As an integral component of Arts One, students have the opportunity to author and publish a written essay.
Student Journal: ONE is a student-focused academic journal that is an exemplary showcase of Arts One writing and how students have progressed over the year. Having an essay selected to be published in the journal is an honour. Though the essays are provided here for public reading, they are all still copyrighted to their respective authors and may not be reused, revised, or reposted without express permission of those authors. Paraphrasing or quoting from them with proper citation is encouraged.
This page contains student essays from 2016 onward. To search for a specific essay, please use the search bar below. To search for a specific year, click on the dropdown menu below the search bar.
2024
Sovereigns and Slave Morality: The Nietzschean and Hobbesian Perspective on January 6th, 2021
On January 6th, 2021, using the paranoia and widespread resentment of his followers, former president Trump rallied a group of malcontents to storm the Capitol building in Washington D.C. By analyzing the condition of his supporters through Nietzsche
2024
Colonial Legacies and the Reclamation of One’s Identity: Revisiting Fanon in Contemporary Contexts
By putting Fanon's insights into conversation with recent scholarly works, not only are we shown how psychological mechanisms have influenced his experiences, but are also invited to consider how his argument for a radical transformation of society a
2024
Trigger Warning: History Repeats Itself
Religious texts wield great authoritative value and the Upanisad’s themselves are central to many well-respected modern spiritual ideals and traditions. As such, it is not unlikely for one to take the entire text at face value, which could have dir
2024
The Illusion of Liberty: An Analysis of Sovereignty and Collective Freedom in Hobbes’s Leviathan
While Hobbes’s conception of a sovereign appears contradictory to liberty, this paper posits that his notion of the sovereign aligns with his desire to secure liberty. For Hobbes, liberty is only attainable with the development of the social contra
2024
What Makes a Feminist?: Resisting Gender Roles in Antigone and Mary, a Fiction
In both Mary, A Fiction, and Antigone it is clear that the cultures viewed women as being lesser, depicting them as unreasoning dependents on the men at the centre of their lives. The titular characters both reject these narrow roles, instead taking
2024
Escape the Echo: From Conformity to Autonomy
The journey from conformity to autonomy exemplifies how Mary and Absal become aware of and challenge regimes of truth in their societies, demonstrating its limitations on the self-authority of both subjugators and the subjugated. Ultimately, when see
2024
Housewives vs Magistrates: Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality
A woman’s influence is subtle, unacknowledged, and limited to the private home life. The magistrates’ influence is public, and Rousseau insists that magistrates be obeyed and openly praised for their efforts. The determining factor to this privat
2024
Social Confinement: Captivity and Society in Herman Melville’s Typee
Tommo’s confinement aboard the vessel and in the valley are almost antithetical to one another: the circumstances that make his confinement aboard the vessel unbearable are completely gone in the valley, while the circumstances that conspire to mak
2024
Navigating the Discontents of Civilisation: the conditions of the modern world through the lens of psychoanalysis and modernist literature
Gathering the debris of discontent from the corners of history, it is through the agency of modern literature that a looking-glass is held up to the human condition—treading along the interplay between the modern individual and the conditions to wh
2024
Divine Funerals: The Temporal Self in Freud and Rousseau
One may live one’s entire life, and in hypothesis the span of many lives beyond it, and still never come to terms with the simple fact that existence is narrated retrospectively. As much as one might long to have one’s life story imprinted on the
2024
Reaping as we Sow: Gandhi’s View of Modernity in Hind Swaraj
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is an essential text of the Indian liberation and postcolonialism movements, providing a scathing critique of modernity and its impacts on the relationship of the individual to the world around them. In his text, Ga
2024
To Love or Not to Love Thy Neighbour: Civilization As a Window to the Good
That our conceptions of the moral self build our conceptions of moral civilization is not an especially assertive claim. Still, it is nonetheless remarkable the cultural ubiquity of such a phenomenon, and the subjects of this essay are a prime exampl
2024
The Self, Society, and Liberation in Black Skin, White Masks and the Philosophy of Mohammad Iqbal
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks provides a robust account of the historical processes and forces instrumental in the experiences of objectification and loss of selfhood of Black/colonized peoples.
2024
There’s No Place Like Home: The Role of Cities in Shaping the Self in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Utilizing narrative analysis and examining transnational identity and cultural hybridity, this essay will discuss how these cities shape Changez’s identity, not just as mere backdrops but as active participants in the story of a man searching for i
2024
Shedding Fundamentalism— The American Identity
Numerous changing factors occur in Changez’s personal life as well as the world around him for him to arrive at such a decision; the reader is led through his initial excitement as a young New Yorker, his increasing awareness of the world’s polit
2024
Let Me Tell You A Story: Nonlinear Narratives and Generational Influence in A Bird in the House and As I Remember It
Both Margaret Laurence’s collection of short stories, A Bird in the House, and Elsie Paul’s multimedia digital work, As I Remember It, are uniquely structured works that challenge conventional linear storytelling.
