Disease represented in Modern and Contemporary Korean Novels and the related issues and flow

Abstract

Disease is a problematic subject lying between life and death. It is comparable with ‘Crisis’ which brings ‘Disconnection’ into one’s continuous life. Writers use disease which hit them all of a sudden as the base to develop their literary thinking and imagination. The metaphor and image of disease shown in literature can be a significant code we can interpret with historical-cultural and political-social situations of the time. That is, the disease represented in literature is not a matter limited to one person’s body, but a syndrome inseparable from the time context. Extended further, it can be said that the history of Korean literature can not be fully recorded without history of the long pain. Why disease emerged as a new matter of interest in modern times and where and how it’s been placed in literary works of the time? In modern times. Korean literature has shown various diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, venereal disease, leprosy(Hansen’s disease), cholera, etc. If we include some more pathological symptoms such as nervous breakdown, depression, schizophrenia and psychology, and further quite recent diseases such as AIDS, SARS, and MERS, the history of Korean literature may be called as a pathography full of disease experience or a chronicle of pain itself. Researches on the diseases represented in Korean literature have been conducted from various points of view. Going through the mid-late 1980s and 1990s, the scope of the study was extended to more writers and their works. Over time of the 2000s, the subject and methodology of the research on the disease in literature were more subdivided. Since 2000s, the study on the disease represented in Korean literature has extended its subject and scope by meeting with research achievements in the field of history, sociology, and medical science. In such a flow of research, the study on the disease in literature has become a key topic of discussion to read Korean modernity. Now, it’s time to review disease not only at the contact between literature and medical science, but also from a humanistic perspective.