Showing 1 - 4 of 4 Items
Experiments in Gender: A Comparative Analysis on the Literary Representation of Women in Medicine and Science during the Weimar Republic Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Rachel Bercovitch
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Transforming the Humane: Human/Animal Relationships in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand and Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Joosep R. Vorno
Access: Open access
- In this project, I investigate Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915) and Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963) through a magic realist interpretive strategy. I identify how, as a result of a mysterious opening premise, the two texts accomplish a human/animal transformation in the protagonists. While the transformations differ in several aspects, even at times being direct opposites, the way in which the characters navigate their new nonhuman selves poses many important questions about care and humaneness, the human condition, and social and familial structures. By drawing on discussions of magic realism – from its roots in Weimar German art criticism, its contemporary features in literature, and the inherently subversive nature of the narrative mode – I discuss how the lens of magic realism becomes a helpful tool in recognizing, exploring, and appreciating the human/animal transformations as a defamiliarization of the familiar.
Unraveling Paradise: Colonialism and Disguise in German Language Literature
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Brigita Kant
Access: Open access
- For centuries, the Pacific Islands have been disguised by Europeans through the trope of “island paradise." Despite Europe’s role in bringing colonization and racial oppression to Oceania, the dominant narrative has been that Pacific Islanders lead simple lives, untouched from the complicated aspects of the “modern world.” This narrative has enabled White outsiders to fantasize about the Pacific Islands as a place for personal denial of Western social conventions, simultaneously allowing White European men to fetishize and possess Pacific Island culture and identity. My honors project will closely examine three fictional German language texts- Haimotochare (1819), Der Papalagi (1920), and Imperium (2012)- centered around the exploration German colonial involvement in Pacific Islands. My analysis of these texts will allow for the understanding of how the false narrative of “island paradise” came to be, how it has been embraced and weaponized, and what it means for both German and Pacific Islander post-colonial identity.
Onkel Toms Hütte: Translation, Intervention, and Nation This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Sofie Brown
Access: Embargoed