Showing 51 - 64 of 64 Items
The Rubble of Culture: Debris of an Extinct Thought
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: David A. Collings
Access: Open access
- Humanity now faces the possibility that it will become extinct over the next few decades or so. This is not simply a reality about the biological fate of the species; it also raises the prospect of thought’s own extinction. But what does it mean for thought that it, too, might disappear? Thought’s possible disappearance shatters the assumption, at work across all the institutions and disciplines of the West, that one version or another of thought is enduring and will survive. As it turns out, no familiar practice rests on a secure ground; under the sign of the terminus - the prospect of humanity’s extinction - each one is shattered and undone. The cultural legacy becomes a field of rubble. In dozens of short essays, this book moves through this field. It takes up a host of specific inheritances and traces how each is shattered and transformed by an extinct thought. It engages with religion, philosophy, history, literature, ethics, studies of political power and resistance, and depictions of humanity’s place in the nonhuman world. It reconsiders the emergence of capitalism and of biopower, the science of climate change, the import of mediation and technology, and philosophies of temporality. Moreover, it contends with many innovative waves of thought over the past two centuries, from German idealism to deconstruction, from psychoanalysis to queer theory, from decolonizing theory to Afropessimism, and from the critique of ideology to speculative realism. It concludes by assessing what it is like for thought, having confronted its extinction, to live on in this debris, to dance with its own oblivion.
Writing Into Openness: Coincidence, the Ethics of Narration, and Patience in the Work of W.G. Sebald
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Miles Berry
Access: Open access
In and out of the spectacle: The Beijing olympics and Yiyun Li's The Vagrants
Date: 2011-01-01
Creator: Belinda Kong
Access: Open access
Food Comes First: Growing Up at my Family’s Table This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Eleanor Sapat
Access: Embargoed
"I Remember!": Irish Postcolonial Memory in the Early Short Stories of Seán O'Faoláin
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Rebecca Norden-Bright
Access: Open access
- Seán O’Faoláin (1900-1991) was an Irish writer, cultural critic, and editor of the literary magazine The Bell. He wrote prolifically throughout the twentieth century, and while his short stories are often anthologized, much of his work is now out of print. This project will examine O’Faoláin’s first two short story collections, Midsummer Night Madness (1932) and A Purse of Coppers (1937), within the context of the post-independence period in Ireland. The 1930s is a period often glossed over in both political and literary histories of Ireland, overshadowed by the Literary Revival and primarily characterized by deepening conservatism and political strife. However, the 1930s was also an era in which essential debates about Irish identity and the future of the Irish nation played out, in public discourse and in literature. Memory, in particular, served as an important site for these debates, as the newly independent Irish nation sought to define itself in relation to its turbulent past. O’Faoláin’s stories from this period reflect post-independence disillusionment and draw a desolate picture of a nation at a crossroads. At the same time, however, the stories draw upon revolutionary memories to construct a vision of a new Ireland, one no longer shaped by the legacies of colonialism. Situating O’Faoláin’s work within the context of postcolonial theory, my project argues for the postcolonial short story’s unique ability to represent identities in transition and shape the future of the Irish nation.
Vienna Secession
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Bobby Murray
Access: Open access
- ‘Vienna Secession’ is a poetry manuscript broken into four distinct sections: “The Vienna Secession,” “Waltzes,” “Short Talks,” and “Other.” Most of the manuscript is in dialogue with Secessionist artists, or the ethos of the Vienna Secession. However, others, like the haikus, are exercises of form and responses to other contemporary poets, such as Robert Hass or Richard Wright. The manuscript explores different genres, including ekphrasis, prose, and experimental poems, like the ‘Waltzes,’ which employ 3/4 meter to emulate the Viennese waltz. The heart of the project is its sonic awareness—pulling from W.H. Auden, August Kleinzahler, and other musically-oriented poets. Outside the ‘Short Talks’ section, the poems’ sonic and phonetic qualities are integral to their style and meaning. At times this may be subtle, or even indiscernible, but overall, careful attention is paid to the sound and rhythm of the poems. The manuscript should be considered in both musical and literary terms. Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’ and advice in ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ are instrumental in creating these poems. As a ‘first statement,’ many poems battle with the insecurities of a young poet and exemplify the grapple of an aspiring creative. The poems consider antiquated things through contemporary frameworks; relationships, communication, masculinity, and suffering, to name a few. A general incentive of the work is to provide fresh perspectives on historical art and to import its most apposite sentiments into our current moment.
