(top of the hourglass) I am examining the concept of place as it functions in fictional worlds, in particular, fictional worlds that are unsettled by earthquakes. While this focus is motivated by my own physical and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest, this project bridges a variety of disciplines from the humanities to the physical and […]
Author Statements from Ruth Ozeki
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 […]
after the quake: authorial statements from haruki murakami
For my data analysis goals for this week, I have examined several interviews and public statements by the author of one of my texts, Haruki Murakami. I looked for his statements specifically regarding the events that inspired the publication of after the quake, a collection of short stories set in February 1995 in between the Kobe earthquake […]