2024
Heir to the Brick House
Within Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, Vanessa’s independent sense of self is shown to be inherited from her controlling grandfather, which ironically explains the resentment she holds towards him.
2023
Thebes and its Discontents: Psychology and Politics in Sophocles and Freud
A civil war ends when an authoritarian leader takes over the city. A woman tries to bury the body of her brother, but is forbidden by the leader. She speaks out against him, and becomes a rebel against the regime in the process.
2023
So, What Now? Understanding Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. (And Stay Tuned for the Deepest Secrets of Life.)
It was in the late 19th century that Friedrich Nietzsche launched his famous attack against religion and its moral precepts. Since the time of Nietzsche’s writing, Western society has only become more secular.
2023
Comparing The Philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi and Friedrich Nietzsche As Outlined In On The Genealogy of Morality and Hind Swaraj
Mohandas Gandhi’s treatise Hind Swaraj lays out the philosophical groundwork that outlines how India should depart the British Raj and become a self-governed nation.
2023
Rousseau, Reason, and the Films of Human Shame
To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reason is a burden. To him, it planted in humanity a coven of abstract fears and vices and was responsible for leading humankind to “purchase imaginary repose at the price of real happiness.”
2023
Sacrifice, Suffering, and Politics: Exploring Dharma and its Centrality to the Attainment of Swaraj
Literary work on Gandhi is marked by phenomenal abundance. What accompanies this abundance are two extremities of such analyses: viewing Gandhi as either a highly politicised Indian icon or a holy man who revolutionized the conventional perception of
2023
Hamlet: Revenge Over Remembrance
Few facts are certain in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whether in terms of its characters' allegiances, the motivations behind their actions, and in a few cases, even the sanity of some characters.
2023
The Inevitable Fact of Captivity in Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life reflects Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim in The Social Contract (1762) that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The tale follows the anthropological narration of Tommo
2023
Objectification Versus Subjectification: The Self-Perpetuating Cycles Between the Psyche and Society
It is through the intricately-detailed prose of Frantz Fanon’s writing that scenes of objectification are depicted in Black Skin, White Masks.
2023
Our Lives are Built on Weaving All Our Stories into Worlds We Call Our Own: The Stories that Create Personal Identity in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House
A Bird in the House is a collection of stories narrated by a character named Vanessa. While Vanessa the narrator is an adult, the collection is about a younger Vanessa, who is a writer in her own right.
2023
A Charkha Between Kallipolis and Worker’s Utopia: Unraveling Gandhian Self-Rule and Self-Control through Marxist and Platonic Philosophy
In Mahatma Gandhi’s work Hind Swaraj, the notion of individual self-control and political self-rule is analyzed in great detail. As a text written to criticize British settler rule and the influence of modern Western civilization in India, c
2023
Nature as Nurture: The Role of the Physical in the Journey to Enlightenment
Thinkers from all ages argue that we, as beings, are restricted by the physical world. Whether it be a heaven or some greater truth, there exists a metaphysical world which is unreachable through physical means.
2023
American Eulogy: Dissecting the Proverbial Death of New York in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Beyond
Conceptualizing a time when America was merely an extension of the British Empire, rather than the red-white-and-blue, gun-toting, eagle-loving, land of the free some proudly proclaim it to be today would be quite the undertaking. The national identi
2023
Societal Alienation and Discontent: Freud and Marx on Our Relationship with Love, Libido, and Labour
It does not seem intuitive for love and work, as we understand them, to be at all related to each other—even less so as embodiments of the same concept. Likewise, Freud and Marx seem opposed to each other when it comes to their respective outlooks
2023
“The compassionate heart finds not any comfort, but dreads an eternal separation"
Mary: A Fiction is a deeply psychological text that describes, as Wollstonecraft writes in her opening Advertisement, “the mind of a woman” (76). Central to understanding Mary’s mind, and hence the text as a whole, is the concept of comp
2023
Never Enough: Frantz Fanon and Identity
Whiteness as a social structure is perhaps the most pervasive descriptor of difference, being, and non-being. Structures of whiteness and being formally delimit the identities, bodies, and lives of non-white people.
