2009 Freshman Essay Contest Winners: Kyle Matthews, Jonathan Senin, and Thomas Allison
The CGS Rhetoric Division is pleased to announce the prize-winners from the 2009 Freshman Essay Contest. This annual competition honors excellent writing and research by first-year students. This year, essay nominations were solicited from faculty from all divisions at CGS and the committee received almost thirty essays in total.
From this pool of essays on a wide variety of subjects, the prize committee picked out three that members felt were deserving of special recognition: one First Prize and two Runners-Up.
First Prize goes to William “Kyle” Mathews of Team F for “The Surge of Suburbia and its Legacy,” a detailed analysis of the demographic and cultural forces which contributed to the explosive growth of suburbs in the 1950s. In documenting how the rush to embrace a pastoral way of life brought about the end of rural America, Kyle shows a keen awareness of the historical irony.
Runner-Up Prize goes to Jonathan Senin for “21st Century Kid: Confusions and Illusions Surrounding China’s Youth,” a critique of Sue Williams’ recent documentary about the post-Tiananmen generation. Jonathan brings Marxist theory to bear on Williams’ “Young and Restless in China” in an effort to explain why Williams’ effort to let her subjects tell their own stories winds up inscribing them within a Western paradigm of economic progress.
Runner-Up Prize goes to Thomas Allison’s “The Falling Man: An Analysis of Media Ethics,” a thoughtful analysis of the ethics of photojournalism. Using Richard Drew’s iconic photograph of one of the jumpers from the World Trade Center as his point of reference, Thomas takes note not only of the contributions which this photograph made to public discourse and grieving, but also a variety of difficult and complicated ethical dilemmas that both preceded and followed the image’s publication.
The committee members for 2009 were Alan Taylor, Chuck Henebry, and Rick Cole.