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Presentation

As an undergraduate completing an English degree with a minor in Creative Writing, the Creative Writing Workshop has become a quintessential and reoccurring theme in my life. Assessing my own subjective experiences when it comes to the workshops I have participated in, this research essay applies the practice of phenomenology and its theory of subjectivity to the Creative Writing Workshop to better understand the workshop structure and its participants. Through assessing subjective accounts from different sources, there is evidence that implies that the workshop needs to change and address criticism when it comes to the workshop’s legitimacy as an academic practice. Arguments against the workshop suggest that a system that is supposed to uplift the author focuses instead on the subjectivity of the reader in which the workshop breeds critics rather than writers. Other arguments suggest that the workshop is not supposed to uplift the author, but to improve one’s writing.

To base criticism on the workshop using phenomenology, this research essay looks at the institutionalization of creative thinking, the subjectivity of the instructor as well as the workshop participants, and what occurs when an individual is presently in the workshop environment. The workshop will be traced back and explained as a product of culture and how the workshop system has done little to evolve and meet the needs of workshop participants. Through covering phenomenology and workshop structure, this paper dismantles the traditional workshop and argues for an alternative that is sympathetic in equal parts to both reader and writer.

Presentation

Kenneth’s thesis presents a bold metadisciplinary examination of the English major within Canadian universities. This innovative research project argues for the radical reconstruction of the degree through three key approaches: democratization (dismantling paywalled elitism), decolonization (challenging Eurocentric curricula), and Queering (embracing diverse identities in content and approach). Grounded in Freirean pedagogy of love, the thesis positions the English degree as an essential force for fostering critical thinking and reducing societal polarization.

The project uniquely combines rigorous academic analysis with creative autoethnography. The scholarly component includes comparative analysis of English degree requirements across Canadian universities, examination of course syllabi, and synthesis of existing research on decolonial approaches to education. This is complemented by a modern “campus novel” that explores academia from 2SLGBTQ+ and Mixed-Indigenous perspectives, while deconstructing and reimagining the Dark Academia genre that significantly influences Generation Z’s perception of literary studies.

Through this dual approach, Brown’s thesis addresses critical issues in higher education while demonstrating the English degree’s potential as an emancipatory force. The research provides practical frameworks for institutional reform while exploring how love for literature and language can revitalize the degree’s perception among digital native students. This work contributes to ongoing conversations about the future of humanities education, arguing that a transformed English degree is vital for developing the next generation of concerned, empathetic citizens.

Presentation

Colonial adventure fiction of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century is a genre that the Western canon has celebrated since its inception. The works of authors including Joseph Conrad, Jules Verne, and H. Rider Haggard have been vessels of racism, imperialism, exploitation, animal cruelty, misogyny, and the perpetuation of rich, white men as an inherent ruling class. These ideals have been not-so-carefully disguised into fun and exciting adventures that take brave adventurers to exotic locales, where action and mystery await them.

Séan Feeney’s Honours project is a work of creative writing that seeks to implement researched criticism into a story that is recognizable to the genre, but subverts the deplorable aspects. This will be a critical look at the forms and tropes of colonial adventures, and question their positions as perpetuating the ideals that were previously listed. By de-canonizing these ideals within its own genre, this project hopes to open up discussion and serve as an example that adventures into the unknown, and their accompanying Victorian aesthetics, can be utilized in a modern context without celebrating damaging ideologies that have consequences to this day.

Presentation

Ava’s Honours thesis focuses on the writings of John Keats and his representations of love and death. Ava analyzes a series of poems and letters of Keats in which he exercises his combination of love and death. He does this with a frequency no other Romantic poet does, which she notes through comparisons of the writings of William Blake and Lord Byron.

Keats has a habit of placing death and love alongside each other in which the experience of love is so overpowering and consuming that death is the favorable option or the ideal way to express devotion. His ideas of death for love fall into two categories pending on who the love is being expressed for. When speaking to a muse, the narrator wishes to die to express the intensity of his emotions and how deep his love runs. When drawn to a love of nature, there is a want to die because nothing else experienced in his life will be superior to this moment.

Keats was not a religious poet, typically feeling skeptical about the existence of God in general causing beauty and love to become his religion. In this, his worship of love and beauty inherently leads to the final act of death as comes in other religious practices; to dedicate his entire life to beauty and love before his untimely demise at the age of twenty-five. He clearly writes in a letter to Fanny Brawne that “love is my religion. I could die for that. I could die for you.”