Snails

Maybe it's because my brain's a little slow from the lack of stimulation over winter break, or maybe it's because this is my first blog post (ever!), but I am having a hard time coming up with something remotely interesting or thoughtful.

I'm not well read in the area of Modernization, so when I was asked to list things I associated with the word “modern”, I found myself embarrassingly using the snail (or coil) technique. (You know when you start off broadly circling a topic and then narrow in from there). I'm not going to lie, the first two entries on my list were: not ancient, and not current.

I had not intended snails to play such an important role in my initial experience with this course. I know the snails in Epitaph symbolize something but I don't know what that something is. All I know is that when you see a snail, something disturbing is about to occur.

The reading for Tuesday “Introduction: Colonial Modernity in Korea” discusses many things, one of which being how Japanese elites thought shooting themselves up with controlled doses of the West would help protect them; “Japanese elites understood that the best means of protecting themselves from the Euro-American beasts [...] would be through controlled exposure to its toxicity” (Introduction, p. 4-5). I think Epitaph shows elements of the “Japanese spirituality, Western technology” (Introduction, p. 5) mentioned in the reading. The western technology being the modern hospital practising Western medicine. The spirituality shown in the movie (the marriage between the dead fiancé and the living betrothed), is not something I have ever heard of before. I have seen a marriage between souls in the Korean drama Master's Sun though...

I wonder if the snails are related to the weight difference between a living being and its corpse.