TagAcademic Essay

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

What Breaks Your Heart  by William Munro   We shouldn’t give creatures names. It’s the name that breaks your heart.             — Rose Tremain, Sacred Country, 308. My name is William; I’m sick; I’m dangerous. I was twelve years old when I was first determined to be “mentally ill”. An authority figure gave my vague

The Pharmakon and Narratives of Cultural Identity: Reading Derrida in Lowe academic essay by Kai Ying Chieh Lisa Lowe’s account of the relationship between the system of transnational capitalism and the intersecting subjective narratives of Asian immigrant and Asian American women labouring within this system works in a critical tradition that values plurality and ambiguity.

  “What a beautiful day for an Eschaton”: Game Logic and the Short-Circuit of Meaning academic essay by Rob Patterson On a snow-filled Interdependence Day, the final foreseeable round of Enfield Tennis Academy’s homegrown game Eschaton is played. It is by far the most complicated and descriptively dense game within the text, which is notable

A Stasis in Motion: Wordsworth’s Poetics academic essay by Reuben Jentink William Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” is “concerned with the variations” (Simpson xi) in perspectival positionality. For David Simpson, “it is the mind that sees, not the eye” (xi). The forsaken woman’s “perspectival” death-song is a dialectic between, on the one

“Small, fierce, and restless eyes”: Stereotype and Hybridity in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater academic essay by Kelly O’Connor “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!” exclaims Thomas De Quincey as he concludes the chapter on “The Pleasures of Opium” in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (55).

Queering Fear: The Danger of Normality in J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit academic essay by Tristen Kiri Brudy   Western society, the legal system and families are traditionally geared to protect children in order to properly prepare them for life as adults. The idea of putting