Culture and Civilization

Culture and Civilization According to anthropologists of 19th century, Culture is earlier and Civilization is later. Everything created by man is culture, civilization is an advanced state of cultural development. Culture developed in three stages: Savagery >> Barbarianism >> Civilization (Acts of cruel and violent behavior) (Extremely cruel and unpleasant behavior) Alfred Louis Kroeber said Culture is super organic, he has given three forms of culture namely Social Culture (Status and Role), Value Culture (Philosophy, Morals) and Reality Culture (Science and Technology, etc).According to Kroeber civilization is a part of reality culture. Robert Redfield said culture is a totality of traditions and civilization is a totality of great and little traditions. Culture: The collective appearance of customs, faith, art, language, way of thinking and way of living of a particular group of people. And civilization is the developed part, when different cultures meet. Difference between Cultur e and Civilization, Sociologists View Culture| Civilization| Culture includes religion, art philosophy, literature, music, dance, etc. hich brings satisfaction and pleasure to many. It is the expression of final aspects of life. | Civilization includes all those things by means of which some other objective is attained. Type writers, motors, etc. come under this category. Civilization consists of technology or the authority of man over natural phenomenon as well as social technology which control man's behavior. | Culture is what we are. | Civilization is what we have. | Culture has no standard of measurement because it is an end in itself. Civilization has a precised standard of measurement. The universal standard of civilization is utility because civilization is a means. | Culture cannot be said to be advancing. It cannot be asserted that the art, literature, thoughts are ideals of today’s and superior to those of past. | Civilization is always advancing. The various const ituents of civilizations namely machines, means of transportation, communication, etc. are constantly progressive. | Culture is internal and an end. It is related to internal thoughts, feelings, ideals, values, etc.It is like the soul of an individual. | Civilization is external and a means. It is the means for the expression and manifestation of the grandness, it is like the body of an individual. | Difference between Culture and Civilization, Anthropologists View Culture| Civilization| All societies have culture. | Only a few societies have civilization. | Culture is earlier. | Civilization is later. | Culture is pre-condition for civilization to develop. | Civilization represents a stage of cultural advancement. | Culture is super organic. Civilization is a part of reality culture. | Culture is a totality of traditions. | Civilization is a totality of great and little traditions. | Culture Vs Civilization Firstly, civilization in theory is bigger than culture in which an entire c ivilization can encompass one single unit of culture. Civilization is a bigger unit than culture because it is a complex aggregate of the society that dwells within a certain area, along with its forms of government, norms, and even culture. Thus, culture is just a spec or a portion of an entire civilization.For example, the Egyptian civilization has an Egyptian culture in the same way as the Greek civilization has their Greek culture. A culture ordinarily exists within a civilization. In this regard, each civilization can contain not only one but several cultures. Comparing culture and civilization is like showing the difference between language and the country to which it is being used. Culture can exist in itself whereas civilization cannot be called a civilization if it does not possess a certain culture.It’s just like asking how a nation can exist on its own without the use of a medium of communication. Hence, a civilization will become empty if it does not have its cult ure, no matter how little it is. Culture can be something that is tangible and it can also be something that isn’t. Culture can become a physical material if it is a product of the beliefs, customs and practices of a certain people with a definite culture. But a civilization is something that can be seen as a whole and it is more or less tangible although its basic components, like culture, can be mmaterial. Culture can be learned and in the same manner it can also be transmitted from one generation to the next. Using a medium of speech and communication, it is possible for a certain type of culture to evolve and even be inherited by another group of people. On the other hand, civilization cannot be transferred by mere language alone. Because of its complexity and magnitude, you need to transfer all of the raw aggregates of a civilization for it to be entirely passed on. It just grows, degrades and may eventually end if all its subunits will fail.Summary: 1. Culture is by def inition smaller than a civilization. 2. Culture can grow and exist without residing in a formal civilization whereas a civilization will never grow and exist without the element of culture. 3. Culture can be tangible or intangible whereas civilization is something that is more tangible because it is what you see as a whole 4. Culture can be transmitted through symbols in the form of language whereas an entire civilization cannot be transmitted by mere language alone.

Leadership/Drum Major Paper Essay

I think I would make a great drum major because I believe people take me as a leader and respect and listen to what have to I say. Though I usually am the leader I also am a good listener. When people have problems or have ideas to make the show better I will listen to whatever has to be said. To me being a drum major would be a great accomplishment and an awesome chance to help out our marching band. I have found from being in the marching band that each member wants respect. I intend to give respect first and in doing that I believe I will receive it from my piers allowing this whole experience to be a perfect one. I understand that with this job comes great responsibility, and I am definitely ready for it! Being a member of the Woodland High School marching band for two years, I now have an idea of how to make band more attractive to everyone. Making the time spent in band class and at after school practices most effective is a major prerogative of mine. I would like to make it our number one goal to get every band member to learn, and memorize their music. This will allow the show to be ready as early as possible so it gives ample time to perfect formations, add character to the show, and make it our own. By doing this I know our scores will be significantly higher than last years. Most importantly each member will understand that hard work does pays off. I love music. I never hesitate to sign up for any extracurricular band I can get into. I love being involved, I love growing as a musician. I also love marching band- it’s so challenging and so draining, but it’s such an amazing experience. I have a zealous enthusiasm for music and marching band that propels me forward, and can apply this to my role as drum major. Energetic leaders are much better than halfhearted ones. * My philosophy on leadership is simple: lead by example, always help, and never quit. When I was a freshman, I looked up to the marching band veterans because they were already excellent at something that I was struggling to master. Having role models is inspiring; it gives people something positive to emulate. Additionally, I always offer to help- whether that means * Moving and unloading equipment, or coming in early to work with a marcher who needs a little extra assistance. Furthermore, quitting is out of the question for me. Using excuses instead of giving your best, giving up on something (or someone), or abandoning your responsibilities are things I absolutely do not believe in. Promoting excellence in others starts with promoting it in you. * I am unique among the other applicants seeking this position because of the qualities I have listed above. My musical experience, my determination, my diligence, and my passion for music make me singular among the many.

Workplace report (2000 Words) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Workplace report (2000 Words) - Essay Example Strategic Leadership, innovation and commitment to the stakeholders of the concern are some of the right keywords that can be effectively related to Wal-Mart operating in the international retail paradigm (â€Å"Our Storey†). The Organisational Structure of the Company shown in the Appendix reflects a Hybrid Form where specialised units are created by the concern that focuses on addressing the needs of specific departments and also other international regions. Relating to the departments specific heads are deputed that take care of the legal, merchandising, sourcing, and electronic and web commerce and also financial and corporate affairs of Wal-Mart. Again pertaining to the regions effective decentralisation is practiced by creating heads and deputy heads for international regions relating to Asia and European countries (â€Å"Walmart†). Rational model related to decision-making functions rests mainly along four steps that can be underlined as follows. The Rational Model moves along in firstly Identifying a Potential Problem; secondly the model endeavours to Generate Effective Solutions to the Problem identified, thirdly and fourthly the model probes to Select a Solution from the List of Generated Ones and tends to Evaluate its Feasibility in meeting desired ends respectively. Thus the Rational Model is based on a series of Logical Steps that aims at finding an Optimal Solution to the Problem identified. Rational Model is also based on some assumptions reflecting that the manager takes decisions in a well informed environment (Kreitner and Knicki 337). The Normative Model as rendered by Herbert Simon contrary to the Rational Model tends to operate based on an environment of uncertainty. This model being non-rational in nature tends to follow assumptions wherein the manager is not held to work in an informative work environment such that decisions can be taken in an

The Tradition of Judaism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Tradition of Judaism - Essay Example The family has a meal featuring traditional food and wine. The purpose of the ritual to remind people that when God created the Universe in seven days, He devoted a whole day to resting and so should the Jews. I learned that people who adhere to the religious tradition of Judaism tend to perform this ritual on a weekly basis, namely every sun set of Friday and up to the sun set of Saturday. As I have previously noticed, the wife is responsible for lighting up the candles and saying the blessing. Then, the father of the family says all the required prayers and the people are able to have dinner and celebrate Shabbat. It is beyond any doubt that this particular ritual preaches the need of the people to adhere to the religious tradition of Judaism and devote an entire day of the week free from daily routine and contemplating about what really matters in life, namely their relationship with God. There are different methods of praying that are used during this ritual: the words of prayers are pronounced first by the woman and then all the prayers are chanted by a man. In addition to that, people are required to direct their mind to various religious matters so that it would not stray away from the ritual. Speaking of the body placement during the Shabbat, it is a tradition to remain standing while all the major prayers and blessings are performed which shows that the people feel respect for the moment. What is really interesting is that there is a certain function reserved for women during Shabbat: they not only light up the candles but also prepare the meals for the dinner, which puts a lot of responsibility on them.

Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Being a Major Movie Review

Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Being a Major Departure from Shakespeare's Original Work - Movie Review Example Innovation is presented for a more marketable modern audience while retaining the old Shakespearean themes, such as love versus hate, youth versus age, and destiny versus determination. Despite its tremendous success, critiques ranged from admiration to disgust (â€Å"Romeo and Juliet: Of its Time and of Ours†). Nevertheless, Luhrmann has ultimately given the audience what is possibly the most dedicated of all film adaptations in upholding the persona of both Shakespeare and his play. As Shakespeare probably projected, all succeeding adaptations would be free-spirited and packed with the younger generation’s impulsivity; a challenge to power; and a rebellion. The boldness and extremism of Luhrmann's wild editing, spectacular art direction and humor rebel against authority and sensibility and likewise matched the bravado of the lead characters, Romeo and Juliet (â€Å"Romeo and Juliet: Of its Time and of Ours†). ... The director shot scenes at great angles and always-moving camera effects and used unusual shooting memos such as "macro slam zoom" and "distorted out-of-focus close-up," to provide a more or less frenzied energy. Rap, modern hip-hop, rock, electric guitar, Western sound themes and Latin chants throughout the movie give a characteristically teenaged attitude (â€Å"Romeo and Juliet: Of its Time and of Ours†). Shakespeare, according to Luhrmann, used every musical variety and poetry to satisfy the much diversified viewers in the Globe Theater. In the 1996 adaptation, Luhrmann echoes this in his film, informs the public against the foolishness of meaningless family disputes and cleverly revises it for the 20th century, however, preserving its crucial ethical fight as it relates easily to the young audiences (Gibbs). â€Å"Poetry is the most effective means of instruction, as poetry can â€Å"teach†¦not only by delivering forth his very being, his causes and effects, but a lso by making known his enemy, vice, which must be destroyed, and his cumbersome servant, passion, which much be mastered† (Duncan-Jones 220). Although much of the Shakespearean poetry is lost in Luhrmann’s film due to cuts, the plot remains unharmed. This dismayed several critics but quite a few intellectuals sided with Luhrmann, revealing that Shakespeare’s language and script are intended to be used as a starting ground for his stories, rather than just being a stationary writing (â€Å"Romeo and Juliet: Of its Time and of Ours†). Dissimilarities are aplenty between Shakespeare’s original and the outrageously lively Luhrmann version. Whereas in the play, sex is an acceptable expression of love, particularly for the young;

Environmental Legislation Report Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Environmental Legislation Report - Coursework Example The various environmental laws and legislations include several restrictions that the site must follow in order to operate in a hassle free manner. Since the power station between the estate and the landfill site served as an intermediary, the problems were comparatively lesser. The increase in the number of industries led to litter, pest and pollution. When considering this situation, the board of directors of Ambrosia must ensure that they follow the environmental laws and legislations. They must also modify their operations to avoid problems in the future. Environmental laws are different in each country and the country expects the industries to abide by the legislations. The environmental laws of a country aim at protecting the environment from hazardous chemicals. The environmental laws in U.K and the European countries are more severe when compared to the other countries. The environmental laws came into existence only when the protection and preservation of environment was considered as the major issue. These environmental laws include legislations for pollution, protection of wildlife, litter and other environment related issues. One of the major environment laws is the one that deals with the wastage of a factory. Factories fail to dispose their wastes in a proper manner. Instead they tend to leave it unattended where they get into river fields and water reservoirs. The law was passes in the year 1972 and it was named, Poisonous wastes Act. When considering this landfill site, air pollution is the major problem and most of the Claimants complain about the dust that is exerted from the landfill site. The landfill site is surrounded by several industries which include silver factory, gas works and liquorice industries. All these industries emit certain amount of gases and dust which create a problem to the residents. This report aims at helping the authorities of the Ambrosia

Geographical Relocation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Geographical Relocation - Essay Example Th following ppr is rport, which covrs th issus rltd with th xptrition procss of th workr from London, UK to Mdrid, Spin. Hrin, I im to nlys th cs of such rloction, whn mking nlysis of th country of rloction (th conomy of Spin, tx nd hlthcr systm, insurnc nd politics), providing ovrviw of living nd working conditions nd invstigting th wys tht my fcilitt th rloction nd dpttion procss of workr who xptrit from London to Mdrid. Whn providing th rport I will mk n ccnt on th policy of our orgniztion tht clrly idntifis its gols in ch stg nd thus will rsult in bttr intrntionl prformnc of xptrits. Trining should nvr focus primrily on bnfiting th individul xptrit. Rthr, it should cntr on mting th orgniztion's gols. It should try to mtch th xptrit's knowldg, skills nd comptncis with thos rquird for ch prticulr ssignmnt. Lik most othr trining, its succss should b msurd by how much th orgniztion bnfits, not how much th individul might grow or lrn. xptrition, th prctic of snding hom country mngrs to othr country loctions, is populr, lbit xpnsiv, prctic mong intrntionl corportions (O'Boyl, 1989). xptrits, fmilir with th cultur, lngug, nd customs of hdqurtrs, cn fcilitt th trnsfr of corport cultur btwn hdqurtrs nd th subsidiry, nhncing communiction nd coordintion (Boycigillr, 1991; Rosnzwig, 1994). Thy cn lso provid tchnicl nd mngril skills tht my not b immditly vilbl t th locl lvl. Somtims usd to s tmporry stffing nds, xptrits r lso vlubl s mchnisms for corport control in vitl mrkts. Finlly, xptrits my b utilizd to nforc nd protct th compny's intrsts. xptrition is not without costs. In ddition to th obvious finncil rsourcs ncssry to trnsfr mngr nd his or hr fmily physiclly to Spin, thr r hiddn costs s wll. ssignmnts oftn my not b compltd, ncssitting th rplcmnt of th xptrit (Bird & Dunbr, 1991; Blck, 1988). In ordr for th rloction procss to b ffctiv, th xptrit tht is bing snt to Mdrid, should djust to locl customs nd try to incrs his job stisfction nd ffctivnss. Th conflict t workplc tht might ppr round diffrncs on norms nd cultur my frustrt th workr nd cus th convrs ffct. Morovr, th workr might wnt to rturn to his formr work in hom country nd in such wy cus th unncssry xpnss for th compny tht invstd mony in his xptrition. nothr hiddn cost ssocitd with xptrition is th inbility to rtin th xcutiv upon rturn to th hom country. Mny xptrits do not hv gurntd positions t hom onc thy succssfully complt thir ssignmnts. Th xcutiv oftn rturns to find himslf/hrslf on th priphry of th orgniztionl infrstructur. For tht rson, bfor dprtur, xptrit should b rssurd tht his workplc in hom compny will b kpt upon th nd of his xptrition. xptrit pr-dprtur knowldg cn contribut to both work nd gnrl djustmnt ovrss (Blck, 1988), whn such knowldg includs informtion bout th trnsition. This cn rduc mny of th uncrtintis ssocitd with th nw rol. Work djustmnt includs th xtnt to which th xptrit is bl to djust to th lvl of rsponsibility ssocitd with th ssignmnt s wll s to his/hr py schdul. djustmnt to th gnrl nvironmnt rfrs to th individul's bility to djust to non-work fctors such s housing conditions, shopping, nd hlth fcilitis. Intrstingly, prvious intrntionl xprinc ws rptdly found not to prdict xptrit nd spousl gnrl djustmnt during xptrition (Blck & Grgrsn, 1991b). This suggsts tht mny spcts of ovrss xprinc r not gnrlizbl from on ssignmnt loction to nothr or tht xptrit mngrs r not bl to trnsfr thir lrnings concrning djustmnt in on country to nothr.