2022
But We Sing it Anyway: Understanding female agency on a textual and metatextual level through Sappho’s fragments, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown
Although women play pivotal roles in narratives surrounding love and relationships, as wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, and sister, mainstream scholarship agrees that there is a strong tendency toward female characters being denied the agency
2022
Culture and Consumption: The Importance of Food within Typee and Unfamiliar Fishes
Understanding a culture’s relationship with its food can be one of the best ways of examining how its society functions. Food can be viewed as a necessity to keep humans alive, but it can also be viewed as an integral form of cultural expression, a
2022
Stop Acting Like a Know-It-All
I do not know everything. Nobody does, and anyone who claims they do actually does not, but they do not know that they actually do not know. Mankind is inherently ignorant, and Friedrich Nietzsche explores this complicated and humbling account of man
2022
Finding Liberation Amidst Laughter: The Misread Matrona in Plautus’ Amphitruo
As bright lights illuminate the stage of the Jericho Arts Center, an elderly woman wearing a pink dress and a pregnant belly emerges from the darkness. No laughter sounds from the audience.
2022
Lower The Masks And Unlock The Cage Door
A Bird In The House by Margaret Laurence is a vibrant collection of short stories which builds on the complexities of fictional characters, while simultaneously utilizing animal symbolism, as a satire of the real relationships and people that they re
2022
The Queering of the Self in Herman Melville’s Typee
Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel, “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life”, is a self-reflection on Western culture, as well as the Western moralities that dominated social culture during Melville’s time. Tommo, the protagonist, is shown throug
2022
“Under the Veil,” into “Double-Consciousness”: W. E. B. Du Bois in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Kendrick Lamar’s “u” and “i”
On October 7, 2014, American poet Claudia Rankine published her mixed-media book-length poem and series of lyric essays, Citizen: An American Lyric. Five months later, on March 15, 2015, American rapper Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album,
2022
Angels: Feminine Salvation and Gendered Damnation in Crime and Punishment
There is no denying the significance of the women who occupy the world of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It is a work distinguished by its complex, colourful, and memorable female characters.
2022
The Darkness of Mere Being: Masking Queerness in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen
Superhero fiction has had a long history of presenting ensembles of characters that reinforce a bastion of heteronormativity. Amidst conventional representations of gender and sexuality, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen introduces a team of ma
2022
Alive in Art: Art as it Relates to Life in Still Life with a Bridle
In Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle, art encapsulates life. In Herbert’s essays and apocryphas, life and history are preserved through art, his writing on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and society showcasing the capability of art
2022
What the Blind Mind's Eye Sees: The Effect of Ekphrases in Still Life With a Bridle
Aphantasia is a condition where a person is unable to conjure images with their mind's eye voluntarily.
2022
Desire, Wisdom, and the Importance of Poets: William Blake’s Response to Plato’s Republic
Literary writing is constantly responding to the works of others: rewriting, endorsing and refuting existing ideas and views of culture. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake makes clear through references to the Allegory of the Cave that he has
2022
Arms Like Tongs: The Power and Plight of Women in Grettir's Saga
Set in Iceland’s Viking era, Grettir’s Saga follows the life of Grettir Asmundarson—a famously strong, cunning, and cursed man—as he fights enemies and rids Iceland of the undead, completing many cruel and heroic deeds along his journey.
2021
Verdure and Vermin: The Similarity and Superiority of Emma Woodhouse and Raskolnikov
At first glance, Jane Austen’s Emma and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment seem as different from one another as two novels can be.
2021
Material Conditions: A Comparative Analysis of Idealism and Materialism
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claims that the material conditions of society are the foundation of our intellectual development. Their theory of dialectical materialism states that the notions we have about society are fo
2021
“The Dissolving Blues of Metaphor”: Rankine’s Reconstruction of Racism as Metaphor in Citizen: An American Lyric
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting,
2021
Tommo’s Imprisonment to His Own Cultural Values: Recognizing Cultural Bias in Typee
Tommo, the main character and narrator in Herman Melville’s Typee, experiences many forms of captivity throughout the novel. He is physically confined to the whaling ship, Dolly, and he is held captive by the Typee islanders, but Tommo is a prisone
2021
Cannibal Continuity: Social Cannibalism in Melville and Coates
Herman Melville’s Typee depicts cannibalism at a time when the practice’s nature, and even its existence, is an uncertain question for its contemporary readers.
2021
Rankine and The Pronoun Dreamworld: The Creation of Compassion
In her series of lyric essays Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine employs the pronoun “you” in both an accusatory and uniting fashion. The feelings of Black people are often neglected and scorned, and Rankine’s direct address to the rea
2021
Crime and Punishment: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
“God is dead.” So said Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882’s The Gay Science, but for some, God had been dead long before Nietzsche wrote His death into the public consciousness and put in His place stood a new breed of men, the Übermensch.
2021
Rorschach’s Hypocrisy: The Moral Ambiguity of Watchmen’s Black and White Antihero
From the saturated pages of Watchmen emerges Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ antihero protagonist Rorschach, a stark representation of black and white against the vivid colouring of Watchmen’s setting and other characters.
2021
Herman Melville’s Typee and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing-World: A Comparison
There are many similarities between Herman Melville’s 1846 novel Typee and Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel The Blazing-World. Both texts focus on an outsider who is given an intimate view of a society fundamentally different from their own.
