English Undergraduate Essay Prizes
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This collection holds award-winning academic papers completed by students enrolled in LA&PS English undergraduate courses. The Department of English essay prizes and scholarships include the Avie Bennett Prize in Canadian Literature, the Brian Hepworth Memorial Prize, the Elizabeth Sabiston Prize, the H.K. Girling Literature Prize, the June McMaster-Harrison Memorial Prize, and the departmental essay prizes for the best essay written in courses at each of the four year levels.
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Item Open Access Unessay Option— A Great Deal Too Light: A short story(2023) Poisson, CodyItem Open Access Julius Caesar and The Death of a Chief: The Deconstruction of Colonial Knowledge and Reclamation of Indigeneity Through Theatre(2023-03-30) Nicolazzo, RosinaWithin the greater Canadian cultural context, Indigenous communities have been engaged in a constant effort to reclaim, preserve, and foster their diasporic “pan-Indian” community against the genocidal and assimilationist projects of the settler colonial state. Through imperial logics of disenfranchisement and discourses of violence, Indigenous women have been recurring targets for their held cultural, communal and spiritual power. By reducing and silencing that authority, Canadian white nationalism has asserted its governmental dominion and jurisprudence over all Indigenous wellbeing—with Indigenous women intersectionally marginalized due to white supremacy and patriarchal supremacy.Item Open Access The Swan’s Nest: Shakespeare and the birds of Cymbeline(2023-04-04) Froates, Trevor J.William Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline set in ancient Britain and Renaissance Italy, artfully uses bird references and illusions to weave a narrative chiefly concerned with sight, seeing, and perception. Shakespeare uses bird imagery to connect the natural world and social hierarchies and to establish how birds act as divine messengers and portents. However, most importantly, he uses it to reflect his characters’ intentions, origins, and possible futures, resulting in a layering of identities that is both complex and easily recognizable to the audience. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is richly constructed with classical references to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Ovid, and the bible, to name a few. As done in the bible, Shakespeare similarly draws on literal and symbolic bird references to communicate sophisticated concepts of self-awareness, perception, and understanding. Drawing the audience’s attention to the importance of seeing through another’s eyes or via a different perspective, that of a bird illuminates the dangers many characters face due to their tendencies to fall prey to false or incomplete sight.Item Open Access Reading a Film: Character Interiority in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and its Film Adaptation (1993)(2023-03-10) Schuster-Woldan, EmilyFilm is an audio-visual medium; as such it ‘shows’—rather than ‘tells’—what is happening from an outside perspective. Geoffrey Wagner consequently suggests that in film, “we cannot see what we cannot see; in fiction we can” (183). George Bluestone similarly postulates that film “can lead us to infer thought [but] it cannot show us thought directly” and therefore “the rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language” (47). Film theorists and narratologists have thus maintained that film, as opposed to written works of literature, is inherently less well equipped to handle and represent character interiority—that is, to delve into a character’s mind to reveal their thoughts, dreams, fantasies, memories, as well as emotional and psychological states. However, more recent analyses have demonstrated that there are indeed various “cinematic types of consciousness representation” (Alber 265) that closely mirror novelistic techniques for character interiority.Item Open Access The Construct of Freedom: Comparing Baldwin and Jacobs(2023-03-07) Lee, CharlieAmerica is often colloquially referred to as the “land of the free”. However, what said freedom actually looks like differs depending on one’s perspective. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, because the events take place before the American civil war, there was a very basic standard of “freedom” for Black Americans, which was not to be enslaved or owned by another person. In “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin, however, the main character desires the freedom to oppress Black Americans and enact racism upon them. Not only is freedom a social construct, the idea of “absolute freedom” is neither realistic nor achievable, because one idea of freedom may infringe on another’s idea of freedom, as occurs in these texts. In comparing the two, it is made clear that the freedom of Black Americans directly clashes with the freedom of White American oppressors.Item Open Access Story-Telling and the Preservation of Law & Justice(2023-03-02) Garratt-Dahan, ChanceIn Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” Minnie Wright is evidently guilty of murdering her abusive husband, John. Still, a metaphorical self-appointed jury of women secures her legal innocence in defiance of the law. While the narrative justifies this action, it also implies that deviance from the law is necessary to achieve justice in such an unfortunately common scenario for women in patriarchal societies. By outlining the separation between law and morality, “a Jury of Her Peers” promotes story-telling to rectify this shortcoming. The botched case of Minnie Wright proves that when stories go unheard, dishonesty finds its way into a case, contributing to the degradation of law as a tool of justice.