Inferno XV: Dante Encounters Ser Brunetto Latini

Medium: Inkwash and coffee

An Academic Sin: The Use of Ser Brunetto Lantini in The Divine Comedy

On his journey through The Inferno, Dante Alighieri is shocked to encounter his beloved former teacher, Ser Brunetto Latini, in the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell where Latini is eternally tormented with other men of his ilk—academics, poets, and learned men of rhetoric—are punished as sodomites. The question then, is why has Latini been placed there and what can be inferred about Dante’s understanding of the nature of medieval sodomy as academic blasphemy? The findings presented here indicate that one of the most offensive readings of sodomy is an unsexual one. Sins of fleshy sensuality are presented blatantly in both the Inferno and Purgatory, but I argue that Dante places Brunetto among the eternally damned not only to privilege the rhetoric of humility but to serve as a cautionary tale on how our teachers fail us. Dante’s disassociation with Latini’s need for cerebral acclaim forms the foundational pad for which Dante cautions himself against the ultimate heresy of pride, while Latini continually presses the immodest approach for both himself and his pupil. Intellectual sodomy is a crime that is valued higher in Dante’s penal hierarchy than any sexual sin is, with less chance for redemption, as is shown with the direct bridging of desexualized sodomy in Inferno 15 with the explicitly sexualized sodomy of Purgatory 27. The fact that Inferno XV does not contain obvious allegory or simply stated sins renders it one of the most enigmatic cantos. The position that Brunetto’s sin is hubristic supports Dante’s conflicted relationship with his own pride—the sin on which Dante dedicates his journey.

The North Star of Hype: How Detroit Charts a Course in a Neoliberal Framework

The city of Detroit is associated with the creation of and rise of industrialism in North America. Industrialism, specifically Fordism, within the municipality of Detroit maintained financial strength for decades until the mid-1980s when a new global capitalist era emerged in the Global North. Currently, the city of Detroit is in the process of rebuilding. In the academic literature on development, there is an apparent gap that explores how current ideologies shape development in social spaces. In this review, the ideological influences of sustainable development and neoliberalism are explored through analysis of the social, historical, political, and economic lenses that contribute to and shape development within the city of Detroit. Moreover, the ideological influences are analyzed to understand how explicit discourse for sustainable development either forms or breaks implicit systems of social control. The paper concludes by acknowledging that progressive notions of equality and growth are difficult to actualize due to the inequitable allocation of capital under our system of global capitalism. The paper closes with an exploration of the implicit and symbolic biases that appears inherent in development ideologies to contribute to a genuine and possible path to an equitable and sustainable future for places such as Detroit.

The Deconstruction of Oppressive Structures: Three Non-Conforming Female Figures in Canadian Drama

Sometimes, resistance to oppressive structures takes on forms initially unexpected. Through close readings of George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Judith Thompson's The Lion in the Street, and David French's Salt-Water Moon, this paper considers four female figures in Canadian drama who oppose their circumstances leveraging the—sometimes minimal—power available to them.

Dreaming of Colonialism: Imagining “Place” in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes

This article explores the colonial mindset behind the depiction of space and travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes. Using Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Robert T. Tally Jr.’s “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a Spatially Symbolic Act” as frames for reading travel and travel literature in the text offers new insight into reading Antipodes’ underlying colonial mindset that is intertwined with the complex metatheatrical elements of the play. I read Peregrine as a British explorer going into the exotic to reform and impose his own ways of knowing on the people of the Antipodes. However, the complex metatheatrical elements further complicate this colonial reading of the text. The text uses metatheatrical elements that ultimately makes the audience aware of their own role in the space of the play—invoking a sense of self reflection. By focusing on the ways in which the exotic world is constructed and imagined, the nation as a performance, and the colonial discourse and power dynamics underlying the text I argue that The Antipodes can be read through modern literary theory to better understand and display the emerging difficulties and problems that accompany the developing sense of English nationalism and proto-colonialism. In doing so, the text displays the inherent colonial structures that inform and limit the role of both travel literature and the romance genre in “imaging” nations—something that is pivotal to both questioning and understanding the role of the nation in an increasingly global context.

Saskatchewan Cactus (Grasslands National Park)

This was a random cactus I found at Grasslands National Park that happened to be quite photogenic. I don't have a macro lens for my camera, so I was basically laying down on the ground to get this photo. I had to play with the focus a lot so that the texture of the cactus could really shine through.

Riverbank

For the landscape background, I used acrylic paint on a paper ground. Then I took a photo and overlaid it on top of my painting in PhotoShop.

Cover Art: Covid-19 Assembled and Disassembled

This piece is from my ART 141 class and is a light-up model of the coronavirus itself, able to be assembled and disassembled at will, ironically allowing people to influence the virus but not the other way around. Medium: Candy peanuts, Styrofoam, clay, paint, plastic teaspoons, a plastic cup, LED lights, glue. ©Puja Rajesh (2021)

The Effect of a Fundamental Movement Skill Intervention on the Physical Literacy Levels of Children with Congenital Heart Disease – A CHAMPS* Cohort Study: Physical Literacy in Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease

Preliminary evidence suggests that children with congenital heart disease (CHD) may have low physical literacy (PL). High PL is a determinant of physical activity participation. Therefore, we assessed the effect of a 12-week intervention on the PL of children with CHD. PL was assessed pre- and post-intervention in 14 participants with CHD, aged 9-16 years, using the PLAY tools. The intervention involved six bi-weekly sessions that consisted of a fundamental movement skill practice designed to enhance gross motor function and confidence. PLAYfun assessed physical competence. PLAYself assessed the child’s perception of their PL. PLAYparent was completed by parents to assess their perception of their child’s PL. We found a significant increase in overall physical competence (PLAYfun, p<.001), along with the domains of running (p=.001), locomotor (p=.002), upper body object control (p<.001), and balance (p=.006). No significant changes were found in PLAYself or PLAYparent indicating no changes to their self and parental perceived PL. We demonstrated that a 12-week fundamental movement skill intervention can improve PL in children with CHD. Children with CHD are at an increased risk of sequelae secondary to their reported physical inactivity, PL development may augment physical activity engagement and provide health benefits to this at-risk population.

The 'Wordsworth-Spinoza Link' and Ethics: Motivating the Wordsworthian Moral

Marjorie Levinson has established a link between Spinoza's philosophy and Wordsworth's poetry, focussing specifically on the two authors' shared metaphysics. In this paper I will follow the chain of Levinson's link and show that Spinoza and Wordsworth share an ethics, too. Spinoza's is an ethics of perspective; his primary prescription is to hold a perspective which acknowledges the metaphysical truth of the interconnectedness of all things for the sake of one's mental health. After grounding Wordsworth's well-known prescriptions of communion with nature in a metaphysics of monistic Nature (as Spinoza suggests), we will be in possession of vocabulary with which to describe a much deeper version of the Wordsworthian moral than has hitherto been familiar. Importantly, though we arrive at our description of the Wordsworthian moral by following Spinoza, it remains markedly Wordsworthian and is a novel particularization of Spinoza's general ethical suggestion.