Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Closing The Representational Gap: An Embodied-Enactive View Of Narcissistic Representational Systems, Victor Parchment

2016 Undergraduate Awards

According to tracking theories of mental content, the world we conceive is determined by the world we perceive, and the world we perceive is determined by the mind-independent world as it is. This view is challenged by Kathleen Akins on the grounds that our sensory systems are narcissistic, i.e., they have narrow operational interests and are largely unconcerned with representing objective reality. Yet, if what we conceive is not a veridical representation of the world, how is object-guided action in the world possible? This disconnect is the “representational gap”. This paper will close this gap by arguing that Akins’ concept …

Reclaiming The Female Melancholic Artist In Charlotte Smith’S Elegiac Sonnets, Emily Denommé

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Charlotte Smith is often considered a proto-Romantic poet, and her Elegiac Sonnets a precursor to the Romantic poetry of the next century. However, Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is also heavily influenced by late-eighteenth century currents of thought, most especially the cult of sentiment that had extreme literary significance in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Additionally, changing perceptions of the melancholic artistic genius as a specifically male figure meant that Smith, as a poet for whom melancholy in Elegiac Sonnets was a central element of her artistry, had to demonstrate her claim, as a woman, to the space of the …

Skepticism As Epistemic Naturalization, Dylan Vallance

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Responses to radical philosophical skepticism often interpret skeptical arguments as conceptual challenges that must be overcome if common epistemic practices are to remain justifiably practicable. Such responses treat skeptical arguments as attacks on our ability to justifiably make knowledge claims, wherein the skeptic attempts to isolate conceptual problems embedded in common epistemic processes that debar those processes from the potential to produce knowledge. In this framework, the successful skeptic reveals our constitutional epistemic blindness while the successful response defangs the skeptic’s attack on our capacity for knowledge.

This paper argues that this interpretation is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of …

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Asians and Asian Americans are considered the most well-to-do racialized groups in twenty-first century U.S. Their identity and ontology are incontrovertibly influenced by the model minority myth, a stereotype that envelops them as successful and as overcoming racial discrimination. This paper argues that the model minority myth exemplifies how putatively benevolent racial tropes are nonetheless racist against all communities of colour. Thus, Asian Americans are positioned as the ‘model minority’, as opposed to certain ‘problem minorities’, in order to further subjugate Black and Brown bodies. The myth is also problematic for Asian Americans themselves, demonstrating that to exist as an …

Faustus’ England: Marlowe’S Representation Of Individualism And Spiritual Authority In Elizabethan England In The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus, Andrea Holstein

2016 Undergraduate Awards

This paper explores Christopher Marlowe’s representation of individualism and his criticism of spiritual authority in Elizabethan England as presented in Doctor Faustus. Current Marlovian scholarship focuses on the question of how Marlowe’s consideration of the pressing doctrinal questions of his day were used to advance the narrative of Doctor Faustus. The goal of this paper, however, is to demonstrate that Doctor Faustus is first and foremost a subversive commentary on the religious climate of Marlowe’s day. This analysis of Marlowe’s attitude regarding the religious authorities—both doctrinal and institutional—of this period was accomplished by examining the representation of religious beliefs …

Moving To The Beat: Examining Excitability Of The Motor System During Beat Perception With Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Celina Everling

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Moving along to the beat of music is a universal human trait. It is a behaviour that displays the interaction between auditory and motor systems during beat perception. While several studies demonstrate that motor structures are involved in beat perception, the time course of motor system excitability during beat perception is not well understood. To examine the time course of motor system excitability in beat perception, we stimulated the motor cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and measured the amplitude of the corresponding motor evoked potentials from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle while participants listened to rhythms that induced …

Literary Amplification: Jon Krakauer's Use Of Intertextual References In Into The Wild And Their Role In The Mccandless Phenomenon, Wyatt Merkley

