Showing 21 - 30 of 64 Items

This Is All for You: Stories Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Catherine Crouch
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Bodies, Memories, Ghosts, and Objects or Telling a Memory
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Natsumi Lynne Meyer
Access: Open access
- I think it started in December 2017, when my Mama sent me to Japan to take care of my grandparents, Baba and Jiji, alone. I had been to Japan almost every year since I was eleven years old, and several times before that too, but this was my first time without Mama. When Mama was there, Japan was filtered through her. I could poke bits of myself through her editing and approval. I could read street signs because of the way she read them, and I could understand my grandparents’ sighs from the timbre of her translation. That December, though, I had to see and hear alone. The tiny shakes in Baba’s legs and the indentation in Jiji’s forehead from when he fell down the stairs crystallized in my memory, and I had to write about it. This project includes a series of creative nonfiction and fiction pieces centered around telling my family stories. Writing from interviews, observations, and generational memories, I weave together these story fragments to discuss Asian American identity and immigration, WWII trauma, aging, and inheritance.
James Joyce’s Prose Pedagogy: Language in Freirean Dialogue
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Jack McDermott Wellschlager
Access: Open access
- My project concerns the pedagogical nature of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Across the various styles and forms of Ulysses’ chapters, or “episodes,” I theorize the pedagogy of James Joyce’s prose by tracking the ways that the text demands readers participate in a Freirean dialogue. I will also discuss how Ulysses understands language as a practice of resistance: the novel’s characters have personal linguistic practices that help them open up the worlds that occupy them. I will appreciate the control these characters take of their world as I argue, through Paulo Freire’s work, that no true change occurs without the presence of a cooperative worldbuilding effort.
Out of Time: Queer Resistance to Chrononormativity in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Elana Sheinkopf
Access: Open access
Pandemic as method
Date: 2019-10-01
Creator: Belinda Kong
Access: Open access
- This essay deploys the concept of pandemic as a set of discursive relations rather than a neutral description of a natural phenomenon, arguing that pandemic discourse is a product of layered histories of power that in turn reproduces myriad forms of imperial and racial power in the new millennium. The essay aims to denaturalize the idea of infectious disease by reframing it as an assemblage of multiple histories of American geopower and biopower from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In particular, Asia and Asian bodies have been targeted by US discourses of infection and biosecurity as frontiers of bioterrorism and the diseased other. A contemporary example of this bioorientalism can be seen around the 2003 SARS epidemic, in which global discourses projected the source of contagion onto Asia and Asians. Pandemic as method can thus serve as a theoretical pathway for examining cultural concatenations of orientalism and biopower.
Superhero Ecologies: An Environmental Reading of Contemporary Superhero Cinema
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Andrew McGowan
Access: Open access
The Future Regained: Toward a Modernist Ethics of Time
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jack Rodgers
Access: Open access
- This project explores the convergence of futurity and ethics through an examination of key figures in modernist literature. It studies works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in order to conceptualize an encounter with the future which goes beyond a traditionally linear and teleological model of time, setting out to reimagine the role of both temporality and ethics in novels including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses. Key facets of this exploration, which is metaphorized and guided by the image of a window, include temporal otherness, transgression and fracturing of the self (primarily understood through the paradoxical experience of dying), and the arrival of the future into the present. Major theoretical influences include queer theory, poststructuralism, and anti-dialectics. Ultimately, the project makes the case that it is possible to construct a modernist ethics which embraces the messianic potential of absences, blanks, and blind spots, a proposition made possible by our encounter with an incomprehensible yet imminent fragment of the future out of place in the present. At the close, it suggests an ethical imperative towards “affirmative negation”—a messianic, annunciatory, affirmation of that which is missing or omitted.

Silent Nation: a memoir of sorts This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Mishal Kazmi
Access: Embargoed
"Proud Flesh and Blood": Phineas Fletcher, Gabriel Daniel, and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Embodiment
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Micaela Elanor Simeone
Access: Open access
- The human body was a site of discovery and redefinition in early modern Europe. This project traces the gradual arc from the mid-seventeenth century towards Cartesian notions of the body in the later part of the century through two fictions: Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)’s The Purple Island (1633) and Gabriel Daniel (1649-1728)’s Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690). This project views these two largely-overlooked texts as important literary works that represent the seventeenth century’s transformative debates about and explorations of the human body. I argue that Fletcher employs a dissective mode that embraces mind-body harmony while framing the human as both fragmented and whole. I then explore how Voyage du Monde de Descartes responds to an altogether different culture in the late seventeenth century, after Cartesian ideas extracted mind from body and no longer saw the body as a significant marker of humanity. I argue that Voyage ultimately reveals—through a captivating satirical fiction—how understanding Cartesian anatomy as the product of anxiety, uncertainty, and novelty helps us better see how we became motivated to transcend our bodies.

Counter-Futurisms: Collaborative Survival and Communal Healing in a Climate-Changed World This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Lianna Harrington
Access: Embargoed