Department of English

The winner of the 2011 Chau Essay Prize is Cara Cortese. She has just completed her final year in Arts & Contemporary Studies, and graduated with a major in Culture Studies. She is currently working at an educational publishing company as a marketing coordinator, but would love to return to school for graduate studies. She is particularly interested in Ryerson’s Communication & Culture and Literatures of Modernity programs.

In “The Language of Painting: Ekphrastic Poetry and Shawna Lemay,” Cortese examines a genre of poetry called ekphrasis that offers verbal representations of visual representations such as paintings. After exploring various perspectives on the genre and developing her own framework for understanding the ways this genre positions words and pictures, she turns to an analysis of Shawna Lemay’s poetry from All the God-Sized Fruit (McGill-Queen’s, 1999). Attending to both form and content, her analysis treats the ways the poem imitates “the formal qualities of painting while expressing it in a different medium.” The paper was submitted in English 705: Reading Visual Culture, taught by Dr. Monique Tschofen.

Dr. Tschofen explains the paper’s strengths: “In the first part of this essay, Cara ably sifts through a broad range of literary critics, beautifully distills their ideas, and then develops her own perspective on a major literary genre in relation to these critics. Achieving this kind of critical engagement with scholarship in the field is one of the central goals of academic research in English. In the second part of the essay, she demonstrates that she is an astute close-reader of poetry. As she considers language, history, gender politics, and genre, she opens up the poem for us, and lets us better appreciate its nuances and complexities.”

Upon learning of the award, Cortese remarked “I’ve enjoyed every facet of my time spent at Ryerson, and to receive this award as my undergraduate career comes to a close is such an honour.”

This year, the runner-up for the 2011 Chau Essay Prize is Taryn Linder for her essay "'no words to speak no wish to say': The Ambiguity of Sexuality in Aidan Chambers's Breaktime." Her essay was completed for ENG 224: Children's Fiction, taught by Dr. David Copeland. Taryn Linder is in her fourth year of the Global Studies stream of Ryerson's Arts and Contemporary Studies programme, with a minor in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Management. Her essay explores the difficulty of defining sexuality in Aidan Chambers' young adult novel, Breaktime. 

Cara received her award certificate at the ACS Awards Night ceremony on Nov 9th.