Australian Economy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 2

Australian Economy - Essay Example The unstable nature of growth however affected the general economic climate in a way. For instance, because the economic wave stability was generally unpredictable, investors could hardly predict what the future held for them in investing in Australia. Specific Governmental and Reserve Bank Economic Policies that were introduced in the last 2 years - Budget The budget has the tendency of deciding the future economic hopes of a country because it serves as the blueprint economic policy implementer. For this reason, the government of Australia took certain important steps by way of their budget that were directed towards ensuring economic growth. One of such policies through the budget was the fact that the government through the budget encouraged the establishment and opening of new small and medium scale businesses by the introduction of Small Business and General Business Tax Break, which was â€Å"expanded to allow a bonus deduction of 50 per cent to small businesses with a turnov er of less than $2 million that acquire an eligible asset between 13 December 2008 and 31 December 2009 and install it ready for use by 31 December 2010† (Australian Regulatory Compliance Review, 2010). Again, the budget was highly focused on human resource and labor in general as the pension age was slightly increased to 67 years. This was aimed at retaining and cheering experience in the labor front and ensuring that the human resource base to man Australia’s economic drive was not depleted. Finally, the government saw a lot of hope in the future of the economy of Australia, planted in the need for the country to be self sufficient as far as production is concerned. For this reason, â€Å"The Federal Government used the Budget to launch a new paper on innovation that powered ideas paper canvasses proposed improvements and incremental changes to the existing National Innovation System† (Australian Parliamentary Library, 2010). - Interest Rates The last two years were years that the world as a global entity was resurrecting from previous years of economic shock, meltdown, crisis or however it may e described to depict an undeserving situation. For this reason, it was very important that the policies by the reserve bank and government would be centered on the people and empowering them to be investment oriented. For this reason, the periods of 2009 and 2010 was one season that the reserve bank maintained most of its lending and interest rates. The reserve bank with consultation with the government also ensured that the interest rate was generally low and affordable for borrowers. In some cases, there were even downward cuts on the interest rates and reasons for these decisions included the need to boost the demand for credit to undertake investment projects as demand for credit rose just 0.6% (Rate Detective, 2011). Again, there was the need to conform to global trend such as China cutting its official interest rate by 1.08% (Rate Detective, 2011). Such a move was necessary to ensure that investors did not opt for countries with lower interest rates but for Australia. - Export Promotion Policy In times of economic recovery, exports have been identified to be more profitable to countries than imports (Koduah, 2008). This is because exports attract a lot of revenue in the form of taxation. Knowing this, the Australian government over the last two years was not blind on putting measures

Research critique of a quantitative article Essay

Research critique of a quantitative article - Essay Example 3. List the researcher's suggestions for further studies. As noted on page 131, the researchers advise repeating the same study while controlling for surgical procedure and the use of nitrous oxide, to determine any causative attributes. They also suggest that a future investigation might compare scopolamine as a single agent, as well as concluding on page 132 that future studies could also consider other antiemetics affecting alternative receptor pathways. 4. Indicate if the findings are clinically significant. The majority of findings in the study are clinically significant, as indicated on page 130, Tables 1-3, as well as Figures 1-3. These significant findings include the overall incidence of nausea within 24 hours of surgery, the initial PACU antiemetic treatment, the second PACU nausea treatment, the mean time to first request for nausea treatment, the time to the first nausea event, as well as the time to the first emetic event. The incidence of emesis did not achieve statistical significance, nor was any significant difference noted in the demographic variables, patch placement times, or the occurrence of side effects. 5. Identify the implications of the findings for nursing. ... Particularly, the use of a transdermal methodology will require nurses to interact with patients regarding proper use, symptomology, and postoperative procedure. 6. Identify the researcher's generalization of the findings. The generalization of the findings is found on page 127, in the abstract. It summarizes the article and offers a condensed recommendation. 7. Evaluate the sample. a. Sampling criteria. The sample criteria were straightforward and appropriate to the purpose of the study. By establishing an ASA I or II in patients 18 years or older, as well as excluding those with potentially mitigating conditions (p. 128), the researchers avoided skewing the results. b. Sample size. The sample size was adequate to the task of initial investigation, but too small to draw sweeping conclusions. The authors attenuated the effect of a relatively small sample size by performing a power analysis as discussed on page 129, and wisely allowed for attrition. c. Characteristics of sample. The sample group was diverse in terms of gender, race, and risk factors present, but all participants fell within the primary criteria of having three or more high risk factors for PONV. d. Sample mortality. There were no anaphylactic incidents within either sample group. There was attrition of four subjects as noted on page 129, one for accidental removal of the transdermal patch, one for failure to properly log responses during the data collection period, and two for intentional removal of the TD patches. e. Method used to obtain the sample. As noted on page 128, the sample was obtained after approval from the institutional review board and focused on high-risk patients scheduled to undergo general anesthesia of longer than one hour. Once

Community colleges is the best choice for students Essay

Community colleges is the best choice for students - Essay Example In addition, they provide students with precise sets of skills that facilitate specialization immediately after one leaves college; their locations also ensure the students can easily access them without leaving home. (Crawford and Jervis, 2011). For many international students, community colleges do not carry the prestige that universities do and this tends to discourage them from applying to them. In many countries outside the United States, degrees from community colleges are not recognized since they are considered to be of lesser value than those from universities. One would agree with this assumption because; â€Å"degrees from community colleges tend to be quite limited, and this may create a problem for the holder if he or she wants to diversify into another profession† (Kisch, 2012). University degrees, on the other hand, are quite flexible, meaning that the holder may choose to leave the field they are working within and move to another without any problems. However, international students who are interested in going to community colleges should get to know the educational requirements of the companies, within their countries, before applying. While some companies do not hire community college graduates, there are others, which may be interested in what they have to offer, and it is, therefore, the responsibility of international students to find out whether the degrees they earn will be of any use to them before applying. As aforementioned, community colleges are seen as inferior to universities especially since their graduates are not always accepted by some employers. A contributing factor for this can be traced back to the erosion of the education quality in high school. Retrospectively, high school graduates were equipped induction into the job market. The high school education system of the United States has become so much eroded that it has now become necessary for students to go to college in order to attain jobs. In view of