2021
Outlawed but Not Alone: Friendships Out of Bounds in Grettir’s Saga
Icelandic Sagas all have in common the ubiquitous presence of friendships – among strangers, families, rulers, and members of a community. Two major currents of thought have aimed to explain the presence and function of these networks in Icelandic
2021
Queering Melville
Herman Melville explored the art of carefully placed sexual innuendo, implied romance, and extended metaphor across multiple queer-coded texts throughout his 19th-century literary career. Typee, Billy Budd, and Moby Dick are all examples of notable
2021
Gender? I Hardly Know Her Exploring the Hyperreality of Gender and Sexual Identities
At first glance, gender and sexuality have little to do with Jean Bauldrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, with the irreversible collapse of the true, real, and referential. But Judith Butler, over the course of several essays, establishes that bot
2021
Painting with Words - The Illusive Art of Representation Appearance and Reality From the Perspective of Visual and Literary Art in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle
Still life with a Bridle navigates the stories conveyed by art and other artifacts from the Dutch Golden Age. Herbert records his “artistic journey”, with the keen eye of a historian, weaving in poetic “descriptions of places and artefacts of i
2021
Loving Her Was Red: The Dichotomy of Love and Desire According To Sappho and Taylor Swift
Love is complicated, and the Greek poet Sappho knew this all too well. The lyrical beauty of Sappho’s poetry, and its intensely personal depiction of love and desire, led to acclaim from many of her contemporaries. In many ways, singer-songwriter T
2021
Destined Distance Between Melville, Tommo, and the Typee
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life promises an account of Native life impartial to European bias: "the unvarnished truth" (Melville 2). Herman Melville, an American author, composes an exaggerated version of his own experience living amongst a group of
2021
Atmospheric Prisons and Incomplete Epiphanies in The Matrix and Jane Austen’s Emma
When sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski wrote and directed the 1999 film, The Matrix, it was highly improbable they had Jane Austen’s novel Emma in mind. The Matrix takes place in a dystopian future where sentient machines have taken over all facets
2021
Heroes and Heroism in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen
Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and coloured by John Higgins, Watchmen is one of the most influential modern superhero comics. Watchmen followed in the wake of serious and widely acclaimed comics like Maus by Art Spiegelman, explo
2021
Austen’s Emma: Self-Knowledge and Growth
Satirically critiquing her characters’ behaviours and the English society in which they—and she—live, Jane Austen sketches a vivid portrait of her characters, their flaws, and the confines under which they operate in Emma.
2021
The Danger of the Unclassifiable Form: Hybridity, Rulership, and Knowledge within Cavendish’s Blazing World
by Kailey Bernard Margaret Cavendish’s science-fiction novel The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World can be read as evidence that a ruling class which places value on the perceivable world will struggle to remain in power. C
2021
The Restrictive Power of Schools and Streets in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
In hopes of educating his teenage son on the everyday struggles black people experience, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of his own personal life experiences in his memoir Between the World and Me. Presenting his revelatory experiences from childhood and adu
2021
This World of My Devising: The Author as Authority and Other in Cavendish’s The Blazing World
Cavendish’s The Blazing World is a vehement defence of fiction. In a preface “To the Reader”, she writes, “But Fictions are an issue of mans Fancy… without regard, whether the thing, he fancies, be really existent without his mind or not”
2021
Double Standards: Analyzing the Gender Inequality Lurking in Rousseau’s Discourse
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality is an influential work of the early romantic period which has impacted many philosophers throughout the centuries. His views as a privileged and wealthy white man allow him to speak of returning to
2020
A Class of Their Own: Empowerment through literature in Coates’ Between the World and Me, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Shelly’s Frankenstein
Education offers empowerment. To know more about the world, the people in it, and how they respond to the hardship around them is to prepare for life as an independent adult.
2020
Same Racists, Different Experiences: Comparing Race, Assimilation, and Identity through Literature
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King writes that “somebody once told me that racism hurts everyone. Perhaps in the broader sense of community, this is true. All I know is that it seems to hurt some much more than others” (King 185).
2020
Not Simply Black and White: Whiteness as a Matter of Belief in Coates’ Between the World and Me
The scale, intensity and longevity of inequality is especially unique and unprecedented in America. This is because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in Between the World and Me, American identity is essentially founded upon oppression, and thus economic i
2020
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: How the Psychological Afflictions of Plath’s Esther Greenwood and Shakespeare’s Ophelia are products of binary worlds in The Bell Jar and Hamlet
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet were written hundreds of years apart, but certain characters in the two works seem to have their lives controlled by similar conditions.