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In the summer of 2013 alone, twelve hikers had to be air-rescued off the remote Stampede Trail in the Northern Alaskan wilderness. The route is not particularly accessible or particularly beautiful, and it covers twenty-two miles of soggy, bug-infested, beaver-ponds and muskeg. Throughout the year, powerful rivers of glacial snow-melt cross the path; only in the winter and early spring is it even remotely safe or easy to follow the trail. In her 2013 essay “Chasing Alexander Supertramp,” Eva Holland quotes one Alaskan woman who, shaking her head, pronounced “of all the places you could hike in Alaska…” Yet each …

Beyond Borders: Nature, Revelation, And Identity In Atwood’S Surfacing, Emily Denommé

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing studies the effects of the delineation of identity at a time in Canadian history where the question of Canadian national identity was evolving, becoming a marker that was more clearly defined and more consciously sought out by Canadian artists and citizens. Atwood’s novel can be considered in light of these historical developments, but Surfacing’s interest in the establishment of borders of exclusion and inclusion is not an affirmation of the positive effects such identifiers can bring. Instead of the perhaps typical celebration of the collective identity that such group identifiers as nationality can bring, this novel reveals …

A Revised Feminist Analysis Of Disordered Eating And Weight Preoccupation, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Eating disorders (EDs) are often emblematized by the upper-class young white woman anorexic or bulimic, an archetype that constructs disordered eating as pathological and depicts it in a singular and comprehensible manner. Personal narratives of body dissatisfaction (rooted in both literature and qualitative research), as well as my own subjectivity as a poor East Asian-Canadian woman, will equip me with the theoretical frameworks and insights by which I problematize the homogenization of problematic eating. Subscribing to the tradition of interjecting first-person perspectives into research that is so characteristic to feminist theory, I demonstrate how a subject as visceral and commanding …

1/1, Michelle Bunton

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Creating installations through athletic or “gym” aesthetics, my work embodies a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another. Collectively the components of my installations strive towards an extension of the self or psyche, reaching beyond a deterioration of materiality to achieve pseudo-stasis through recording technologies. However, video and sound technologies ultimately fail to either fully reanimate or fully neutralize a recorded subject, instead what is produced is an intermediary image simply relocated into a new physical body that is equally subject to deterioration. Yet, in its mechanical form, the recording contains the …

Food Figures At The Forks: The Intersection Of Feminist And (Post)Colonial Politics Of Food Imagery In Kiran Desai’S The Inheritance Of Loss, Maryam Golafshani

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Anita Mannur argues that food offers ‘an alternative register through which to theorize gender, sexuality, class, and race’ in literature by and about the South Asian diaspora. The use of food in these texts is not merely a figurative flourish, but rather an ‘important vector of critical analysis in negotiating the gendered, racialized, and classed bases of collective and individual identity’ of South Asian bodies. Food is always already political; it must not merely be tasted, but must be read in terms of how it (re)presents and (re)produces intersecting power differentials. …

An Analysis Of Les Yeux Clos Ii By Toru Takemitsu, Jason Mile

2016 Undergraduate Awards

This paper presents an analysis for Les Yeux Clos II (1989), a solo piano piece written by Toru Takemitsu, based on a lithograph by Odilon Redon. The piece falls within Takemitsu’s “Third Period” which Timothy Koozin describes as a combination of “Western syntax” and “Japanese tradition.” By identifying the influences of Western composers, such as John Cage and Olivier Messiaen, and Japanese tradition, this paper analyzes the extent to which both Western and Eastern traditions can be identified in this piece. Based on comments by Takemitsu and John Cage, the form of the piece is defined by means of motivic …

Towards Romantic Syncretism: Liminal And Transitory Women In The Work Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michelle Bunton

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti struggled with a poetic and visual synthesis of the ideal with the sensual, exploring and attempting to resolve the complex paradox of Victorian sexuality, a feat not easily achieved during an era of such fervent morality. Developing his own Romantic Syncretism, Rossetti presents a synthesis of multifaceted symbolism and allegory in his work, combining pagan and Christian themes to create a liminal space in which the divided natures of his female subjects, their object versus subject-hood, are unified. His approach to Christian symbology, via a fleshy and aesthetic representation of the female form, retains …