The disease in images: representations of the spanish flu in the argentine press (1918)

Abstract

The spanish flu, despite being an epidemic forgotten in Argentina, caused a strong impact, both in the mortality rate of the national territory and in various aspects of the social, political, cultural and economic life of the country. In this sense, although there have been studies from notoriously enriching perspectives, an approach has not been proposed that recovers the representations made, during the outbreak, by newspapers and magazines of mass circulation. From this historiographical vacuum, this study aims to perform an analysis of cartoons and comics placed in the renowned argentine publishing house "Caras y Caretas", trying to shed light on the different ways in which the disease was presented by the magazine to its profuse public consumer.

The analyse, as we have been anticipating, leads us to propose an approach anchored in a fundamentally qualitative work methodology, defined from the articulation of the hermeneutical historical analysis and the content study, recovering for the latter some tools that the socioemiotic gives us. Work will be done on a set of images selected from their content, in terms of the data they give about the conditions of speech production.