Business Survival in a Recession Essay Example for Free

Business Survival in a Recession Essay

Length of stay in pediatric intensive care unit

Length of stay in pediatric intensive care unit 1.1 Scope of Review The following review of the past work done in the area of intensive care unit (ICU) length of stay is divided into two parts. The first part covers the studies done on the PICU length of stay while the second part delves into the literature of ICU length of stay. 1.2 Studies of Length of Stay in Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Ruttimann Pollack (1996) investigated the relationship of length of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) stay to severity of illness and other potentially relevant factors available within the first 24 hours after admission. A median and geometric mean length of PICU stay of 2.0 and 1.9 days respectively, and the upper 95th percentile at 12 days were found. To prevent undue influence of outliers, all patients staying longer than 12 days were considered long-stay patients (4.1% of the total sample) and were excluded from the model-building process. In the LOS prediction model, variables found to be significantly associated (p Table 1.1: Log-logistic regression model for length of stay Variable Regression coefficient SE Adjusted LOS ratio 95% CI PRISM score* 0.6386 0.0407 5 1.28 1.25-1.33 10 1.63 1.54-1.74 15 1.80 1.67-1.94 20 1.98 1.82-2.16 25 1.62 1.53-1.72 30 1.29 1.25-1.33 40 1.38 1.33-1.44 50 1.06 1.06-1.07 Primary diagnoses CNS diseases -0.1682 0.0267 0.85 0.80-0.89 Neoplastic diseases 0.2324 0.0579 1.26 1.13-1.41 Drug overdoses -0.1758 0.0383 0.84 0.77-0.90 Inguinal hernia -0.3270 0.1344 0.72 0.55-0.94 Asthma -0.1135 0.0527 0.89 0.80-0.99 Pneumonia 0.2350 0.0475 1.26 1.15-1.39 CNS infections 0.4966 0.0555 1.64 1.47-1.83 Respiratory diseases ÃÆ'- PRISMà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   0.1257 0.0579 1.67 1.49-1.87 Head trauma ÃÆ'- PRISMà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   0.1710 0.0611 1.73 1.53-1.94 Diabetes ÃÆ'- PRISMà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   -0.3332 0.0666 1.23 1.08-1.40 Admission conditions Postoperative 0.1267 0.0243 1.14 1.08-1.19 Inpatient 0.2358 0.0271 1.27 1.20-1.33 Previous ICU admission 0.1562 0.0521 1.17 1.06-1.29 Therapy Mechanical ventilation 0.4900 0.0258 1.63 1.55-1.72 Intercept -0.0191 0.0278 Scale 2.5602 0.0295 Log partial likelihood = -5487.2; global chi-square value = 1601.9; df = 15; p CI, Confidence interval; CNS, Central nervous system *LOS ratios computed relative to PRISM score = 0. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚  LOS ratios computed for an interaction with PRISM score = 6.42 (sample average). Source: Modified from Ruttimann Pollack (1996). In the same study, Ruttimann Pollack (1996) noted the ratio of observed to predicted LOS varied among PICUs from 0.83 to 1.25. The PICU factors associated (p Table 1.2: Effect of PICU characteristics on length of stay Variable Regression coefficient SE Adjusted LOS ratio 95% CI p* Intensivist -0.1208 0.0189 0.89 0.85-0.92 0.0001 Coordination -0.0513 0.0190 0.95 0.92-0.99 0.0071 Residents -0.0586 0.0200 0.94 0.91-0.98 0.0033 ln (PICU/hospital beds) à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   0.0459 0.0170 1.03 1.01-1.06 0.0068 CI, Confidence interval. *2 ÃÆ'- ln (likelihood ratio) test. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚  LOS ratio and 95% CIs computed for and increase of PICU/hospital bed ratio by a factor of 2. Source: Modified from Ruttimann Pollack (1996). Development of a new LOS prediction model was necessary due to the availability of a newly updated pediatric severity-of-illness assessment system, PRISM III-24 (Pediatric risk of mortality, version III, 24-hour assessment). Ruttimann et al. (1998) have then fitted a generalized linear regression model (inverse Gaussian) to the observed LOS data with the log link function. In the new LOS prediction model, variables found to be significantly associated (p Table 1.3: Generalized linear regression model (inverse Gaussian) for length of stay (n = 9558) Variable Length of stay ratio 95% Confidence interval p Valueà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   PRISM III-24 à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¡ à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¡ 0.0001 (PRISM III-24) °Ã‚ °2 à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¡ à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¡ 0.0001 Primary diagnoses CNS infections 1.41 1.28-1.56 0.0001 Neoplastic diseases 1.22 1.13-1.31 0.0001 Asthma 0.91 0.85-0.96 0.0045 Pneumonia 1.50 1.40-1.61 0.0001 Drug overdoses 0.74 0.70-0.79 0.0001 CV nonoperative 1.22 1.14-1.32 0.0001 CV operative 0.89 0.83-0.95 0.0006 Diabetes 0.74 0.67-0.81 0.0001 Admission specifications Postoperative 0.92 0.88-0.96 0.0004 Inpatient 1.17 1.13-1.22 0.0001 Previous ICU admission 1.26 1.15-1.38 0.0001 Therapy Mechanical ventilation 1.68 1.60-1.77 0.0001 Model intercept ( ± SEM) = 1.423  ± 0.021 days CNS, Central nervous system; CV, cardiovascular system.  °Effect of the variable after adjusting for the effects of all other variables in the model. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚  Log-likelihood ratio compared with the chi-squared distribution with 1 degree of freedom. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¡See Fig.2 (pg 82, Ruttimann et al. 1998). Model fit: Scaled deviance = 9558 (chi-square with 9543 degrees of freedom, p >0.45). Observed versus predicted length of stay, mean ( ± SEM) in: training sample (n = 9,558): 2.351( ± 0.032) versus 2.360( ± 0.011), p >0.64; test sample (n = 1,100): 2.461( ± 0.069) versus 2.419( ± 0.035), p >0.49. Source: Modified from Ruttimann et al. (1998). Ruttimann et al. (1998) have also assessed the PICU efficiency with the new LOS prediction model and validation of the assessment by an efficiency measure based on daily use of intensive care unit-specific therapies (based on the criterion whether on each day a patient used at least one therapy that is best delivered in the ICU). PICU efficiency was computed as either the ratio of the observed efficient days or the days accounted for by the predictor variables to the total care days, and the agreement was assessed by Spearmans rank correlation analysis. PICU efficiency comparisons for both the predictor-based and therapy-based methods are nearly equivalent. Ruttimann and colleagues (1998) acknowledged the advantage of predictor-based efficiency as it can be computed from admission day data only. It was of researchers utmost interest to study the extended LOSs as well. Long-stay patients (LSPs) in the PICU were later being examined by Marcin et al. (2001). As explained previously, LSPs were defined as patients having a length of stay greater than 95th percentile (>12 days). In the study, the clinical profiles and relative resource use of LSPs were determined and a prediction model was developed to identify LSPs for early quality and cost saving interventions. To create a predictive algorithm, logistic regression analysis was used to determine clinical characteristics, available within the first 24 hours after admission that were associated with LSPs. Marcin and colleagues (2001) noted that, Long-stay patients in the PICU consume a disproportionate amount of health care resources and have higher mortality rates than short-stay patients. Multivariate analysis of the study identified predictive factors of long-stay as: age Table 1.4: Significant independent variables from the logistic regression analysis Variable Odds Ratio 95% CI p Value Age 1.77 1.42-2.20 Previous ICU admission 2.18 1.52-3.11 Emergency admission 1.67 1.28-2.19 CPR before admission 0.59 0.37-0.96 0.032 Admitted from another ICU or IMU 2.28 1.13-4.58 0.020 Chronic TPN 3.09 1.39-6.92 0.006 Chronic tracheostomy 2.23 1.41-3.52 0.001 Pneumonia 2.73 2.03-3.68 Other respiratory disorder 2.33 1.64-3.32 Acquired cardiac disease 3.07 2.01-4.67 Having never been discharged from hospital 2.27 1.12-4.59 0.020 Ventilator 4.59 3.60-5.86 Intracranial catheter 2.78 1.76-4.41 PRISM III-24 score between 10 and 33 2.99 2.35-3.81 CI, confidence interval; ICU, intensive care unit; CPR, Cardiopulmonary resuscitation; IMU, intermediate care unit; TPN, total parenteral nutrition; PRISM, Pediatric Risk of Mortality. Source: Modified from Marcin et al. (2001). In a case study carried out by Kapadia et al. (2000) in a childrens hospital in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, discrete time Markov processes was applied to study the course of stay in a PICU as the patients move back and forth between the severity of illness states. To study the dynamics of the movement of patients in PICU, PRISM scores representing the intensity of illness were utilized. The study modeled the flow of patients as a discrete time Markov process. Rather than describing by a string of services and scores, the course of treatment and length of stay in the intensive care was described as a sequence of Low, Medium and High severity of illness. The resulted Markovian model appeared to fit the data well. The models were expected to provide information of how the current severity of illness is likely to change over time and how long the child is likely to stay in the PICU. The use of a Markovian approach allowed estimation of the time spent by patients in different se verity of illness states during the PICU stay, for the purposes of quality monitoring and resource allocation. 1.2 Studies of Length of Stay in Intensive Care Unit According to Gruenberg et al. (2006), institutional, medical, social and psychological factors collectively affect the length of stay (LOS) in the intensive care unit (ICU). Institutional factors include geographic location, resources, organizational structure, and leadership. In term of medical factors, specific medical interventions, specific clinical laboratory values, and the type and severity of patients illnesses were found to be related to length of stay in the ICU. Social factors such as lack of quality communication between patients families and physicians or other healthcare personnel, and conflict between patients families and hospital staff have resulted in prolonged ICU and hospital stays. Anxiety and depression experienced by a patients family members are psychological characteristics that contribute to inadequate decision making and extended ICU stays. In order to examine the impact of prolonged stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) on resource utilization, Arabi and colleagues (2002) carried out a prospective study to determine the influence of certain factors as possible predictors of prolonged stay in an adult medical/surgical ICU in a tertiary-care teaching hospital. Prolonged ICU stay was defined as length of stay >14 days. The data analyzed included the demographics and the clinical profile of each new admission. Besides, two means were used to assess severity of illness: the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score (Knaus et al., 1985, as cited in Arabi et al., 2002) and the Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS) II (Le Gall et al., 1993, as cited in Arabi et al., 2002). The study has identified predictors found to be significantly associated with prolonged ICU stay: non-elective admissions, readmissions, respiratory or trauma-related reasons for admission, and first 24-hour evidence of infection, oliguria, coagulopathy, and the need for mechanical ventilation or vasopressor therapy had significant association with prolonged ICU stay (Table 2.5 2.6). It was also found that mean APACHE II and SAPS II were slightly higher in patients with prolonged stay. Arabi et al. (2002) concluded that patients with prolonged ICU stay form a small proportion of ICU patients, yet they consume a significant share of the ICU resources. Nevertheless, the outcome of this group of patients is comparable to that of shorter stay patients. The predictors identified in the study were expected to be used in targeting this group to improve resource utilization and efficiency of ICU care. Table 1.5: Demographic and clinical profile of patients in the study group [all values shown are n (%), except where indicated otherwise] All (n = 947) ICU length of stay p value à ¢Ã¢â‚¬ °Ã‚ ¤ 14 days (n = 843) >14 days (n = 104) Age (years) ¹ 12-44 391 (41.3) 349 (41.4) 42 (40.4) NS 45-64 309 (32.6) 274 (32.5) 35 (33.7) NS à ¢Ã¢â‚¬ °Ã‚ ¥65 247 (26.1) 220 (26.1) 27 (26.0) NS Gender Male 591 (62.4) 518 (61.4) 73 (70.2) NS Female 356 (37.6) 325 (38.6) 31 (29.8) NS Type of admission Elective 169 (17.8) 164 (19.5) 5 (4.8) Non-elective 778 (82.2) 679 (80.5) 99 (95.2) Severity of illness APACHE II score (mean  ± SD) 19  ± 9 19  ± 9 21  ± 8 0.016 SAPS II score (mean  ± SD) 38  ± 20 37  ± 20 43  ± 16 0.003 Tracheostomy 113 (11.9) 52 (6.2) 61 (58.7) ICU mortality 193 (20.4) 173 (20.5) 20 (19.2) NS NS, not significant.  ¹Because of rounding, some of the percentages may not add up to 100% exactly. Source: Modified from Arabi et al. (2002). Table 1.6: Possible predictors for prolonged stay and the associated odds ratio No. of patients (%) ORs for prolonged stay p value (n = 947) OR 95% CI Non-elective admission 778 (82.8) 4.7 1.9-11.7 Readmission 79 (8.3) 2.1 1.1-3.8 0.02 Main reason for admission Surgical Trauma 171 (18.1) 2.1 1.4-3.4 Non-trauma surgical 231 (24.4) 0.3 0.1-0.5 Medical Cardiovascular 212 (22.4) 1.0 0.6-1.6 NS Respiratory 159 (16.8) 2.2 1.4-3.6 Neurologic 36 (3.8) 0.5 0.1-2.0 NS Other 138 (14.6) 0.51 0.25-1.05 NS First 24-hour data Coagulopathy 345 (36.4) 1.5 1.0-2.3 0.05

