Sample Writing Projects
"A Phenomenological Analysis of The Pardoner"
Originally written as my seminar paper for ENG 460: Chaucer's Fictions of Gender, for the completion of my English Capstone, this paper was an attempt to analyze the Pardoner from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales through the lens of phenomenology, as supported by the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception.
This work won the Albert Morton Turner Prize in the Critical Essay in the English department, and the Levinson Award in the Philosophy department!
The Pardoner, as depicted in William Blake's The Canterbury Pilgrims
"For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yow telle kan,
Which I am wont to preche for to wynne.
Now hoold youre pees, my tale I wol bigynne."
- The Pardoner's Prologue
"Art as Foundational Self-Expression and Its Continued Necessity in Societal Expression"
Written as my final essay for PHI 475: Philosophy Seminar, the Capstone course for Philosophy, this essay explores the relationship of art and the human experience through works such as R. G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis, Book X of Plato's Republic, selections from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
Photograph of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“For the speaking subject and for those who listen to him, the phonetic gesture produces a certain structuring of experience, a certain modulation of existence, just as a behavior of my body invests—for me and for others—the objects that surround me with a certain signification.”
- Phenomenology of Perception