Arts Desk
Arts & Letters
Close readings, textual histories, and critical dispatches for the literature and humanities seminar. Middle English to modernity, with the meter left in.
The Complete Index
Every Dispatch
The full archive, newest first. Pair a dispatch with its course code, follow a topic tag, or jump to a desk.
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Chronological File
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Paradise Lost, Book IX: The Fall A close guide to the climax of Paradise Lost: Eve’s proposal to work apart, Satan’s serpentine rhetoric, the eating of the fruit, Adam’s choice, and the immediate aftermath of shame, lust, and blame.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
MLA 9th Edition: The Page, the Quote, and the Works Cited A working guide to MLA 9: paper formatting, author-page citations, quotation mechanics, the nine core elements, and model Works Cited entries for books, articles, websites, films, lectures, and more.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The Complete 46-Sonnet Reader A complete sonnet-by-sonnet companion to the forty-six poems on the ENGL-200A reading list: the procreation sequence, the rival poet, the constancy poems, and the Dark Lady sonnets, each with a close reading and a route into an essay.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Big Words: A Working Lexicon for Academic Prose A working lexicon for academic writing: turpitude, laconic, apodictic, and other words that earn their keep, with brief glosses, model sentences, and usage traps — plus a wider list for the margin and a test for deciding when a plain word is the better one.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
The Verb Is the Argument: A Working Guide to Analysis Verbs A practical guide to analysis verbs: how to match the verb to the evidence, the confidence ladder from notes to establishes, the difference between imply and infer, thirty-six verbs in six families, reporting verbs, and the overclaiming habits that make examiners distrust a sentence.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
The Line and the Turn: A Field Guide to Poetry Terminology A comprehensive guide to poetry terminology for senior school and university readers: prosody and scansion, rhyme and sound, figuration and rhetoric, stanza and fixed forms, and a practical method for turning terms into analysis — with worked examples and the confusions examiners see most.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Proposal: How to Pitch an Essay Before You Write It A practical guide to the essay proposal: what it is for, the six moves of the opening paragraph, how to write a title and thesis that promise a real argument, the research plan and working bibliography, and the common failures that turn a proposal into a summary.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
Paradise Lost, Book IV: Eden, Envy, and the First Night A guide to Book IV of Paradise Lost: Satan’s “myself am Hell” soliloquy, the description of Eden, Adam and Eve’s hierarchical marriage, the hymn to wedded love, and the first intrusion of evil into Paradise.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Indian Act: The Law That Decides Who Belongs The Indian Act is often described as outdated, but it still shapes status, band membership, reserve land, and governance. This dispatch explains how a nineteenth-century statute became a living architecture of belonging — and why reform is not the same as abolition.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Desire, Disgust, and the Dark Lady A study of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets: the anti-Petrarchan beauty of Sonnet 127, the anatomy of lust in 129, the parody of the blazon in 130, the puns on ‘Will,’ the two loves of 144, and the soul-and-body dialogue of 146.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Pass System: How Paper Controlled Everyday Life The pass system had no basis in the Indian Act, yet it regulated First Nations movement across the prairie West for decades. This dispatch explains how the system worked, how people resisted it, and why its archive is so difficult to reconstruct.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Paradise Lost, Book III: Light, Foreknowledge, and the Son’s Offer A guide to Book III of Paradise Lost: Milton’s invocation to light, God’s speech on foreknowledge and free will, the Son’s offer of substitution, and Satan’s flight to the created world.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Treaty 7: A Relationship, Not a Receipt Treaty 7 is often described as a land cession, but the Elders’ narrative treats it as a relationship with ongoing obligations. This dispatch explains what was negotiated at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, why the written and oral records differ, and what “original intent” means for treaty rights today.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Absence, Constancy, and the Problem of Love A study of Shakespeare’s constancy cluster: the suspicion sonnets, the poems of absence and return, the religious language of Sonnet 105, and the central definition of love in Sonnet 116.