Impacts of Cognitive Cognitive Injuries on Communication

Impacts of Cognitive Cognitive Injuries on Communication Introduction It is an amazing moment when a baby arrives and the midwife announces you have given birth to a healthy baby boy or girl. It is as if the whole world is rejoicing with you. This is the kind of news that makes everybody smile and want to share your joy. To be born in perfect health is all a parent wishes for their child. As we grow into adults, we adopt dreams and ideas, plans and adventures. We are thankful for our strength, health and youth. The elderly especially encourage us to ‘ live life to the full’, while at the same time insisting that ‘youth is wasted on the young’. But what happens when you are struck with an illness, or have a life changing accident. When you are faced with the news that everything dependable and familiar about yourself that you have lived with from birth, has altered or even become totally foreign to you. Who are you now? What does your future hold? Where do you go from here? When are things going to go back to normal? Why me? How am I going to live with this? All the answers you have accumulated in your life, have now been replaced with questions. Definition Remember when you learned to walk and talk? Probably not, because we were so young at the time. Even if we don’t remember it happening, there were other people around us to witness our first achievments. More than likely these were moments of joy and pride. We would have had loved ones supporting us with love and encouragement. Imagine you are a grown adult and you are experiencing this stage of life for a second time. For people suffering from severe cognitive injury, this could be what it is like for them. Rehabilitation after a traumatic or non traumatic injury is a scary and lengthy process. A patient is affected on every level, from physical to mental, social to practical. Even though it is emotional to see a loved one soon after the effects of brain injury, the immediate effects are usually not the permanent result. Patients usually progress over time, but may never return to who they originally were. It takes time , patience and persistence for someone to advance from their immediate side effects. Patients who have been effected physically take on extensive physiotherapy to get their muscle strength back and retrain their body. Mental injuries are treated with counselling and medication. Although these are key to improving a person, support and understanding from loved ones is a major factor. Socially a persons life is flipped over. The casual familiar side of a persons life is replaced with confusion and frustration. Practically a person may need to learn again from scratch, depending on the extent of the injury. Brain injury leaves a person starting over. Although cognitive injury sounds hopeless and dark, there is actually a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Depending on the type of damage, which area of the brain, and to what extent the damage is done, each individual has a different story. There are a lot of different types of injuries. Alzheimers disease. Brain tumors. Stroke. Traumatic brain injury(TBI). Alzheimers This disease would be a common form of dementia. It is mostly known for effecting the elderly, but has been known to go beyond that. Alzheimers can cause a person to forget most of their current life and go back to a time of their youth. They may forget who their children are, the home they moved to when they got married and the life that came there after. It can become very difficult to communicate when the mind falls into confusion. It will take patience and kindness to find new ways of communication. Being able to adapt and finding a new structure will be very helpful. Body language, facial expressions and tone, will become their more dominant forms of communication. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) This can occur through a car accident, a fall or any major hit to the head. The contact to the head can cause a swelling or bleeding to the brain , which effects the normal running and understanding of things. Depending where in the brain you are effected, the results can be different for everyone. No two injuries or side effects are the same. People go through any number of treatments, from speech therapy to physiotherapy. Surgery can be successful in some patients, but is not always the answer. Stroke This can have varied effects on people. It is caused when the blood flow through an artery becomes blocked, and prevents oxygen entering the brain. This can have a range of effects. Speech and language, mobility and facial muscles can all be effected, depending on the level of stroke. Brain tumors These are abnormal growth of cells in one area, that clusters together to form a lump. Depending on where in the brain the tumor is pressing against, that will distinguish how the body is effected. It can effect speech, sight, smell, hearing, emotions and physical use of the body. It also has the ability to change intellect and personality. The overall result to anyone afflicted by damage to the brain, is that there will be significant changes to who they truly are. The common factors of the effects on communication are treated through rehabilitation. People will discover new ways to express themselves and it is challenging. When speech, body language, facial expressions and intellect change in a person, it is like meeting yourself for the first time, and finding your personality and new found talents. Overall there is a lot of adapting to be done, in order to get through each day. These changes also effect the family and friends who support them. Those who know this person well, will know them for their health and intellect. The people who choose to stay and support someone with a cognitive injury, will also find themselves being directly effected. Emotional strain can bring out the different sides of a person. This includes both the sufferer and supporters. Families deal with less free time, problems with finance, communication problems, and changing roles within the family. Emotions can go from happy and content and in control, to sadness, anxiety, anger, guilt and frustration. Families have been torn apart and friends have slipped away. It can feel like a lost cause. We have all experienced a time when we feel like we have fallen into a dark hole. It is cold, dark and lonely. It can leave us feeling scared, and helpless. Falling into a situation when you don’t know why everything has become strange and foreign, can be terrifying. We can become desperate for communication, for someone to say its ok. A familiar face or voice would become a saviour. But it could become a struggle to search for anything we relate to. What used to be our present time, can become obsolete and be replaced by what are distant memories. It is confusing and frustrating for everyone involved. Adapting to a new normality is a transition that does not have to be done alone. There are healthcare facilities, day care centres and counselling available for support. There are healthcare assistants, doctors and nurses available, who are trained and dedicated to helping rebuild communication and physical skills, and achieve the best quality of life. Because each brain injury is so unique, the help given is to achieve individual personal best. This is needed for the patient, family and friends. The extent of who a brain injury effects is like the branches of a tree. Thankfully the services provided encourage persistence. There are treatments available through many different forms. This also depends on the extent of the brain injury and what type. Treatment will usually begin immediately or as soon as damage is detected. It is crucial to keep the oxygen flowing to the brain and through the body, which helps blood flow. This will also help control blood pressure. Visual examinations will be done in the form of x-ray or ct-scan. Severely injured patients will receive more extensive treatments such as, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology/psychiatry and social support. It is a lengthy process and so much to deal with, but treatment is hope and a positive step to beginning again. Conclusion: Sufferers of cognitive injuries can learn to adjust and rise again. They discover a new kind of normal. Life is difficult for us all at times. We struggle with finance, career and family. But for those waking up and struggling each day to remember where they are and why they cant find the words to ask a question, or not understanding why menial jobs that never bothered them before, now cause them to lose their temper. These are some of the challenges facing a person with a cognitive injury. Life is known for its challenges and human strength is powerful and admirable. â€Å"Out of difficulties grow miracles.† References: www.Acquiredbraininjury.com/abimanual/consequences-for-the-family www.Alz.org www.Thebraintumourcharity.org/about-brain-tumours/living-with-a-brain-tumour/communication-problems-and-brain-tumours www.Neuroskills.com/braininjury www.Headway.org.uk/cognitive -communication-difficulties.aspx www.Asha.org/slp/cognitive-referral