"This people which I made": The Character of King Arthur as a Mechanism of Unification in Medieval Arthuriana and the Idylls of the King
Date: 2016-05-01
Creator: Hallie Schaeffer
Access: Open access
Reframing Mourning: Liberatory Grief in Post-Tragedy Chinese American Women’s Fiction
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Sophia Li
Access: Open access
- My project approaches discussions of Asian American melancholia and mourning with a specific focus on contemporary Chinese American women’s fiction. Scholars such as David Eng, Shinhee Han, and Anne Anlin Cheng have long spotlighted the prevalence of depression among Asian American populations, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, and they variously adopt psychoanalytic approaches to understand Asian American mental health and intersectional identities. Looking beyond psychoanalytic models, my project focuses on the works of Yiyun Li, Jenny Zhang, and K-Ming Chang to explore diverse forms of post-tragedy positionality. I read the authors paratextually, not only to locate them within legacies of diasporic fiction and intersectional auto-writing but also to highlight their critically self-reflexive authorship. I study novels and characters depicting complex processes of mourning, ultimately proposing a reading that views them not only as resisting complete recovery but as forging pathways toward liberatory grief.
Men Like Us: Notes on Gay Migrancy Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Campbell Ives Zeigler
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The Wound and the Word: Examining the Literary Afterlife of Gwangju’s Trauma in Korean and
Korean Diaspora Literature
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Seo Yeon (Sophie) Yook
Access: Open access
- My project examines the enduring legacy of the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its reverberations across Korean and Korean American literature, memory, and identity. Framed by the unforeseen reemergence of martial law in South Korea on December 3, 2024–an event that eerily echoed the nation’s violent, authoritarian past–this project interrogates how historical trauma continues to resurface and be reflected in political reality and cultural narrative. Anchored in close readings of Han Kang’s Human Acts and E. J. Koh’s The Liberators, my project traces a literary and ethical journey mapped through the metaphor of the wound: “Bloodshed,” where pain erupts; “Inflammation,” where it lingers and deepens; and “Growth and Rebuilding," where healing becomes imaginable, if never quite complete. The first chapter positions Han’s polyphonic novel as a work of countermemory, a literary act of resistance against state-sanctioned silence that then demands active readerly participation. The second chapter turns to Koh’s diasporic narrative to consider how trauma migrates across generations and geographies through the medium of translation, revealing the subtler textures of inherited pain. Finally, the last chapter synthesizes theories of postmemory and reparative reading to intimate how the pair of texts move beyond trauma’s paralysis, imagining pathways toward healing, remembrance, and collective renewal. Ultimately, I contend that literature offers a vital site for rearticulating and re-envisioning suppressed histories, particularly in the wake of political repression and cultural amnesia. In returning to Gwangju as a living, aching wound, this project engages in the ethical labor of remembrance and the hopeful, reparative task of repair. It affirms narrative as both vessel and balm, as a means of bearing pain and of gesturing toward the possibility of healing across time, space, language, and community.
“My Bright Whatever”: A Scholar’s Life in Letters This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Carolina Weatherall
Access: Permanent restriction
Superego: Notes on 21st Century Celebrity This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Emma Kilbride
Access: Permanent restriction
Shit Happens to Pretty Girls This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Ella Jones
Access: Permanent restriction