2020
Lucretius: The Risk and Rage of the Joys and Despairs of Love
Sex, love, and relationships are compelling universal topics that have been the subject of countless musings and explorations. In his didactic poem, On the Nature of Things, Lucretius discusses all three, guided by his valuing of the Epicurean princi
2020
The Karamazov Brothers and their Discontents: A Freudian Reading of Pain and Pleasure, Aggression and Confession in Dostoevsky’s Classic Novel
While Sigmund Freud came to be known as one of the most (in)famous psychologists of all time, and while Fyodor Dostoevsky established himself as one of the great psychologists of world literature, some modern scientists might point out the audible si
2020
I’m Talking to You: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States of America has emerged as an unmatched superpower in the international arena. With its supremacy in the global economy and monopoly over mass media, the West stands at the forefront in sha
2020
The Reflection
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the characters of Victor and his creature parallel each other as they both face injustice and suffering and both resort to violent revenge.
2020
I am Not Your Stepping Stone: An Analysis of Ethnocentric Bias in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In a world shocked by the horror of death and calamity that came from 9/11, Mohsin Hamid allows us to listen to the voice of a Pakistani-American during this tumultuous time.
2020
A Faux Confession
Mohsin Hamid’s casual yet powerful writing style communicates the biographical story of a Pakistani Muslim’s enchantment and disenchantment with America while maintaining a degree of uncertainty regarding the character and intention of the narrat
2020
“Thus Conscience Does Make Cowards of Us All:” Hamlet’s Freudian Sense of Guilt
In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud imagines the origin of guilt in humans and how it evolves into a more complex conscience. He posits that guilt stems from a fear of the loss of the father’s love when a child recognizes that they h
2020
A Return to the Sea
Edna Pontellier’s story culminates in death, but not in destruction.
2020
American Madmen: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Purpose of Science
When considering where to lay blame for the hypothetical end of the world, it can be hard to decide whether responsibility lies with the creators of the means of destruction or those who actively put these means to use.
2020
Eichmann, Oppenheimer, and the Perils of Blind Obedience
In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus makes the disconcerting claim that “justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (Plato 338c).What is fascinating about Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is tha
2020
Nietzsche and Arendt’s Warnings Against Totalitarianism
Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt have both been misinterpreted with regard to their attitude toward the Nazis, but in fact they both hold very strong and uncompromising anti-Nazi views.
2020
What Does Justice Look Like for the “Banal” Adolf Eichmann?
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is nothing short of terrifying. The striking candor with which Arendt uses Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial to bring to light the horrors committed under the Third Reich is so ir
2019
Watchmen: Impediments, Failures, and Splits in Understanding
In Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, both Ozymandias and Rorschach think they have found the truth. Ozymandias finds truth in intellectual illumination, like the Gnostic “Eugnostos,” who “is all mind, thought and reflecting, considering
2019
The Past, Present, and Future in The Road
The past can be a dangerous thing. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, affects one’s future in innumerable ways, molding itself into fear and sadness, leaving one trapped at the bottom of the past’s well, the rope unreachable.
2019
In His Time: How Ernest Hemingway Defines and Promotes Masculinity in In Our Time.
In 1943, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “If you leave a woman, you ought to shoot her” (qtd. In Baker 554). This quote seemingly encapsulates Hemingway’s misogynistic attitude towards women, reinforcing his age-old image as a hyper-masculine, macho ma
2019
Liberty in Leviathan
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes presents a world in which people make contracts with each other to create a sovereign, who has absolute authority over them and is responsible for their lives. This paper argues that although Hobbes advocates for authorita
2019
Just Ideas? An analysis of the use of political authority to bring about justice in the world
While writers have long pondered what it means to lead a just life, some of the thinkers encountered in our course have argued for a preferred view of justice as a realizable ideal, and used arguments about political authority to bring this conceptio
2019
Enlightenment for Dummies: The Simple Guide to ‘Finding Yourself’ by Friedrich Nietzsche
“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves-- how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day?” (GM, Preface, p.1)This is the very first idea presented by Friedrich Nietzsche in his col
2019
The Bear, the Bird, and the Irishman: An Examination of the Loss of Innocence in “The Sound of Singing”
More than anything else, A Bird in the House is a story of entropy and change. Whether the theme of entropy is visible in Vanessa's interactions with her elderly family members or in the entry and exiting of characters, it is most constant in Vanessa
2019
The American Nightmare: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
“I prevented myself as much as possible from making the obvious connection between the crumbling of the world around me and the impending destruction of my personal American dream” (Hamid 93). This is a quotation from Mohsin Hamid’s novel The R
2019
Watchmen and The Odyssey on the Nature of Violence
by Carter Dungate No one would deny that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Homer’s The Odyssey are vastly different works: with Watchmen being a graphic novel and The Odyssey being an epic poem composed nearly three thousand years
2019
“A Lightning Burst of Knowingness”: What Chris Reveals About the Connor-MacLeod Family in A Bird in the House
In Margaret Laurence’s collection of stories, A Bird in the House, the story “Horses of the Night” begins with Vanessa’s cousin Chris coming to stay at the Brick House while he attends high school in Manawaka.
