Winners from the Class of 2015

Christina Errico, “The Rite of Spring: Segue to Modernism”
In this essay on Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Errico synthesizes an array of perspectives on the groundbreaking modernist ballet. Placing the ballet in a twentieth Parisian cultural context, she analyzes how primitivism informed the creation of and audience response to The Rite of Spring. She argues that while audiences initially responded negatively to the “treatment of the female body” and the “challenge to conventional beauty,” they ultimately redefined their standards of “modernist beauty in dance and music.”

Laura Hart, “The Meaning of Metaphor”
Hart constructs a strong voice in this ambitious essay that grapples philosophically with Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. Weaving an abstract and theoretical argument about the meaning of metaphor, Hart teases out the implications of Nietzsche’s claims that language is “a quivering truth buried under countless faltering metaphors.” She then argues that real truth resides in humanity’s creation of a shared language that enables us to “embrace the beauty of that communal untruth.”