My name is Morgan Zepp. I was an English Literature and Global Studies double major, with minors in Writing and Spanish. Doing an Honors Thesis was extremely important for me in that it helped me to understand what academic writing really is. There is no prompt or specific purpose provided by someone else–instead, it’s about one’s participation in a larger conversation. Writing a thesis allowed me to explore my own academic interests, including finding ways to intertwine literature and global studies from an environmental perspective.
My thesis provides an environmental perspective on two global, non-English texts and explores how the concept of a changing environment is written through the consciousness of characters. The texts I explored were Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami, and “Isabel Watching it Rain” in Macondo, a Colombian short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I attempted to understand the function of these works in accordance with current ecocriticism, and brought them into a conversation about how the environment is imagined.