Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi's transmedia analyses unearth people's experiences of "wormification"—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped capitalist growth in the wake of the Korean War.

Whether embodied as refugees, leftists, or broken families, Yi's wormified protagonists transcend their positions as displaced victims of polarized politics and unequal development. Through metamorphoses into border riders who fly over or crawl through the world's dividing lines, they reclaim postcolonial memories buried in the pursuit of modernization under US hegemony and cultivate a desire for social transformation. Connecting colonial legacies, Cold War ideologies, and neoliberal economics, Worm-Time dares us to rethink the post-WWII consensus on freedom, peace, and prosperity.

We Jung Yi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and positions.

Worm-Time examines critically received and widely discussed South Korean texts, freeing them from the confines of existing conceptual frameworks and offering new ways to think about how they resonate with the concerns, aspirations, and future visions of the contemporary period. I applaud We Jung Yi's intellectual ambition and courage.

Yoon Sun Yang, author of From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men:

An incredibly rich, bold, and sophisticated study of South Korean culture, Worm-Time reminds us why we still need to talk about the Korean War and the division of Korea in the twenty-first century and why we must turn to Korean literature and culture to understand the true cost of the Cold War.