Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

Hegel and Dessalines: Philosophy and the African Diaspora

[First paragraph]
 Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Susan Buck-Morss. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xii + 164 pp. (Paper US 16.95) Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Nick Nesbitt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. x + 261 pp. (Paper US 22.50)
 
 These two books have relaunched universal history – not without controversy– as a dominant trope in the fields of colonial history and postcolonial theory. They have also highlighted tensions around the application of a Hegelian philosophical genealogy to Haiti, the first self-emancipated black postcolony, the state ghettoized as “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” and now the embattled zone of recovery from the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010

Interview with Ken Carpenter (Class of 1958), Deborah Jenson (Class of 1983), and Jim Jenson (Class of 1982) by Ben Bousquet

In this oral history, Ken Carpenter (Class of 1958), Deborah Carpenter Jenson (Class of 1983), and Jim Jenson (Class of 1982) reflect on their respective experiences at Bowdoin. Ken speaks of his background as an “orphan” (his father had died and his mother could not afford to raise him) attending Girard College for Boys, his transition to Bowdoin life as a first-generation student, and his involvement with the Delta Sigma fraternity. He also explores how the research skills that he gained at Bowdoin influenced his career as a cataloger, librarian, and author. Ken and his daughter, Deborah, go on to explain that, during his time at Bowdoin, Ken met his future wife, Mary Carpenter, at a boarding house in Brunswick run by Mary’s mother, Elizabeth Wilson. They later explain that Mary Carpenter had also lost her father and that Mary’s subsequent career in academia influenced Deborah’s career path. Deborah also recounts the factors that affected her decision to attend Bowdoin, as well as a hazing story from her early days at Delta Kappa Epsilon. Jim tells of his decision to enroll at the College, his transition from California to Maine, and his experience in the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. The three also discuss their thoughts on Bowdoin’s decision to eliminate fraternities

Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence

Assessment of the publication of Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ independence documents in the American journalistic sphere, 1804-1806

Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation

This article traces the contributions of mirror neuron theories in neuroscience to debates on literature and related theories of mimesis or, as Erich Auerbach defined it, the representation of reality. The “ensemble” descriptor used for the visualization technologies on which we currently depend to chart the neuronal firing in the human brain is also an apt term for an additional translational issue between structure and what one might call the philosophical domain. The most carefully established data of brain activity is empirically confirmable on the micro level. Moving from it to the so-called “higher order” or more complex issues of meaning and use by humans, not least in cultural life, requires in effect a translation from micro evidence to ensemble evidence. Within the neurosciences, such translational processes are objects of seduction and suspicion at once. Yet an “ensemble” principle is not only active in brain mapping evidence, but in the “single brain” to “social brain” evidence field for neural mirroring. The brain in isolation represents only a slice of the field of the dialogic brain, the brain performing social cognition of others, the brain bringing the other’s existence into the individual’s embodied space through the individual’s internal simulation. This essay moves from the concept of the social brain to the suggestion of an ontological priority of representation in the mirror neuron paradigm. Is literature itself a relative of brain mirroring processes, and thus a form of biomimesis? And if we recognize literature and other representational processes as a part of “the human ensemble,” should we also recognize the capacity of literature and other art forms to mimetically influence our performance of physiological being