Essay --

Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 2 Kyle Camerlinck Jupiter Christian School Mr. Bryan White Bible 9 Introduction Author Paul, also known as Saul, was an apostle of God who wrote the book of Ephesians and was sent to set up churches for Him. He changed his name from Saul to Paul because he wanted to start his life over, follow God, and live for Him. He wanted to start over because he was known as a man who persecuted Christians. Saul did not even notice he was doing wrong until he started to reach Damascus and a voice yelled from the Heavens saying, â€Å"Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?† Saul answered back, â€Å"Who are you, Lord?† then the Lord answered, â€Å"I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But, rise and enter the city, and you will be told what to do.† For three days Saul was made blind by Jesus and did not eat or drink. Then, Ananias walked into where Saul was staying and restored his sight, something like scales fell off his eyes and he could see. After being in Damascus with the disciples he proclaimed that Jesus is the one true God. Then, he fled to Jerusalem w here he joined the disciples with the help of Barnabas, changed his name to Paul and became a missionary to Christ. He set out on three missionary journeys where on his third, he was put under house arrest in Rome for two years where he wrote the book of Ephesians. After his release, he left, went to Spain, and was eventually persecuted and martyred by Nero. Date and Place of Writing Paul wrote Ephesians when he was in prison in Rome. He was there because Jews attacked him after his third missionary journey, but he was the one that got arrested. The epistle was written to the church in Ephesus, to help them with their unity. Thychicus deliver... ... showed all this and rewarded us so that one day we would be notice his kindness. The Christian is made alive in God and does good works for him. He does this to show his everlasting grace to everyone. Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (ESV) In verses 8 and 9 of Ephesians 2, Ephesians 2:10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for his good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (ESV) In verse 10 of Ephesians 2, Application Ephesians 2:1-10 is basically saying not to over use God’s grace. The verses say that God’s grace is a gift and even though every time you sin God gives you grace, you should not over use it. God wants you to good for Him, after all that is what he created you for.

One Deadly Psychotic Break Essay -- Literary Analysis

An online dictionary defines mental illness as â€Å"any of various disorders in which a person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior are so abnormal as to cause suffering to himself†¦or other people;† a second definition is â€Å"any of various psychiatric disorders or diseases, usually characterized by impairment of thought, mood, or behavior† (Thefreedictionary.com). In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story â€Å"Ligeia,† the narrator perfectly satisfies both of the above definitions. In Poe’s story, the nameless narrator’s beautiful wife Ligeia lives with him a short time before she dies. After her death, the narrator re-marries to Rowena, who eventually dies as well. At the conclusion of the story, his first, beloved wife returns to him through the body of Rowena. In reality, however, Poe’s story is far different from what it at first seems. The narrator, under the influence of opium, creates Ligeia in his mind and, when she  "dies,† he kills Rowena himself to bring his first wife back. In the article â€Å"Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia,† Jack and June Davis describe â€Å"Ligeia† as the faulty account of an insane narrator who â€Å"knows Ligeia only through his opium hallucinations but who wants to present her as a real and credible person† (171). The narrator uses Ligeia to chase the elusive secret to eternal life. When she dies, instead of forgoing his search, the narrator procures Rowena in order to present Ligeia with a dead body to return through; thus, he commits murder to carry out his insane plot. Because the narrator of Poe’s story fabricates the existence of his first wife, uses her to pursue eternal life, and kills his second bride to bring Ligeia back, he can be classified as mentally deranged. Ligeia’s unreality is strong evidence for the instability... ...im. What the deranged narrator once perceived as a victory over death is, in reality, nothing more than a drug-induced psychotic break. Works Cited Basler, Roy. "The Interpretation of "Ligeia"." College English. 5.7 (1944): 363-372. Web. 7 Apr. 2012. Basler, Roy, and James Schroeter. "Poe's "Ligeia"." PMLA. 77.5 (1962): 675. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. Davis, Jack L., and June H. Davis. "Poe's Ethereal Ligeia." Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. 24.4 (1970): 170-176. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. Espejo, Roman. Mental Illness. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2012. Print. "Mental Illness - Definition." The free dictionary by farlex. Farlex, Inc., 2011. Web. 13 Apr 2012. . Rabkin, Leslie Y. Psychopathology and Literature. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966. Print.

The Call of the Wild :: essays research papers

Title:  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Call Of The Wild Author: Jack London Copyright: 1986 Setting:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The beginning setting takes place on the property of Judge Miller in Santa Clara Valley, California in 1897. Later the setting takes place in Alaska during the Gold Rush of the Klondike. Main Character:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Buck is the only main character of the book. Buck is a dog who is part Saint Bernard and part Shephard. Summary:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Buck is my favorite character of the book. He had such a great life before he was stolen and sold to some very nasty people. Buck was treated very badly and he had to learn how to survive. He didn’t let the people know he was scared. The only way to survive was to listen, watch and learn. Buck wanted to be the leader and fought for what he wanted and he got it.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Buck had a great life living with Judge Miller and his family. He had free run of the place and played with his daughters and hunted with his sons. All the other animals were stuck in the house or behind fences.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  One day a gardener named Manuel, that Buck had trusted, stole Buck and took him to a train station and sold him to people who used large dogs to pull sleds in Alaska. These men were not nice and would beat Buck and the other dogs very badly to let them know who was boss. Buck and the other dogs had no idea what was happening to them. The dogs were put onto the trains and taken to a ship that took them to Alaska where they would be sold again in teams to pull the sleds of people looking for gold and other work.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When Buck and the other dogs got off the ship, the first thing they saw was white. They didn’t know what it was. It was snow. They learned quickly how hard and scary this would be. Other dogs being used were wild wolves that would tear the new dogs apart if they had the chance.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Buck and eight other dogs were sold to Perrault and Francois. Buck knew he needed to learn how to survive fast. One of the dogs, Spitz, who was the leader was a wolf and very mean. He would bully the other dogs. Buck hated him and one day wanted to take him down to take his place as leader. The dogs had to live through many dangers and survive with little food and sleep.