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Playing Indian: Performance and the Colonial Gaze Buffalo Bill’s Wild West turned Indigenous people into spectacle for settler audiences. This dispatch examines how performance produces ideas about Indigeneity — and how Indigenous performers have used the same stage to contest those ideas.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Paradise Lost, Book II: The Council of Hell and the Road Through Chaos A guide to the infernal council of Paradise Lost: Moloch’s war, Belial’s quietism, Mammon’s empire, Beelzebub’s strategy of guile, Satan’s solo mission, and the allegory of Sin and Death at the gates of Hell.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Jagged Worldviews: Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science Indigenous knowledge is not a collection of folklore to be added to Western science. This dispatch examines Leroy Little Bear’s ‘jagged worldviews,’ Kyle Whyte’s critique of crisis epistemology, Deborah McGregor’s environmental justice, and the Buffalo Treaty’s politics of restoration.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Rivalry, Betrayal, and the Rival Poet A study of Shakespeare’s middle sonnet cluster: the ‘disgrace’ sonnets, the Rival Poet, the great time-and-monument poems, the deathbed sonnets, and the farewell of Sonnet 87.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Beyond the F Word: Indigenous Feminisms and the Politics of Gender Indigenous feminism is not Western feminism with a different flag. This dispatch examines how colonialism reorganised gender, why the ‘F word’ remains contested, and how Indigenous women writers and activists have made gender justice part of sovereignty.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Paradise Lost, Book I: The Argument of Hell A close guide to the opening book of Milton’s epic: the invocation and its theodicy, Satan’s rhetoric of the unconquerable will, the catalogue of fallen angels, and the building of Pandemonium as a parody of divine creation.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
What Blood Quantum Cannot Measure Blood quantum turns belonging into a racial fraction, but Indigenous identity is also kinship, community, land, language, and self-determination. This dispatch examines the colonial logic of classification and the contested politics of ‘Pretendian’ claims.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Procreation, Time, and the Fair Youth A study of Shakespeare’s first sonnet cluster: the procreation sonnets, the assault of time, the rival claims of children and verse, the gender trouble of Sonnet 20, and the consolations of love and memory in Sonnets 23, 29, and 30.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Angry Inuk: Inuit Sovereignty and the Seal Hunt Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s Angry Inuk shows how international campaigns against the seal hunt overrode Inuit political authority and threatened food security. This dispatch examines the film alongside Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s argument that Indigenous sovereignty is ontological, not merely legal.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Complete Study Dispatch A full close-reading guide to the Pearl Poet’s Arthurian romance: the beheading contract, the pentangle, the three hunts and temptations, and the green girdle that turns a chivalric test into a meditation on fear, faith, and truth.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Museums, Repatriation, and the Digital Footprint Museums present themselves as objective custodians of culture, but their collections were built through colonial acquisition. This dispatch examines repatriation, the politics of display, and the digital archives that are extending the fight over Indigenous data into the present.
Annals & History INST 201 -
Judith: The Sword, the Saint, and the Severed Head A close study of the Old English Judith: its manuscript context beside Beowulf, its heroic recasting of a biblical heroine, the two-stroke beheading, and the poem’s uneasy alliance of chastity, violence, and national deliverance.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Wife of Bath: Experience, Sovereignty, and the Art of the Prologue A study guide to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: the battle between experience and clerical authority, the five husbands, the rape that opens the Tale, and the meaning of female sovereignty in Chaucer’s most performed voice.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
The Faerie Queene, Book I: Holiness and the Knight of the Red Crosse A canto-by-canto study of Book I of The Faerie Queene: Redcrosse’s wandering, Una’s constancy, Duessa’s falsehood, the House of Pride, the House of Holiness, and the dragon that turns a failed knight into Saint George.
Arts & Letters ENGL-200A -
Magna Carta: Clause, Myth, and the Making of English Liberty A source-led guide to Magna Carta: the political crisis of King John’s reign, the 1215 clauses on justice and consent, the charter’s annulment and reissues, and the long afterlife that turned a baronial settlement into a myth of liberty.
Annals & History HIST-104 -
Enzyme Kinetics: The Michaelis–Menten Model in the Lab A quantitative guide to enzyme kinetics: the steady-state derivation, Km and Vmax, catalytic efficiency, inhibition patterns, assay design, and the edge cases that make real data deviate from the Michaelis–Menten curve.