2019
Impression and Identity: How Margaret Laurence Reveals Character Through Observation and Reflection in A Bird in the House’s “The Mask of the Bear”
First impressions do not fully comprehend identity. They can be effective tools to make basic judgments and broad assumptions; however, in terms of interpretation, their insights are extremely limited. A person’s physical and social traits contribu
2019
Understanding White
A month ago I thought that I was white—that was until I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. In his book, Coates doesn’t refer to people who look like me as ‘white', but as “those Americans who believe that they are white” (Be
2019
Alienation and Belonging in Authority and Resistance
There are few things worse than feeling alone. Believing there is nobody to share life with, no group to which you belong, is a terrifying and crippling emptiness. This sense of isolation is often seen as a personal problem, a weakness caused and exp
2019
Love is Where Edges Meet
“The Promise” is a contract that tied the Hmong of Laos with the C.I.A. personnel during the Vietnam War. In exchange for this ethnic minority’s loyalty in the fight that the Americans led until 1975—and the resulting persecutions and mass mi
2018
V as Conductor
In Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, the eponymous V declares, following the word’s etymology, that “anarchy means ‘without leaders’” (195). However, just as the text’s evaluation of fascism does not necessarily coalesce with
2018
The Perfect Match: Satire and Suffering in the Poor Mouth and the Inconvenient Indian
As James Joyce, the most influential Irish novelist, writes, Flann O’Brien is “a real writer with the true comic spirit”, a spirit that pervades The Poor Mouth. There is no doubt humour is a crucial factor of the book, a momentous aspect that s
2018
Power Glove: Biopower and Video Games in The Three-Body Problem
One of the key concepts discussed in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is that of biopower. Loosely defined, biopower is “the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population,” with these practices constituting how “organiza
2018
Cleanup on Isle Five
After many years of being asked, “If you were on an island and could only bring one thing, what would you bring?” one may be frustrated after reading The Tempest for never having said magic powers. With magic powers, one can do practically anythi
2018
We'll Take a Cup of Resistance Yet, for Absolutism is not the End
Rooted in scientific deduction and reasoning, Thomas Hobbes’s depiction of authority is a response to his understanding of human behaviours in the state of nature. Hobbes maintains that inherent human aversions and passions propel the disintegratio
2018
I will love/even unwilling: bell hooks and Sappho on love as an action
Sappho’s enshrinement in pop culture “as [a] love goddess,” according to bell hooks, has been essential in suppressing a long-held narrative of love constructed primarily by male poets (hooks, xxi). However, Sappho’s conceptions of love (at l
2018
Ruined?
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down recounts a conflict that occurred between a Hmong family and an American hospital regarding the treatment of a Hmong epileptic (in the eyes of the Western medical tradition) girl, Lia Lee.
2018
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger tells the story of the self-made man, Balram Halwai, who claims himself to be many things: a servant, a philosopher, an entrepreneur, and a murderer. Although these professions are certainly apart of Balram’s
2018
Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth, Too: Gender in bell hooks’ all about love
In a society so deeply imbued with patriarchy, women and men struggle to navigate their relationships with love and power, leaving many distraught and hopeless. bell hooks’ all about love: new visions is both a celebration of love and its cathartic
2018
The Effects and Reflection of Space in Émile Zola’s Germinal
In Émile Zola’s novel Germinal, the distinction between characters from differing social classes can be seen in their outward appearances. However, a subtler distinction can be seen through the use of space.
2018
Panasonic: The Power Of Language In White Noise
Used to establish keystones of identity, emotion, and culture, language defines many of the parameters of human life. In his novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo analyzes the power and limitation of language in a technologically advancing world.
2017
Sayers’ Method of Understanding Academia
As Harriet Vane returns to Shrewsbury College and the world of academia within Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, she becomes entrenched in a war of attrition between the college’s reputation and a figure intent on undermining it with the use of obs
2017
The Marriage of Science and Art in Carson's Silent Spring
As an environmentalist, living in the 21st Century, I have come across the idea of connectedness time and time again. I have come to understand how the universe is a whole, and made of countless components. Rachel Carson played a large role in the en
2017
The Silence of God
Death is the most prominent theme in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, manifested in the lives of Jack and Babette, primarily in the form of constant noise in the background. There is always someone humming (DeLillo 27) or the TV is left on with nobody wa
2017
The Feminist Façade
Women maintain a constant presence in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, and they all seem to have achieved positions of power through various means. This image of an empowered woman might seemingly contribute to the novel’s feminist nature. However
2017
Of Virginity and Violence
Certain qualities of classical fairytales and myths beg for feminist adaptations. The blatant misogyny and unapologetic reinforcement of patriarchal values they display has prompted a host of contemporized re-imaginations such as those of The Bloody
2017
Marriage, Magic and Invisibility
Rulers must make clear the distinction between their subordinates and themselves if they are to demonstrate believable authority, and Prospero in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is no exception.