Gun control and the Constitution

The history of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of US citizens to â€Å"bear arms† is one of the most complex and controversial of all the developments within constitutional law that have occurred in the last 230 years. In this book Cottrol attempts to bring together most of the major cases on the Second Amendment from the Supreme Court, and also includes various articles on their meaning.One of the most valuable aspects of this book is the fact that Cottrol tackles his subject neither from the perspective of a supporter of the Amendment nor from a gun control advocate. This balance is a rare achievement in a treatment of an aspect of the law that often inspires resonantly partisan scholarship that fails to offer the true complexity and difficulties involved with balancing the various parties involved with the Second Amendment. The book is divided into two main sections. The first gives copies of the two leading Supreme Court c ases, Presser v. Illinois and United States v.Miller, as well as a state case that is now more than a century old but still provides precedence: Aymette v. State of Tennessee. Unlike many other books, Cottrol also provides the full texts of leading laws regarding gun control, such as the Brady Act and the 1986 Farm Owners Protection Act. These enable the reader to compare court cases, with the points of law that are raised within them, as well as the constitutional issues, with the actual laws that are now in place. Over all of them is the simple but actually over-riding language of the Second Amendment.In the second part of the book, Cottrol provides ten law and history scholarly articles which offer a strictly balanced view of the spectrum of views on the Second Amendment. Four out of the ten articles are actually challenging to the idea that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, while the rest are either historical or pro-Second Amendment in nature. Perhaps the best section of the book is actually the Introduction, an extended contemplation of the various issues involved with gun control from the Revolutionary War on.Cottrol argues that the founding fathers saw that an armed citizenry was a necessity for the defence of political liberty that had only recently been won. However, the idea that America was (and still is) somehow intrinsically different from other countries in its attitude towards gun is merely stated rather than proven. Thus Cottrol argues that â€Å"from the beginning, conditions in colonial America created a very different attitude towards arms and the people† (p. 13).But most European countries had a heavily armed populace in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries compared to today, but have succeeded in developing into modern countries that do not have a generally armed citizenry, with associated much lower crime/murder rates. Cottrol offers an interesting view on a part of the gun control debate that rarely received much attention f rom either side. That is the fact that during the Nineteenth Century fears of insurrection from slaves (and then freed blacks) and Indians meant that there were outright bans on these groups possessing arms.So the Second Amendment has already been suspended in the past for what are now regarded as spurious reasons: should not similar suspensions be considered in the present day? Cottrol does not explicitly state this, but it is implicit within his own scholarship that he briefly outlines within the Introduction to his book. In one of the most important aspects of the book, Cottrol argues that the â€Å"collective rights† argument over whether the Second Amendment merely guarantees the right to bear arms for a small, trained militia (i. e. an army? ) is moot.He says that if both pro and anti- gun control proponents accepted that there is a right to bear arms guaranteed in the Constitution then a genuinely productive conversation and dialogue could occur within society as to se nsible limits to access to that right. Arguing theoretically over whether the â€Å"right† exists or not is a rather futile exercise in sophistry. The more important argument is how the right should be instituted within society: what type of arms should be allowed under the constitution, what limits as to age, criminal history etc, should be placed?The right to bear arms, Cottrol suggests correctly, does not imply the right to bear all arms. For example, fully automatic machine guns have been illegal for ordinary citizens in the United States since the 1930’s. A person cannot but a bazooka, tank or fighter plane and claim that the Second Amendment protects his right to purchase and use it. So the argument, Cottrol suggests, should be on the types of arms that are allowed, not whether they are to be allowed at all. Here Cottrol’s suggestion that Federalist issues be more closely considered is very interesting.He correctly asserts that about 43 states already have laws and/or constitutions that touch in some way or another upon the unfettered right to bear arms. This area of law, full of often contradictory of at least contrasting law, has yet to receive much scholarly attention. Cottrol implies that far more gun control may actually be occurring than those on the national level, arguing over theoretical constitutional matters, seem to understand. State matters may at times conflict with Federal authority, especially considering the existence of state militias versus the federally controlled national guard.Who actually controls national guard units became of great importance during the civil rights movement, when Southern states started to deny the validity of federal laws regarding desegregation. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all used federal troops in one way or another to help enforce federal court decisions. Cottrol’s book suggests that the strict constitutional arguments regarding the Second Amendment are in fact a f ulcrum for much larger political, social and cultural dilemmas within society.The scholarly articles which support the idea of gun control, and thus the diminishing of Second Amendment rights , often seem to rely upon essentially pragmatic arguments: gun control would lessen the amount and seriousness of violent crime. They imply that a tragic irony is now occurring in which the constitutional amendment designed to protect the country, and to make the citizens safer, have actually made the United States of America one of the most dangerous advanced industrialized countries in the world.The issue of guns and the Second Amendment seems to be rather tangential to the real problems according to Cottrol. He briefly mentions the country that is the most difficult for gun control advocates to explain: Switzerland. The Swiss keep about 650,000 assault weapons in their private homes, making them by far the most armed/per capita population in the world. Yet Switzerland has virtually no violen t crime. The country also has virtually no poor people and few if any of the social problems that seem to lead to much of the gun violence in the United States.While Cottrol’s one volume edition of what was previously a large three-volume work is by necessity limited in length, it is a pity that these wider issues surrounding the Second Amendment could not be considered. For example, the Brady Law, named after the Reagan official who was paralyzed by the man who nearly assassinated President Reagan, was designed to stop the type of attack which had occurred there, but in fact does not really begin to tackle the problem.A person who wants to assassinate a President (or to shoot his wife) will find access to deadly weapons in any country in the world, whether it has no gun laws or a plentitude of them. The psychological problems associated with spree killers such as the Columbine killers cannot be tackled by gun control laws, nor can the economic hardship and desperation that s eems to lead to much of the black-on-black violence that accounts for a majority of murders. If Cottrol were to write another book on the wider implications of gun control these kinds of matters could be considered.Yet the book might still have a constitutional basis as the US Constitution was not a theoretical document written as some kind of intellectual exercise but rather as a living framework on which a democratic country could grow. The argument over whether the US Constitution should be regarded as a â€Å"living document† that should be adapted to current circumstances and even changed if necessary, or whether its power lies within a strictly â€Å"originalist† interpretation is at the heart of political debate today.One of the reasons that many of the public have an opinion on the constitutional arguments surround the Second Amendment is that they are, supposedly, simple to explain. Either the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms or it does not. Cott rol suggests that this is in fact an irrelevant dichotomy: it is how that right is controlled that is at the heart of the matter. In conclusion, Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explanations of the Second Amendment is an excellent book that raises a number of different perspectives on this important part of the US Constitution.Cottrol’s compendium of cases, opinion and scholarship suggests that a balanced approach to the various arguments should be adopted so that both sides can speak to one another rather than at or passed one another. ____________________________________ Works Cited Cottrol, Robert. Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explanations of the Second Amendment. Routledge, New York: 1994. .

Tgif Case

TGIF Case Problems: Macro – Quantum Software is experiencing problems in regard to their liabilities due to their TGIF beer bust parties. Quantum is also facing the issue of continuing success in sales. Micro – Quantum over works their employees and is using the beer bust parties to keep morale high. Some employees however are taking advantage of the free beer every Friday and are consuming too much. Causes: {draw:frame} Quantum has had much success in the past three years of its existence. While that is a huge positive it comes with some responsibilities. One is keeping up on staffing issues. Quantum seems to be highly under staffed and is asking employees to work 16 hour days 6 days a week. The over worked employee gave Erin, one of the owners an idea as these individuals need to blow off some steam after these horribly long weeks Quantum is asking them to work. Another cause for their current situation concerning the beer bust Friday is Erin was its convincer. She now has a vested and seems to be bias interest in keeping beer bust Fridays despite the risk it lends to the organization. It seems that the problem would not have even come to pass if the first issue of under-staffing would have been addressed. Instead now a chain reaction of causes has taken place: Alternatives: Quantum has several options to mitigate the issue of too much liability which could affect their profits. First Quantum could ask every employee to do a breathalyzer test and sign a waiver before driving home, leaving no liability to Quantum. Another alternative to their current state is hiring more people. Obviously the work to employee ratio is too high. Quantum could move beer bash Fridays to a bar, giving the liability of when to stop serving the employees beer to the bar and its owners. The last alternative to discuss in this forum is instead of having beer bashes to just give the employees every Friday afternoon off to do with what they please. Recommendations: First, Quantum owners, Erin and Stan need to sit down with the attorney Bill and review exactly their liabilities and the kinds of suites they would be up against if something went wrong. Instead of beer bash Friday, Quantum should have a monthly happy hour at a local bar, and reassess the work load they have and hire the appropriate amount of people so that the employees have normal working hours of 40 hours a week. Also, take the opportunity with the current employees and create a psychological contract to bring out any underlying expectations both the employees have about Quantum and what Quantum has towards the employees. Both changes still provide Quantum the corporate climate they seem to be trying to attain with beer bash Fridays, however they mitigate the need for employees to ‘blow off steam’ and helps boost moral through comfortable workloads and social happy hours monthly. Lastly, by putting into place a planned change control process for future issues as Quantum grows they will be able to mitigate these types of liabilities in the future. OD Practioner Behavior Profile One â€Å"Self-Assessment Exercises† will help you gain insight into yourself and your preferences. This understanding is directly applicable to your development as an O. D. practitioner. You are expected to share the results and to discuss their implications for practitioner effectiveness with the instructor. You are encouraged to share them with your classmates online. Weekly reflection Recently at DST Systems, DST has experienced changes in the business environment. DST saw these changes when the organization started utilizing strategies such as restructuring, de-layering, downsizing, merging and acquiring. This has left the organization faced with great challenges in managing associates retention. While reading this week’s chapters I saw DST in several of the key terms, specifically during the NOGO case and describing their management style as Sluggish. DST is a great example of a Sluggish management organization. Seniority and hangers (people who just hung around and grabbed a paycheck) were the individuals rewarded. Three weeks ago I left DST after 5 years of service. I did so because of that mentality. They have operated for the last 30 months in the red. Change is upon them now as it is a cost concern. Instead of going about change in a positive and forward way, DST instead is laying off people without doing a re-organization to utilize their untapped human potential. I stayed during the layoffs and fortunately did not lose my job from it being cut. When I saw however their lack in communication about the layoffs and there was no change process communicated as no additional changes were going to be made, I decided that this corporation wasn’t moving in a direction that was positive and got out. My fear is one day DST Systems, who was once quite an innovative and inspiring corporation with a phenomenal background, will be a case in a text book for another MBA student to learn what not to do and asses where they stepped incorrectly.

