Showing 31 - 40 of 64 Items
Minor, Ugly, and Meta: Feelings in Contemporary Korean American Literature
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Kyubin Kim
Access: Open access
- In 2019, Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong published her memoir Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning in the midst of a turning point in Asian American politics. Hong describes minor feelings as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Used as a concept to summate the Asian American experience in white America as living in a country where one’s reality is constantly questioned and made invisible, minor feelings forges an affective framework to study minoritized, diasporic literature. My project enriches Hong’s “minor feelings” by studying Korean American literature through a transnational and multimedia lens, considering how Korea’s colonial history and nation-building play roles in emoting Korean American self-realities. I structurally model my project after Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, split into four chapters, each focusing on one affect: shame, anger, han, and love. My project follows and documents the contemporary shifts occurring in Korean Americana, in how they perceive collective racial and diasporic identity, the intersectionality of layered identities, and the younger generations’ call for coalition. Since Korean American affects often are studied as an afterthought to Korean affects, my project retains a focus on the Korean American experience, recentering members of a diaspora whose globalizing homeland’s triumphs may eclipse their minor, invisible realities in America.

Pathways: Montana Stories and Poems This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Tess Davis
Access: Embargoed
"One Never Knew": David Foster Wallace and the Aesthetics of Consumption
Date: 2016-05-01
Creator: Jesse Ortiz
Access: Open access
- Increasingly, David Foster Wallace is becoming a cult figure among literary enthusiasts. His novels, essays, and short stories are all known for their poignant critiques of modern culture. Since his 2008 suicide, Wallace’s name has come to represent a way of thinking that rejects – and perhaps transcends – the hegemonic power of late capitalism. Wallace had a problem with pleasure. His writing often seemed to deflate or deconstruct what many people enjoy. For him, so much was “supposedly fun.” To understand Wallace’s relationship with pleasure, we must see how pleasure incorporates aesthetics and consumption. Wallace takes issue with the pleasure that comes from the aesthetics of cultural commodities. Irony produces pleasure, which turns culture into a desirable commodity. In my first chapter, I argue that Wallace’s essays challenge aesthetic pleasure by deconstructing self-reflexive irony. In his descriptions of consumer culture, Wallace evokes the feeling of disgust to undo the aesthetic pleasure of consumption. In my second chapter, I move to Infinite Jest to show how Wallace engages with irony while using it to exceed aesthetic pleasure. Infinite Jest challenges the hierarchy of aesthetics and suggests that deformity and waste can be beautiful and important. Infinite Jest demonstrates that, by trusting others instead of pursuing aesthetic ideals, people can build communities that are more honest and fulfilling than the pleasure of consumption.

When There's A Fire–Short Stories Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Zoë Ellis Wilson
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

“Unstuck in Time and Space”: Time Travels in Teen Cinema Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Hallowell Lyne
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Palimpsestuous London: Spatial and Temporal Layering in Fin-de-Siècle Victorian Fiction Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Elisabeth A Strayer
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Possessing Her: Embodying Identity in Exorcism Cinema Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Alicia Echavarria
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
"In Loving Virtue": Staging the Virgin Body in Early Modern Drama
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Miranda Viederman
Access: Open access
- The aim of this Honors project is to investigate representations of female virginity in Renaissance English dramatic works. I view the period as one in which the womb became the site of a unique renewal of cultural anxieties surrounding the stability of the patriarchy and the inaccessibility of female sexual desire. I am most interested in virginity as a “bodily narrative” dependent on the construction and maintenance of performance. I analyze representations of virginity in female characters from four works of drama originating in the Jacobean period of the English Renaissance, during and after the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Across four chapters, I examine the characters of Isabella from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), Beatrice-Joanna from Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling (1622), the Jailer’s Daughter from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), and Helen from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1602-1605). To establish a framework for my readings, I situate each work in its contemporary cultural context, drawing upon Catholic and Protestant religious doctrines, period medical texts, and popular culture. I intend to explore the complex, often contradictory nature of the forms of virginity the plays depict. Still, I hope by uncovering the opportunities these four characters are provided by their virginity, that I can widen the confines of the category.

They Used to Be Castles Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Lily Anna Fullam
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Postmemory’s Shadow Archives: Reshaping the Punctum in Asian Diaspora Poetry This record is embargoed.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Hannah Kim