Katrina Olynyk’s final project, “The Importance of the Left and Right Brain,” draws on the (now mostly debunked) theory of the double brain, long used in literary scholarship as a lens for analyzing Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Olynyk extends the work of scholars such as Anne Stiles, who have argued that the dual personalities might be understood as a “double brain,” to consider the importance of the left-brained vs. right-brained theory as a characteristic device of the science fiction genre.

Olynyk’s painting uses color, symbolic imagery, selective text, and lines to illustrate the two-brain theory. The painting refers back to both Jekyll and Hyde and Oryx and Crake. One of the most fascinating elements of the painting is the repetition of five key words from Oryx and Crake in both halves of the brain (in different arrangements). These words, which Snowman collected and which — as Olynyk points out — represent the various branches of the humanities, come to represent the power of language to connect analysis and creativity, even as they represent Snowman’s own role as mediator between Crake’s world and Oryx’s.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.