TagAcademic Essay

How do we conceptualize our world? Is it true to reality or do our histories become muddy in the remembering? As humans, idealization is irresistible. We idealize time periods […]

In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Lamb outlines three distinct conceptualizations of “popular culture” […]

Prominent American linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir claimed that language affects worldview. As a key proponent of linguistic relativity, Whorf asserted that differences between languages, particularly in the treatment of categories such as colour and time […]

The act of bleeding is fundamentally transgressive, as it reveals what is suppressed, inherited, and predisposed: our mortality and genetics […]

In The Virtues of Our Vices, Emrys Westacott considers an act in today’s society ‘rude’ so long as it satisfies two conditions: if it “violates a social convention; and if the violation were deliberate, indicating a lack of concern for another person’s feelings” (18). Within Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, rudeness is not as overtly defined; nevertheless, it serves as an overarching social mechanism […]

When Canada’s Multiculturalism Policy first emerged in 1971 it was primarily reactionary in nature, seeking to define Canada’s multicultural identity in opposition to two cultural models familiar to the Canadian public: the first, the American “melting-pot” mentality and the second, Canada’s previous cultural structure, biculturalism. However, the Canadian multiculture long predates the policy, stretching back, theoretically, to the nation’s establishment […]

Functioning as microcosms of society’s social inequalities, schools often mirror social norms and ideologies, providing a significant context in which children begin to form and understand gender identities. The complex cultural arena of this “hidden curriculum” is portrayed in Alex Mino’s George, wherein the protagonist struggles to find a means to express her identity as a transgender girl […]

“Totally Hosed”: Adult Life and the Kafkan Parable in Wallace’s “Adult World” Academic Essay by Taylor Tomko In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College. This speech, which would come to be known as This is Water, argues that education teaches us not so much how to think, but

The Great Bear Rainforest: Overcoming 500-Year-Old Views on Nature Academic Essay by Cameron Bullen Many works of early Canadian literature provide an insight into the attitudes and opinions of North American society at a given point in history. Often these views are completely alien to a contemporary reader, but at other times these attitudes have persisted

Ninjas – Invisible in More Ways than One: Orientalism in Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Academic Essay by Emma Coffin Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies engages in both adaptation and cultural appropriation. His narrative introduces a zombie plague to the original text of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, combining his writing with

“The “Object Deaths” and Reconfigurations of Hrunting, the Giant’s Sword, and Nægling: Swords as Objects and Actors in Beowulf” Academic Essay by Sara Dueck In “Thing Theory”, Bill Brown proposes new ways of viewing the interrelated roles of objects and humans by exploring the moments in which the utility of an object is removed and the

Fealty and Fear: Notions of Kingship in The Lord of the Rings Academic Essay by Deanna Chan Anglo-Saxon culture pervades J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and is especially visible in the social structure and practices that bind subjects to their ruler in Middle Earth. In particular, Tolkien seems to have borrowed the Anglo-Saxon

Stomaching the Consequences of Posthumanism: Capitalism and Interdependent Consumption in M.T. Anderson’s Feed Academic Essay by Julia Tikhonova M.T. Anderson’s Feed portrays a dystopian world in which the seemingly fixed epistemological framework of what it means to be human is provokingly destabilized. Renegotiating the boundary between humans and machines, citizens in Feed live with neural

Staging the Temporality of Trauma: Vern Thiessen’s Vimy as an Exploration of the Reach of Traumatic Memory Academic Essay by Jamie Donicci Vern Thiessen’s 2007 play, Vimy, is a poignant and nuanced representation of the processes of traumatic memory. In Vimy, Thiessen stages the story of five veterans of the Battle of Vimy Ridge and