• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.45-77
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• 2021

The aftermath of the COVID-19 virus continues. There are two potential fears behind the various preventive and quarantine measures. : the fear that "I may be infected" and the fear that "someone may infect me". This subconscious is built on the 'imagination of infection'. This paper attempted to analyze science fiction(SF) narratives and zombie narratives that influenced our imagination of infection. And this paper attempts to examine how SF novels and movies understand and express "infection", and how zombie narratives reveal "infection" and its horror. Mary Shelley's novel "The Last Man" revealed the paradox that the fear of an infectious disease gave humanity an opportunity for reflection. The films and showed that fear and aversion to infectious diseases can lead to riots and conflict. Zombie narrative is a genre that most dramatically expresses the horror of infection. Director Yeon Sangho's zombie trilogy, including , reveals that people around you can turn into the most dangerous source of infection. Through SF and zombie narratives, we can realize that humanity must have a humble sense of solidarity, ethics, and empathy in the face of infectious diseases. Through this narrative texts, we can realize the importance of the imagination of infection. Imagination of infection is the basis for understanding the causes and consequences of the spread of infection, the process and future prospects.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.691-717
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• 2010

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love framed by an overarching pattern of death, set in the war-torn and doomed Troy, from which the lovers cannot separate their fate. Compared with Boccaccio's poem, the attention paid to death in Chaucer's version underlies his complex treatment of love. Above all, the language of death in Chaucer's poem provides the thread from which the entangled web of love is woven. Death together with desire pervades the language and rhetoric of the poem, prominent not only in the courtly love tropes, but also in the characters' asides and speeches. The prominence of these two concepts, desire and death, seem to be central to the various issues that the poem contains explicitly and implicitly. That is, two concepts are the basis for the breadth and depth of Chaucer's examination of love in light of the social and political realities of late fourteenth century England. The language of death in Chaucer's poem reflects the powerful influence on his imagination. With the devastation wrought by the plague and the changing fortunes of England in the war with France, Chaucer's world was once saturated in death, and one that could amply parallel the turn from prosperity to downfall. In particular, Chaucer's poem is suffused with the language of contagion and death in connection with desire. Troilus's lovesickness mimics the progress of a viral infection. Once breached, his body performs its newly compromised identity through fever, loss of appetite, and physical disintegration. On the other hand, Chaucer depicts Boccaccio's conventional portrait of Criseyde into a elaborate paramour of a pathogen. She is characterized as the contaminant that infects male hero. In addition, Criseyde is cast as sole earthly cure of illness that Troilus suffers from. In spite of Criseyde's role as nurturer and healer, Troilus longs for his own death and feels death clutching his heart. Finally, Troilus's love toward Criseyde is doomed to death.