Bowdoin Orient v.133, no.1-25 (2001-2002)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1002/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.138, no.1-25 (2008-2009)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1009/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.137, no.1-25 (2007-2008)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1008/thumbnail.jp

Producing 'Britishness': Globalisation and the Construction of National Identity in British Fashion

British fashion is poised amidst a clutch of conflicting narratives, representations and ideologies. Through an examination of these rival encounters and the events that have gone to generate them, this thesis gives an insight into the culture of contemporary fashion, its dilemmas and the industry it supports. In particular, my discussion looks at the relationship between fashion and national identity. It posits fashion as a site central both to the re-branding of Britain and also to contestations over British identity itself, including the gendering of Britishness and its class relations. Using the cases of two iconic British fashion companies, Paul Smith Ltd and Mulberry Plc, I explore how the apparently straightforward and economically driven process of the globalisation of British fashion is, in fact, a far more culturally nuanced and locally embedded encounter than has previously been suggested. I unpack the different ways in which Paul Smith and Mulberry go about negotiating and sometimes even shaping and mobilising a sense of nationness in what is a rapidly globalising commercial marketplace. For in spite of their shared iconic national status both companies go about generating and deploying their self-confessed British character in exceedingly different ways. It is through an exploration of Paul Smith and Mulberry's contrasting corporate strategies, symbolic production techniques and product profiles that I investigate the different meanings afforded by the term Britishness. Indeed the thesis contends that, in the arena of fashion, Britishness is characterised less through some distinct essence or by a particular 'look' and more through its 'narratives of ambiguity'. In turn, it suggests that an understanding of these narratives goes some way in problematising and disrupting commonly imagined notions of Britishness borne out of Anglo-centric, androcentric and bourgeois tradition and, still further, it looks at how such notions might be re-worked in more multiple and complex ways

Of Gods and Gaia

This book examines the case for planetary engineering and management that seeks to redefine and reorganise environmentalism around nuclear power, biotechnology, GM food and geoengineering. This amounts to moral and political disarmament of the environmental movement and can be resisted. This book examines what these proposals amount to and what kind of thinking – and politics – lies behind them. Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Mark Lynas follows suit and entitles his book The God Species. These books focus almost exclusively on technology and offer technological solutions to the environmental crisis. There is nothing on morality, an explicit repudiation of ‘ideology’, little on social practices, and a disdain of politics which always seems to slant against socialism and the left. The environmental crisis ought to have concentrated minds and caused us to take the notion of natural limits and planetary boundaries more seriously. However, far from coming to terms with the Faustian bargains which lie at the heart of modernity, the inversion of means and ends, the enlargement of means at the expense of ends, the planetary engineers come to invest our technologies with a divine power. I shall take these books on with respect to specific points, examining the cases made for nuclear energy, biotechnology, GE food and geoengineering. I shall set the books by Lovelock, Brand and Lynas within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed