school
i am in grad school for one
I am currently pursuing a masters of science in narrative medicine from columbia university, I have mentioned this before but its become clear that. some people maybe thought I was doing a bit, which is fair bc it is the type of bit I would do. I am going to start posting some of the papers I have written for school, but only the ones that recieve an A or above (jokes on you, thats all of them.)
Here is one i wrote for a class called Close Reading: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Illness. For this paper I identified elements of Bachelardian phenomenology within Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Sorry if this isn’t your bag, will post more Adventures of Handstand soon.
Close Reading: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self, Danielle Spencer, Ph. D.
In form, genre, and subject The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson defies traditional classification. The Argonauts is an expansive non-linear meditation on love, language, identity and embodiment, oriented around Nelson’s relationship with her partner Harry Dodge and the life they build together. In The Argonauts, Nelson fluidly cites and expounds on a vast range of philosophical influences, from Barthes to Winnicott, and in doing so collapses the formal intellectual hierarchy so carefully preserved elsewhere in literature. In presenting the reader with an account of her romance, Nelson discusses the shifting nature of queer identity, sex, maternity, and transformations both physical and metaphysical.
At its core, The Argonauts is both a chronicle of love and an interrogation of structure; to Nelson these concepts are inextricable, something made abundantly clear in the book’s opening pages and its title. In these pages, Nelson presents Barthe’s observation that “the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use.”
Chapter 5: shells of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is devoted to the phenomenological study of the shell. Bachelard advocates for supplanting an appreciation for the shell’s beautiful exterior with a more phenomenologically fruitful naive amazement, emphasizing an outlook that is “governed by the imagination.” This approach gives “fresh impetus to the complex of fear and curiosity that accompanies all initial action on the world.” Not only is the phenomenologic modality of observation proposed by Bachelard a useful method for engaging with The Argonauts, but many specific themes that Bachelard ties to the shell, such as transformation, emergence, intimacy, refuge, containment, and autopoiesis, can be meaningfully found within The Argonauts pages. The location and examination of these shared themes makes for an expansive interpretive exercise.
Bachelard proposes a ‘phenomenology for the inhabited shell’ asserting that, while the physical object of the shell itself is comprehensible both in structure and beauty, its formation remains mysterious, and as such generative for phenomenological imagination. Bachelard tells us that through phenomenological engagement with the imagination, the dialectics of “large and small, hidden and manifest, placid and aggressive, flabby and vigorous.” contained within the shell are accentuated.
The Argonauts is a written account that devotes a considerable amount of writing to discussing the fundamental inadequacy of the written word, and questioning the intention and efficacy of writing itself. The horror of writing, she says, is “There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.” These inverse natures of hiding and its intentions are visible in the shell as well, “they come alive in the dialectics of what is hidden and what is manifest.”
Bachelard’s suggestion that the creature who emerges from the shell “is not only ‘half fish, half flesh’ but also half dead, half alive, and in extreme cases, half stone, half man.” speaks to a state of multiplicity echoed by Nelson in her discussion of gender, something she says has “a certain ontological indeterminacy.”
When discussing her anxieties surrounding Harry’s use of testosterone, and what changes it may or may not bring, Nelson says “in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end”, a mutable boundary Bachelard identifies in the shell as well, when he observes that, “Everything about a creature that comes out of a shell is dialectical…the part that comes out contradicts the part that remains inside.”
In addition to these dialectics, Bachelard observes that the shell represents “the dialectics of creatures that are free and others that are in fetters.” Freedom, and its inverse, are a central node to two moments of conflict in Nelson and Dodge’s relationship. First, there is the freedom that comes up when Dodge navigates his physical transition. “I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.”
The conflict around freedom arises again when Nelson gives Dodge a first draft of The Argonauts to read, and the veracity of her representation of him is called into question. “How can a book be both a free expression and a negotiation? Is it not idle to fault a net for having holes?” Harry Dodge’s top surgery and Maggie Nelson’s pregnancy cooccur in 2011, “the summer of our changing bodies”, during which they were undergoing transformations in tandem.
