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 The House Always Wins: How Cigarettes in Passing by Nella Larsen and Nevada by Imogen Binnie Represent Women’s Attempt to Explore Their Sexuality Through Patriarchy(2023-05-16) Santarsia, PatrickPassing is a vehicle through which a marginalized individual attempts to transgress their oppressor by presenting as compliant within a dominant ideology. An example of this mode is when women present as heteronormative in order to explore their sexuality, thereby transgressing patriarchal expectations of women. This notion is represented through cigarettes in Passing by Nella Larsen, particularly when Irene and Clare are smoking together. There’s a social expectation for men to light women’s cigarettes, which implies that men must approve of women’s pleasure. Passing relies on this same appeal to social approval; if women are seen as heterosexual, then their relationships aren’t considered a threat to male interest, allowing them to act against patriarchy. While this enables women to explore their sexuality, it ultimately reaffirms the same system which prevents that exploration. Nevada by Imogen Binnie offers this same criticism of passing through Maria’s use of cigarettes. Smoking is perceived as a means to relieve stress, it’s a tool to accept one’s position and move forward. Passing operates the same way: one accepts a dominant ideology and choses to work within, but, like cigarettes, this state is temporary and harmful. While cigarettes in Passing act as a tool for women to explore and fulfil their sexuality within the confines of patriarchy, cigarettes in Nevada underline how that tool perpetuates the construction of patriarchy, and thus call for the need to build anew.Item Open Access Managing Cultural Specificity and Universality in Trey Anthony’s Da Kink in My Hair and Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience(2024-05-03) Lomibao, Adelvida AmorIn Da Kink in My Hair and Kim’s Convenience, Trey Anthony and Ins Choi respectively represent different ethnic spaces situated within a larger dominant white society. The setting of both the Caribbean hair salon and Korean-owned convenience store provides representations of and insights into underrepresented peoples. While both the hair salon and convenience stores are run and operated by ethnic Canadian hyphenates, they differ in who is granted entrance. For the salon, being a black woman is a prerequisite to access but anyone from off the street (literally) may enter the convenience store. Da Kink in My Hair is the story of black women; Kim’s Convenience is universal. The women of the hair salon retreat from society even if temporarily. The Kim family is demonstrative of the Canadian value of multiculturalism, shedding Asians’ status as the perpetual outsider. While both are set in Toronto, the two plays’ settings, the black hair salon and the Korean-owned convenience store offer two different responses to being made foreign by the dominant white society: create a safe space with and for your fellow black women, or acculturate and be a cornerstone (or corner store!) in your Canadian neighbourhood.Item Open Access Working on Blood Relations and The Rez Sisters with an Axe and a Hammer(2023-11-28) Lomibao, Adelvida AmorSharon Pollock’s Blood Relations and Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters are seminal Canadian plays that follow the lives of women who feel trapped and examine how they react to their circumstances. The characters Lizzie Borden and Pelajia Patchnose are both women who desire to escape from the restrictive patriarchal home or the opportunityless reserve. These two women also famously wield weapons: Lizzie Borden took an axe and Pelajia has her hammer. This difference in weapons is reflective of these women's differing approaches to combatting the violence they experience. Axes break but hammers fix. While both women suffer under the patriarchy, Pelajia’s experience as an Indigenous, less financially fortunate woman adds different shades of oppression. Despite this, Pelajia has something Lizzie sorely lacks: love for her family. These differences manifest themselves in the women’s weapons of choice. Lizzie Borden uses the axe to violently remove her obstacles, whereas Pelajia uses her trusty hammer to slowly repair what is broken.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.