Science & Industry BIO-210 -
The Thesis Statement: Building an Argument That Survives a Seminar A practical guide to writing thesis statements that do real intellectual work: the claim-and-reason formula, the counterargument clause, scope control, and the pressure test that separates a thesis from a table of contents.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
The Last Seventy-Two Hours: An Exam-Week Field Guide A practical exam-week system: how to map the syllabus, forecast questions, use past papers properly, run active recall, and build a seventy-two-hour plan that does not depend on an all-nighter or a highlight pen.
The Style Desk STYLE-101 -
The Black Death and the Fourteenth-Century Crisis A source-critical guide to the Black Death: the arrival and spread of plague in Europe, the mortality debate, the pogroms and flagellants, the labour shortage, and the historiographical argument over whether the pandemic ended feudalism.
Annals & History HIST-104 -
The Cell Cycle: Checkpoints, Mitosis, and the Logic of Division A mechanistic guide to the cell cycle: interphase and M phase, cyclin–CDK control, the G1/S, G2/M, and spindle checkpoints, the stages of mitosis, and the routes from checkpoint failure to cancer.
Science & Industry BIO-210
Topic Index
Tags
- Indigenous Studies 8
- Academic Writing 5
- Early Modern 5
- Milton 5
- Paradise Lost 5
- Shakespeare 5
- Sonnets 5
- Epic Poetry 3
- Gender 3
- Revision 3
- Allegory 2
- Archives 2
- Arthurian Romance 2
- Close Reading 2
- Colonialism 2
- Diction 2
- Essay Craft 2
- Exam Prep 2
- Free Will 2
- Marriage 2
- Middle English 2
- Research 2
- Sovereignty 2
- Thesis Construction 2
- Time 2
- Absence 1
- Active Recall 1
- Alberta 1
- Alliterative Verse 1
- Analysis 1
- Anglo-Saxon 1
- Angry Inuk 1
- Baronial Revolt 1
- Belonging 1
- Betrayal 1
- Biblical Poetry 1
- Biochemistry 1
- Black Death 1
- Blood Quantum 1
- Buffalo Treaty 1
- Canadian History 1
- Cancer Biology 1
- Canterbury Tales 1
- Cell Biology 1
- Cell Cycle 1
- Chaucer 1
- Chivalry 1
- Citation 1
- Constancy 1
- Constitutional History 1
- Dark Lady 1
- Data Sovereignty 1
- Desire 1
- Eden 1
- Elizabethan 1
- Environmental Justice 1
- Envy 1
- Enzyme Kinetics 1
- Epic Romance 1
- Epistemology 1
- Essay Proposal 1
- Exam Strategy 1
- Fair Youth 1
- Formatting 1
- Fourteenth Century 1
- Heroic Verse 1
- Identity 1
- Indian Act 1
- Indian Agents 1
- Indigenous Feminisms 1
- Indigenous Knowledge 1
- Inuit 1
- King John 1
- Lab Technique 1
- Legal History 1
- Literary Terms 1
- Literature 1
- Love 1
- Medieval England 1
- Medieval Europe 1
- Medieval Literature 1
- Michaelis-Menten 1
- Mitosis 1
- MLA 1
- Molecular Biology 1
- Museums 1
- Old English 1
- Oral History 1
- Pass System 1
- Performance 1
- Plague 1
- Planning 1
- Poetry 1
- Prairie History 1
- Pretendian 1
- Prosody 1
- Quantitative Biology 1
- Repatriation 1
- Representation 1
- Rhetoric 1
- Rival Poet 1
- Satan 1
- Science 1
- Seal Hunt 1
- Social History 1
- Spenserian Stanza 1
- Status 1
- Style 1
- Temptation 1
- The Fall 1
- Theology 1
- Time Management 1
- Treaty 7 1
- Treaty Rights 1
- Verbs 1
- Versification 1
- Vocabulary 1
- Wellbeing 1
- Wild West Shows 1
Seminar File
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History Desk
Annals & History
Chronologies, competing interpretations, and cause-and-effect matrices for history, politics, classics, sociology, and Indigenous studies. Dates matter; so does the historiography.
Science Desk
Science & Industry
Lecture synthesis for biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and economics — with equations, process diagrams, and the edge cases examiners love.
Style Desk
The Style Desk
The Herald’s practical desk: thesis construction, citation mechanics, revision systems, and the unglamorous work of turning good notes into a good essay.