For my goal this week, I collected author statements from Ruth Ozeki from interviews and her biography that inform her work. In Ruth Ozeki’s author statements about her philosophies of writing fiction and the origin of A Tale for the Time Being, she touches on many of the meta-fictional aspects I am interested in for my project. […]
Post 11/9: Election Reflection
Election Day felt like a catastrophe on the Lewis & Clark College campus. Conversation was muted. People wore black. People missed class. My peers and professors hadn’t slept. The functions of a normal day disappeared. In my research, catastrophe, disaster, and apocalypse are key terms. It didn’t quite feel like that on 11/9 to me, but it […]
Ruth Ozeki and A Tale for the Time Being: Drawing Connections
For my thesis goals this week, I have turned to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. This book is a novel about a woman in British Columbia who discovers a lunchbox with a diary from a Japanese teenager that may have been washed over the Pacific from Japan after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and […]
Science Fiction Discourses & Fictional Realities
Last week, I had a wonderful meeting with my adviser and mentor, Jim Proctor. He put my budding thesis into a language that connects it even more explicitly to my area of interest: the fiction of unsettled landscapes. Further, we discussed the various structures of fiction and literature in regards to my previous interest in […]
An Inquiry into Earthquakes in Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction
Introduction & Frameworks I want to explore the place of fictional stories in relation to scientific discourse. To this end, there are several theoretical frameworks which I aim to use to carve out the academic space of this inquiry. First, narrative is often used in discourses of environmental history, as William Cronon has discussed at […]