2017
“Hi non sunt homines”: Perspectives on Humanization on Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau as Influenced by Contemporary Philosophy and Surgical Science
Humans have, for millennia, felt a desire to impose their unique characteristics on other animals. When we look at a dog, we typically imagine that it looks at humans around it much as we look at other people. We imagine that the dog is thinking abou
2017
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: A Heaven of Misery
Life in late 18th-century London was difficult, especially for those who were unfortunate enough to be stricken with poverty during this time of industrial revolution. Arguably, the people who suffered from this hardship the most were children, which
2017
Power to the People: The role of the People in The Prince
In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli promises to "set aside fantasies about rulers, then, and consider what happens in fact."[1] The result is a book with a political philosophy that eludes classification, even today.
2017
Looking for clothes but grasping at darkness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – an exploration of negative space
Chekhov’s concept of ‘showing not telling’ continues to pervade both film and text today. Whereas contemporary films have access to dialogue as a medium of communication between director and audience, silent films instead heavily rely on visual
2017
The Intuitionist: Where Black Men Tell White Lies and Silence Turns Loud
The human experience, as subjective and relative as it may be, is rooted deeply in two worlds: that which can be seen and physically touched, and that which cannot. As Colson Whitehead tells the story of Lila Mae’s life in the dystopian elevator wo
2017
Investigating the Death of the Author in Paul Auster's City of Glass
The structural critic describes the characters of a novel as nothing more than “the noise of their name” (Gass, 1970, 49), as any fixed aspect of the narrative structure to which the reader will always return as “music returns to its theme” (
2017
The Sound of Scandal: An analysis of the thematic significance of jazz in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
While many critics of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz choose to focus on her use of the music form’s distinct structure in the narrative voice, jazz music itself also plays a vital thematic role in the story. By incorporating motifs of jazz into her H
2017
Guilty Women: An Analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” Utilizing Laura Mulvey’s Theories of Scopophilia and Female Narrative Roles
She stands alone in a crowded room. Her hair captures the light, framing her face with soft, ethereal radiance. She smiles gently at the people around her, yet remains still, untouched, as though she is waiting for something to happen.
2017
Where did Plato and Galileo search for truth? The inward and outward search for epistemological and metaphysical certainty
Creating a binary between looking inward and outward when thinking about philosophy is obfuscatory, particularly when dealing with the works of Galileo and Plato. Galileo literally gazes at the sun until he is blind, while Plato looks into his mind a
2016
From Words to Images: A Comparison of Paul Auster's City of Glass and Its Graphic Novel Adaptation
Paul Auster's novel, City of Glass, fabricates a world in which appearances often fail to correspond to reality and the readers can be as confused and bewildered as the characters in the novel. To adapt City of Glass into a graphic novel, where image
2016
Sylvia Plath: The Devil and The White Macaw
Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood has a complex understanding of her enlivened friend Doreen, which makes her long for a similarly spirited disposition. Esther’s existence is instead confined by the ever-present thoughts of death plaguing her mind.
2016
Female Forces Behind the Mask: Rorschach’s Path to Violence and Heroism
There are few things that are black-and-white in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. Instead, heroes and villains and the justification of violence blur together into one disheveled and messy humanity.
2016
Sebald's Barbaric Poetry
"Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch," wrote Theodor Adorno. "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism." Since writing it in his 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," this sentence has been quoted and appropriated time
2016
A Smidge too Manly, A Smidge too Motherly: An Analysis of Midge, the Friend-Zoned Female in Hitchcock's Vertigo
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 11). This quote from
2016
you burn me: Sappho In Conversation With Faulkner On Life After Death
The narrative of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner could not exist without the character Addie Bundren – mother of five and wife to Anse. Throughout the chapters of the novel, the narrative’s perspective changes from character to character as th
2016
Convergence of Meaning: The Tripartite Nature of ‘I’ in Paul Auster’s City of Glass
Paul Auster’s City of Glass is a text that confronts a wide array of themes, two of the most prominent being language and identity. Language is presented as the conveyor of meaning, connected to the Biblical myth of Babel, whereas meaning is an eva
2016
Falling in Love with Siri: Undermining the Male Gaze through the Removal of the Female Body in Her
In her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey aims to bring the oppressive male gaze into question, noting that, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/f
2016
Midge’s Point of View: Unacknowledged Subversion of the Symbolic in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” includes a discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. While the discussion is relatively short, spanning less than a page, it makes important claims about the value of
2016
Sigmund Tzu and the Dream World
Delving deep into the psyche of Dora, Freud’s case history, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), navigates the thoughts and dreams that course through her psyche to find, pick apart, and analyze the potential causes of grief and s
2016
Eyes to Watch
Eyes are everywhere in the comic series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. From the eyes of every character to the pupil-like circles of clocks and “fallout shelter” signs, figures of vision can be found throughout.
