English Undergraduate Essay Prizes

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/41478

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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Now showing 1 - 16 of 16

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The manipulation of Long and Short Temporalities in Bamewawagezhikaquay’s “The Contrast”
(2025-03-28) Nisi, Amanda; O’Briain, Katarina
Typically, time is linear and can be recollected through memory. While this understanding of time privileges forward human progression, Paul Huebener proposes that long/slow and short temporalities occur simultaneously in nature. Long time is a natural process which takes many years to progress and short time is a natural process that is quickly completed. Huebener’s concept of Critical Time Studies enforces a critical understanding of time that operates socially as a form of power in the Western world (327). To support this concept, Huebener explains two incidents under the Harper Government in 2012 where deadlines shifted for political and economic gain. The first concerned the oil industry and the compression of time. The maximum period to review major environmental resource projects was reduced from six to two years (329). Speeding up the timeline of this review did not allow the necessary tests and requirements to be completed, and consequently, oil and gas were transported quicker than before. The second example concerned a delay of a carbon-pricing scheme which could cost the petroleum producers additional money (330). Huebener notes that when it comes to the “imposition of actual environmental regulations, the above emphasis on speed and acceleration disappears, giving way to plead for slowness and precaution” (330). Huebener demonstrates that time is manipulated for political purposes as deadlines shift for capitalistic gain. Huebener highlights the political manipulation of time; however, this concept is not specific to the political domain. This essay applies these concepts within the realm of literature, specifically the poem “The Contrast” by Bamewawagezhikaquay or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. In this poem, Bamewawagezhikaquay’s speaker compares her happy childhood with her community before the European colonial settlement in America to the pain she and her community feel after the extractive action by the colonial settlers in power. Throughout the poem, the settler and the speaker each use Huebener’s idea of long and short time and the concept of physical and psychological pain measures these temporalities. While the settler’s long and short time represents destructive actions, the speaker’s time represents a kind and forgiving alternative bringing together personal and collective action.
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The Fragile Boundaries of Power: Imperial Violence and the Ethics of Suffering in Waiting for the Barbarians
(2025-02-25) Di Clemente, Casandra
The frontier in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is not merely a boundary between empire and wilderness; it is a fluid, unstable space where power and morality are tested, and identity unravels. As the Magistrate distances himself from the imperial order, he confronts the fragility of civilization and the ethical void at its core. The empire's escalating paranoia transforms the town into a breeding ground for fear and suspicion, where violence is rationalized, and suffering becomes both inflicted and ignored. Coetzee's sparse, detached prose mirrors the emotional and psychological detachment that enables the empire's machinery to function. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee rejects the spectacle of suffering, compelling readers to grapple with the ethical ramifications of imperial violence, the limitations of empathy, and the dehumanization of both the oppressed and their oppressors.
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The Weight of What We Carry: Shame as Survival in Two Histories of Oppression
(2025-03-21) Akbari, Donna
This essay argues that in Daya Pawar’s Baluta and Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, shame is not just a residue of oppression but an inherited survival technology. Across caste and indenture, it organizes speech, desire, kinship, and mobility while acting as strategic quiet that protects the vulnerable. Through close readings, it pairs Pawar’s internalized caste shame with Bahadur’s reclamation of “silence” as intentional protection. Narrating shame—via autobiography and archival recovery—converts stigma into testimony, proposing “learned shame” as a transhistorical tool repurposed into resistance.
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Hope From Within: Exploring Indigenous Resilience in Patti LaBoucane-Beson’s The Outside Circle and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
(2025-03-04) De Castro, David
"The aim of this essay is to compare Patti LaBoucane-Benson's The Outside Circle (2015) and Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) in the context of Indigenous resilience to showcase how the rediscovery of an interconnected Indigenous identity and the revival of spiritual traditions can become active modes of resistance and transformation. By observing the recurring symbolism of a web and the repetition of smudging that occur within both novels, I examine how the practice of traditional Indigenous ways of knowing and being can become a powerful means of hope for Indigenous peoples to heal integrational wounds and resist colonial erasure."
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No Way Out: Gendered Vulnerability and Social Entrapment in Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724)
(2025-03-28) Bianco, Simoné
