exponentially through person-to-person sharing on social media platforms. For this article, I created a corpus of memes that circulated in March 2020, during the first weeks after statewide lockdown orders were issued in the U.S. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar concept of the chronotope, I analyze a subset of these memes that specifically addressed the experience of time in confinement, illuminating two interrelated trends: the disruption of temporal order in the present and the projection of chronotopes of hindsight in which this present gets resolved as past. Through detailed textual analysis, I show that the memes reveal both a widespread sense of disorientation and a corollary impulse to mitigate it through the imagination of spatiotemporal realms. I argue that such chronotopic projections can serve as a response to temporary but profound uncertainty, caused in this case by the public health crisis in its initial stages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: March 2020
  • 2.Memes: An origin story
  • 3.Chronotopes and memetic activity
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Chronotopes of disorientation
  • 6.Chronotopic projections
  • 7.Conclusion: April 2021
  • 8.Postscript: February 2022
  • Notes
  • References
References (50)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Giolo, Guilherme & Giselinde Kuipers
2025. The Humorous Construction of Time and Meaning: Memes and Temporal Sense-Making during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Time & Society DOI logo

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