To Bachelard the shell is an oneiric image that relates deeply to the human experience of transformation. Nelson’s own embodied experience of transformation as result of her pregnancy brings to mind this same engagement with the proverbial container. Nelson’s pregnancy explodes the notion of a singular self by introducing an additional occupant to her body, an experience she denotes throughout the book with the phrase, originally culled from Winnicott’s primitive agonies, “going to pieces / falling for ever”. Nelson’s description of her pregnancy as something that is ‘inherently queer’ and occasions her a “radical intimacy with – and radical alienation from – one’s body” makes clear that it is not just the body that transforms during pregnancy, but the concept of pregnancy that transforms when viewed through the broader lens of queer theory.
It is this same force of production and birth that Bachelard references in his discussion of scaly, tail-shell creatures Melusines that appear in C. G. Jung’s Psychologie und Alchemie. These creatures, and this force, “furnishes us with the phenomenological documents for a phenomenology of the verb “to emerge.” Observing emergence through this lens serves as the “perceptible threshold of all knowledge” because in observing we experience fear, curiosity, hesitation and fascination, the dual state of both wanting to see and being afraid to see.
Transformation as an ontology is a principal theme in The Argonauts. Taking the eponymous Argo as the penultimate manifestation, Nelson reflexively refers to the ship’s gradual restructuring as a totem of metamorphosis. She refers again to this perpetual transformation, quoting Lucille Clifton saying “A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward.” For Bachelard, the shell serves a similar function, embodying a mutable multifaceted being. The shell is not an object or a form, it is a process of formation; a daydream of constant creation.
Bachelard refers to the observations of poet Paul Valery who speculates in his work Les coquillages, that any shell created by man would be ‘obtained from the outside…whereas “the mollusk exudes its shell” (loc. Cit. p10)”106. Here Bachelard, via Valery, touches on a central concept to the phenomenological idea of the shell; the continuous formation of structure from inside that which the structure serves. This premise, that the structure of a shell itself is born not from external assembly but from interior perpetual processes, can be applied to the structure of The Argonauts.
Structurally, The Argonauts eschews traditional chapters or sections in favor of continuous, short, paragraphs with no variation. Nelson’s dedication to this parataxic structure enforces a radical democracy of influence, allowing her to move easily from X-Men, to anal sex, to queer theorist Eve Sedgwick in the span of a few memorable pages. The structural format of The Argonauts is what it needs to be, Nelson’s handling of material dictates the structure of the work, not the other way around. Instead of contorting the contents to inhabit a traditional frame, Nelson allows the structure, the shell, to be dictated by the animal of the work itself. Bachelard paraphrases Valery in saying that “one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.”
Bachelard’s phenomenological imagination provides a rich framework for interpretation of The Argonauts, Nelson’s work already engages in a literary practice that subverts traditional structure and encourages a deeper narrative intimacy. The untraditional and expansive character that these two pieces share has much to teach the reader about relationality, the relationality of the subjects they discuss, that of the reader to the text itself, and as examples of the varied ways in which text can inform structure. Both The Poetic of Space encourage the reader to participate in creative expression by way of demanding creative interpretation.
Bringing into being the shell that surrounds one’s own body, and eradicating traditional literary structure to create a container for your written experience that is authentic to its multiplicity are both examples of agentic creation within a narrative. Narrative agency, as described by Meretoja refers to “our ability to navigate our narrative environments: to use, (re)interpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narrate our lives, relationships, and the world around us.” I believe that both of these texts provide useful examples of some ways in which agency and creation can inform and mutually enhance one another within a narrative.
Works Cited
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Penguin Classics, 2014
Meretoja, Hanna, Eevastiina Kinnunen, and Päivi Kosonen. “Narrative Agency and the Critical Potential of Metanarrative Reading Groups.” Poetics Today, vol. 43, no. 2, June 2022, pp. 387-414.
Nelson, Maggie. “Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities: An Argonauts Anniversary Interview.” Interview by Lucy McKeon. Pioneer Works, 19 Nov. 2025,