The eighteenth-century novel emerged as a powerful literary form amid profound social and economic transformation. As London expanded into a centre of commerce and spectacle, novels reflected and shaped mounting anxieties about urban life. In particular, they explored how women navigated these shifting landscapes, revealing that cities—often portrayed as sites of opportunity—were instead structured to entrap and expose them to danger. Urban life demanded social performance, requiring women to carefully curate their identities under constant surveillance, a dynamic that reinforced class hierarchies and patriarchal authority. With the rise of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1964), a defining ideology of the period, personal autonomy and social legitimacy became increasingly tied to self-ownership and economic agency. Yet for women, whose identities were dictated by patriarchal surveillance and marital dependency, true autonomy remained an illusion. Within this context, Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) frame the city as a space of gendered vulnerability, where class anxiety and social mobility depend on performance and gothic entrapment. While Evelina initially suggests that patriarchal structures protect women from urban chaos, both Burney and Defoe ultimately reveal how these structures enable rather than prevent harassment, social danger, and gothic terror. Through staged performances and coerced social interactions, both novels expose the city not as a space of female empowerment but one where women are persistently policed, manipulated, and controlled.
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Figures of Speech Are Not For Women: Metonymy, Rhetorical Questions, and Simile in The Calf That Frolicked in the Hall
(2024-03-23) Sivakumar, Kalyani
Language reflects the broader systems of oppression that cultivate it. These structures extend beyond institutions and into the interpersonal realm, shaping discourse itself. Ambai complicates this distinction by illustrating how her female protagonist remains an outsider despite mirroring the figurative speech of her male peers. Her innate inability to conform to masculine literary devices excludes her yet allows her to succeed in the long-term. In The Calf That Frolicked in the Hall, Ambai utilizes metonymy, rhetorical questions, and similes as a language of agency for women, while the male characters–particularly Udayan and Kadir–use the same figures of speech in ways that reflect not only patriarchal exclusion, but also the melancholia of a generation confronting the failure of its revolutionary ideals.
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Emotionally Unavailable by Design: An Analysis of Narrator Reliability in Nevada and The Yellow Wallpaper
(2025-04-08) Sivakumar, Kalyani
What readers consider a “reliable” narrator often reveals more about their assumptions than about the narrator’s truthfulness. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper prompt readers to critically examine their internalized biases regarding narrative reliability. Each text achieves this through distinct approaches to narrative structure, perspective, and the portrayal of emotional vulnerability. Nevada employs third-person indirect discourse to follow Maria on a road trip, while The Yellow Wallpaper unfolds through the first-person epistolary format of an unnamed narrator. Despite the immersive intimacy of the first-person voice, Gilman’s narrator remains unnamed. By contrast, Maria is named early, with her gender and social context made clear. Yet the narrative structure flattens her personhood through emotional detachment and stereotyping. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper appears more emotionally accessible and credible to readers, despite lacking the most basic marker of personhood—a name. Meanwhile, Maria is difficult to empathize with, due to the narrative distance mirroring her dissociation. This disparity raises important questions about whose pain is believed, and which ways of expressing that pain are accepted as valid or deserving of empathy in literature.
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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, Patrick
Passing 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.
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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 Amor
In 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.
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Working on Blood Relations and The Rez Sisters with an Axe and a Hammer
(2023-11-28) Lomibao, Adelvida Amor
Sharon 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.
Access status: Open Access ,
Unessay Option— A Great Deal Too Light: A short story
(2023) Poisson, Cody
Access status: 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, Rosina
Within 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.
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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.
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Reading a Film: Character Interiority in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and its Film Adaptation (1993)
(2023-03-10) Schuster-Woldan, Emily
Film 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.
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The Construct of Freedom: Comparing Baldwin and Jacobs
(2023-03-07) Lee, Charlie
America 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.
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Story-Telling and the Preservation of Law & Justice
(2023-03-02) Garratt-Dahan, Chance
In 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.

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