Showing 1 - 10 of 10 Items

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.

• Embargo End Date: 2026-05-18

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Andrew YH Chang

Access: Embargoed

• Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Clayton James Wackerman

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Grace Monaghan

Access: Open access

This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As such, I foreground race and whiteness in these novels, in conjunction with animality, empire, and sexuality, all of which were crucial tools in the imperial gothic’s project of constructing the monstrous Other. The British empire relied on the establishment of a physical and moral boundary between itself and the colonized Other, in order to justify its imperialism and maintain its own perceived superiority. Yet, ultimately, this project demonstrates that the boundaries between the self and the Other, between morality and monstrosity, and between mainland England and its empire, were dangerously porous.

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.

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.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Alicia Echavarria

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

• Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Lianna Harrington

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2017-05-01

Creator: Savannah Blake Horton

Access: Open access

This is What You Want: Stories is a collection of nine stories exploring the role of humor in dark situations. It is a work of fiction.

Date: 2013-05-01

Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein

Access: Open access

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.