2016
The Souls of Black Folk and The Essentiality of Human Connection
Du Bois’ classic text The Souls of Black Folk does not at first read as a cohesive argument. Rather, each chapter offers a different style, a different purpose, and this makes for a complex and at times disjointed reading experience. The unifying f
2016
Anne Frank: The Young Girl and the Writer
When Hitler began his long rise to power in 1919 and promoted anti-Semitism across Europe, the world was devastated by the horror that ensued. Amongst the approximately 60 million people killed during the war, 11 million of them were Jews. Anne Frank
2016
Where the Road Ends
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road explores the bleak and barren post-apocalyptic world of a father and his son and their journey to find sanctuary. As the father and son travel throughout the novel they travel farther and farther down the road. In this ne
2016
The Person in the Picture: The Image and the Self of Esther Greenwood
Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is photographed many times. Sometimes the act of being photographed is equated with the objectification of Esther, which is to say, the photographer takes away Esther’s personhood and she becomes an object
2016
Backstreets: Shadows, Violence and Queerness in Watchmen
The visual language of queerness in 2010s America is defined by brightness—rainbows, glitter—declaring a queer existence fully saturated with light. But the torture and death of the only gay characters in popular TV shows, the sensationalization
2016
Opposing Oppenheimers
Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer recounts the trial of one of the most prominent physicists in history. Oppenheimer, often called the father of the atomic bomb, was summoned before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and i
2016
We Didn't Start the Fire
“Are you one of the good guys?” (McCarthy 282). The father-son odyssey of The Road is consumed by constant searching for food, shelter, or safety. The father is searching for something else, as well, something intangible but just as necessary for
2016
Mulvey vs. Carter: The Power of the Gaze
Both Laura Mulvey and Angela Carter are well-noted female writers in the 1970’s that have talked about feminism through their writings. In Mulvey’s famous article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she talks about how most popular cinema
2016
The Communist Manifesto and its earlier drafts: Further explanation, or simply an ignorance of the truth?
Inspiring a movement is not only a difficult, but a lengthy process. The perfect combination of motivation in the population, necessity for change, as well as belief that a particular movement will improve the peoples’ lives will create the necessa
2016
Voices Rolling in the Deep
In writing Austerlitz, Sebald endeavours to tell a story that, in its scope and controversy, is harrowing to tell. Faced with the barbarism of the Holocaust and the impossible challenge of bringing its victims’ histories back from the dead, he mani
2016
“He’s Coming To Steal My Eyes”: Vision, Survival, Connection, and Existence in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Sight is a profoundly important sense. Vision helps one navigate through the world, but it is also intensely emotional. It matters what we choose to look at, as well as what we allow to look at us, and it is terrifying when vision is obscured, for th
2016
From Bodies Politic to the Body Politic: A Modus Operandi for a Modus Vivendi
The Hobbesian state of nature both begins and ends with human nature. While Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is widely regarded as advocating a pessimistic view of human nature, Hobbes’ pessimism is not directed towards human nature, but towards the stat
2016
Technicolour Ideals: The Poison-Saturated Society of Plath's The Bell Jar
Colour permeates Esther Greenwood’s narration in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Esther often articulates her visual perception in vivid colour. She particularly emphasizes the aesthetic of a film she watches with the Ladies’ Day girls. The film i
2016
Forget the Juice Cleanse: Rid Yourself of Male Toxicity for a Fresh, Rejuvenated Glow! (Only $99.99 for a limited time)
The ability to embrace femininity has always been a uphill battle in relation to the issues women have dealt with in Western society: in recent years, liberating ourselves through our sexuality has become apparent through movements like “SlutWalk
2016
The Decolonization Manifesto: Marx and Muslims
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon enhances a Marxist analysis by addressing the intersections of race, colonialism and capitalism. Fanon uses the terminology of Marx and Engels but applies it in different ways. By ‘stretching’ Marxist an
2016
Asserting Meaning in Dabydeen's "Brown Skin Girl"
David Dabydeen’s Slave Song addresses the dilemma of how to identify the ‘true’ voice of a Guayanese culture that has been clouded and corrupted historically by the voice of colonialism. Dabydeen, born in Guyana to Indian parents but having emi
2016
Dreams We Must Loathe
As the Man attempts to walk the narrow line separating blind optimism and consuming despair, he uses his dreams and memories to keep him situated on the difficult path of realistic survival. The combination of the will to survive and unavoidable desp