Showing 11 - 20 of 64 Items

New Creatures in Old Gazes: Investigating Shifts Away from Anthropocentrism in Contemporary Animal Fiction

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Catherine Mose

Access: Open access

This paper examines three works of animal-based fiction published within the last decade that all center on hypothetical forms of animals with a focus on decentering anthropocentric narratives of how much agency an animal is allowed to have in a human-centric narrative without engaging in anthropmorphism. By comparing the books with theory from the academic field of animal studies, older works of animal-based fiction, and historical debates surrounding the depiction of real-world animals in writing, I aim to interrogate the methods these authors use to decouple their animals' agency from anthropomorphism, and the ways in which this shift allows anthropocentrism to take new forms rather than be eradicated.


Miniature of Tapping at the Windows: A Collection
Tapping at the Windows: A Collection
This record is embargoed.
    • Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14

    Date: 2020-01-01

    Creator: Samuel Milligan

    Access: Embargoed



      Reading & Teaching Chaucer: the "Good Wif"?

      Date: 2020-01-01

      Creator: Sophie Friedman

      Access: Open access

      This two-chapter project applies formalist and feminist thinking to the thirty-line description of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval, British work The Canterbury Tales. It is an interdisciplinary project; it studies how to read and teach Chaucer at the secondary level based off of these two approaches. In this formalist chapter, I study narrative voice, rhyme, irony, and ekphrasis, writing about the history and function of each of those tools and their role in the passage. I argue that the formalist close reading approach is an excellent teaching tool that generates thorough, rigorous, and joyful reading. In this feminist chapter, I compile a critical literary history of scholarly feminist and pre-feminist engagement with the passage over time. I read into an underlying genotype text, arguing that the Wife of Bath was a female entrepreneur who used textiles as a means of social, professional, and aesthetic expression and empowerment. Then I advocate for a feminist ethical teaching approach—one where we use the text as a non-ethical space in which to explore ethical questions surrounding gender. Ultimately, I argue that feminist and formalist approaches are interdependent and complementary; for both reading and teaching Chaucer, they stand stronger together.


      Guarding Whiteness: Disability, Eugenics, and Rhetorical Agency in Southern Renaissance Fiction

      Date: 2023-01-01

      Creator: Philip Carl Bonanno

      Access: Open access

      This project explores fiction from white authors in the Southern Renaissance, specifically William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. By examining their work alongside some of the performers that appeared historically in freak shows of the South, chapter one investigates how physically enfreaked individuals (usually phenotypically white) have access to power and the powers of whiteness. Chapter 2 interrogates how the South pathologizes promiscuity as mental illness with words such as moronic or feeble-mindedness, and the ramifications it has for the stratification on class divides among Southern elites and “White Trash.” The chapter seeks to answer the question of why, for a short period in the 1940s, white women were more likely to be punished with forced sterilization than Black women. Chapter 3 uncovers the rhetorical agency used by Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, looking at how he resists the powers of whiteness through crip time and his trauma responses to his family that seeks to reinsert the Antebellum South. Using an intersectional approach of critical whiteness studies, disability studies, crip theory, and queer theory, relies on a variety of scholars including, but not limited to; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Richard Dyer, Matt Wray, Jasbir Puar, Ellen Samuels, and Allison Kafer. The primary works examined include promotional materials of historical freaks, McCullers’ The Ballad of a Sad Café, William Faulkner’s The Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury, and Flannery O’Connor short stories “Good Country People” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”


      Miniature of Theories of Thanks: Affect Studies, Reciprocity, and Theoretical Perspectives on Gratitude
      Theories of Thanks: Affect Studies, Reciprocity, and Theoretical Perspectives on Gratitude
      This record is embargoed.
        • Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19

        Date: 2022-01-01

        Creator: Clayton James Wackerman

        Access: Embargoed



          The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement

          Date: 2024-01-01

          Creator: Mei Bock

          Access: Open access

          A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.



          Miniature of Have No Fear: Stories
          Have No Fear: Stories
          Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.

              Date: 2025-01-01

              Creator: Jiahn Son

              Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                Miniature of Advanced Mammals
                Advanced Mammals
                Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.

                    Date: 2020-01-01

                    Creator: Emma Bezilla

                    Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                      Human Today, Posthuman Tomorrow in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

                      Date: 2020-01-01

                      Creator: Benjamin Bousquet

                      Access: Open access

                      Human Today, Posthuman Tomorrow explores the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy through the lens of posthuman theory. Atwood’s trilogy depicts a dystopian, anthropocentric world that hinges upon an apocalyptic, man-made epidemic known as the Waterless Flood. Through posthuman theory, this thesis looks at ways to reconcile the oppositional and hierarchical relationship between the human and the nonhuman. The thesis is split into three main chapters, each of which engages a different posthuman theory. The first chapter addresses the concept of hybridity as it is elaborated by Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. Next, the thesis turns to Donna Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto” to address the ways human-animal relations in the trilogy are imagined as mutual and non-hierarchical. The last chapter turns to the pigoon/human relationship through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming to understand the ways in which humans and pigoons build a new, non-oppositional relationship. In all, this thesis works to understand the stakes of the trilogy through posthumanism to argue that only through a posthuman understanding of the world are we able to erode oppositional differences between humans and nonhumans and create a future inhabitable for all.