So. That was a very fitting conclusion to a very enjoyable class. It seemed as if Contagion touched on various themes we had discussed regarding other texts. While watching what I thought was an excellent movie (thanks in large part to the acting. What a cast!) I couldn’t help but wonder whether Soderbergh’s depiction of […]
Read More →Archive for December, 2014
Cough. Cough. Sneeze. Sneeze. Die.
Well, that was a wild ride. And here comes the last zero G roll. I found the idea of R0, a.k.a. the basic reproduction number, absolutely fascinating. So here is a quick list of the R0 for the world’s most infamous viruses. Disease Transmission R0 Measles Airborne 12–18 Pertussis a.k.a. whooping cough Airborne droplet 12–17 Smallpox Airborne droplet […]
Read More →Conclusion. Answers. More Questions.
Through the use of diction, the authors of Contagion Literature have managed to portray … Just Kidding. We started Contagion with King Oidipus. As baptism, we read the scene of Oidipus gauging his eyes out with talons which, it can be argued, foreshadowed the horrors we would go on to visualize in the succeeding books. […]
Read More →CAUTION: BIOHAZARD
As “the terrifying true story of the origins of the ebola virus,” The Hot Zone seems to cross the border between science non-fiction and horror fiction. One way Preston achieves the horrifying effect is by creating a sense of imminent danger, well represented by the biohazard sign and biosafety level he presents at the very […]
Read More →Creative Scientific Memoir, Nonfictional Thriller Journalism
The Hot Zone presents itself as a scientific, non-fiction thriller. I felt this claim, along with multiple aspects of its prose/published format, were some of the major clashing points of our discussion on Monday. As augmenter, I hope to amplify this debate. According to Wikipedia (“reliable source” haha), “Fiction is the form of any work […]
Read More →Inuits zombified
In Zone One, Whitehead (repeatedly) provides social commentary on the subject of consumerism prevalent in New York, something that can now also be extrapolated for many other cities on the world map. In the book, he employed two kinds of zombies – the stragglers and the skels – to make tangible the effects of consumerism. Arguably, the […]
Read More →As more and more people believe zombies are real, they try to find a real zombie contagion with any occasion. Thus, once the ebola appeared, it was normal to relate it to the possibility of being responsible for the emergence of zombies. Here is an interesting article about some presumably zombie due to ebola. Also, as […]
Read More →If fiction is not horrifying enough take a look at reality: ebola
The Hot Zone explores a world of the highly infectious diseases that fall under the classification of filoviruses. The three viruses that fall under this category are Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, and Marburg. Being nonfiction, the book seeks to be informative and accurate. It begins with the story of Charles Monet, a Frenchman that worked […]
Read More →Zombie Apocalypse
It’s clear that society now a days is obsessed with the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. People actually plan and prepare for it. It’s immersed in our culture now and it’s curious to think why it came about. This article has an interesting claim, saying that in fact “ zombies may be helping us cope with the […]
Read More →The Evolution of Zombies in Literature
On Sunday we discussed the ideas of ‘zombies’ in the texts we have read and compared them to that in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. We arrived at the conclusion that in previous works, the notion of The Zombie – though never explicitly mentioned – alluded to the idea of an infected being wilfully infecting another. […]
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