Politeness Strategies Used by Comedian in Stand-Up Comedy Metro Tv Indonesia (Pragmatic Study)

A. 3 Background of the Study From past to present, entertainment stage would never die, because every people always need some kind of refreshment after they work or when they feel bored, for example they can go to the amusement park or recreation on the weekend, and they can also watch a comedy stage. But the writer thinks people will tend to choose to watch the stage of comedy on a television, because they can laugh and forget about thier fatigue easily without going anywhere. In modern era the fulfilment of a comedy spectacle will be very easy, because television makes us closer to anything.Nowadays we can get various types of comedy shows in Indonesian television; there are ketoprak, lenong, opera comedy, ludruk, musical comedy, comedy reality show, etc. In Indonesia, the latest version of comedy and quite dense now is stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy is the art, initially developed in the United States, of humorous dialogue presented before an audience. The talk itself is memoriz ed and, today, usually expressed in a spontaneous conversational manner, as if the performer were speaking to friends.Although it tends to be one-sided, there may be interaction between performer and audience, which the former does not always want. Often verbal content is augmented with a range of theatrical embellishments such as special costumes and props, grunts, snorts, and howls, bodily movements and facial gestures. The typical act consists of anecdotes, narrative jokes, one-liners, and short descriptive monologues, which may or may not be related. (Stebbins, 1990) In Indonesia, stand-up comedy is considered as a new type of comedy show, and it started to become famous and widely shown on television in 2011.KompasTV is the television station that present and introduce the show of stand-up comedy for the first time, and now popularized by MetroTV. And there are also auditions held in many cafe for the open mic. The open mic is the term for testing the ability to provoke laughte r of the audience, if comedians succeed in making audience laugh in open mic, this automatically lifts their name as a comics. So they can go to stand-up comedy stage and might be shown on television. Because comedians always have any idea to performs joke with their own style and characteristic in language.There are some studies about stand up comedy, for example, Limon (2000) who studied about the existence of Jewish in stand-up comedy in America, Schwarzm (2010) tried to explore linguistic aspects of verbal humour in stand-up Comedy, Falk (2010) explained about the representations of ethnicity in stand-up comedy, and Lockyer (2011) also studied about stand-up comedy, and he focussed on the audience perspective. The several researchers above are interested in stand-up comedy and the language also relation between comics and the audience.However they did not explore about politeness issue in language used by comedian or comics, so that the writer will try to conduct a study about t hat. Hopefully this research can be very useful for any studies about linguistics and also for researchers who focus are interested in this case. The topic of politeness strategies have been utilized by several researchers. One of them is a research conducted by Ika Puspita Wati (2010) entitled â€Å"Politeness strategies used in the ‘Today’s Dialogue’ Talk Show†.This research tried to find out the kind of politeness strategies used in the talk show and the context in which the strategies emerge. But it is still different from the writer’s study in the term of the object of the study, the factors lead to the emergence of politeness strategies as well as the determined contexts. This research focuses on the use of language especially the using of politeness strategy in stand-up comedy show by comedians. The purpose of this study is to discover any existence of the politeness strategies used by comedians in stand-up comedy in Indonesia. B.Statement of The Problem 1. What kinds of politeness strategies used by comedians in stand-up comedy show? C. Literature Review 1. Politeness Strategies According to Brown and Levinson (1987), â€Å"Politeness strategies are strategies that are developed in order to save the hearer’s face†. There are four kinds of politeness strategies introduced by Brown and Levinson; they are Bald On-Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off-Record. Bald On-Record is a politeness strategy which is used more directly and usually does not attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s face.This strategy is most often utilized in situations where the speaker has a close relationship with the hearer. On the contrary, Bald-Off Record strategies is mostly used through indirect language and avoid the speaker to be imposed by the interlocutor. Furthermore, positive politeness strategies seek to minimize the threat to the hearer’s positive face, the desire to be approved. It is used to make the hearer feel good about himself, his interests or possessions. It is mostly used in situations in which the hearer knows each other fairly well.As the opposite of positive politeness, negative politeness strategies are oriented towards the hearer’s negative face, the desire to be unimpeded in one’s action, and emphasize avoidance of imposition on the hearer. Face refers to the â€Å"public self-image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself† (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 66). To maintain the other's face means to recognize and respect the claim members of society make with respect to each other in interaction. The act of communicating such an acknowledgment is politeness.Face (Brown and Levinson, 1987) is assumed to be of two types: positive face, or the want to be approved of by others, and negative face, or the want to be unimpeded by others. Acts that run contrary to these wants threaten the face of the speaker (e. g. apolog ies) or the hearer (e. g. requests). Certain acts of politeness, such as orders or requests, are intrinsically face-threatening (FTA) and thus require strategic redress. D. Method of the Study D. 1 Research Approach The aim of this study is to figure out the kind of politeness strategies used in stand-up comedy show in Indonesia by comedians.The writer applies qualitative approach to interpret the data in transcript, because the process to get the data deals with video recording. According Merriam (1999) characterises qualitative research as understanding the meaning people have constructed in which the researcher is the primary instrument for data collection and analysis. It usually involves fieldwork as primarily employing an inductive research strategy focusing on process, meaning and understanding resulting in a richly descriptive product.D. 2 Population and Sample The population of the data is the videos of stand-up comedy Indonesia in 2011 which are broadcasted by MetroTV and uploaded on YouTube site. There are so many videos on YouTube about stand-up comedy, especially for stand-up comedy which shown in Indonesia. Then the writer will only choose the top five videos which have highest rating and subscriber on YouTube, and the videos of comedians became a sample for this research.The reason of choosing these samples is because the videos become the best in YouTube for stand-up comedy Indonesia which contains of comedian’s speeches and jokes who got the best response from the audience and the subscriber of their videos on YouTube. D. 3 Technique of Data Collection The first thing that the researcher will do is collecting the data by downloading the videos that have been recorded by the official of stand-up comedy organizer from YouTube site. After downloading the videos the researcher will transcribe the speech of the comedians from the videos into text files.After that the writer will observe directly to the aspect of politeness strategies used by comedians from that transcript. And then the data from transcript will be classified based on the theory of politeness strategy. D. 4 Technique of Data Analysis After making the transcription of the data from videos of comedian, the researcher will identify it into several types of data based on the theory of politeness strategy; they are Bald On-Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off-Record as Brown and Levinson introduced in their theory.And then writer tries to conduct an analysis based on classified data, why some of their speech classified as one of the types of politeness strategies theory. And then after that the writer will interpret why the comedians act like that in stand-up comedy show and why they speech. Eventually, the writer comes to the last step which is making a conclusion. D. 5 Scope and Limitation of the Study This study focuses to observe the politeness strategies used by comedian in stand-up comedy stage, especially stand-up comedy Indonesia that showed up by MetroTv and then become famous in Indonesia.The videos uploaded again by YouTube in internet, so subscriber can watch and give comments or subscribes the videos. This study narrows its discussion to the study of the way comedians use politeness strategy in stand-up comedy Indonesia in which audience expectation about comedy is become the main reason. It does not cover all discussion of politeness strategies occur in all contexts of males and females or every aspect in stand-up comedy. D. 6 Significance of the StudyThe study has the aim to give the contribution to everyone who wants to get the knowledge about the research of politeness strategy, especially how the way a comedian performs to fulfil the audience expectation in comedy stage using politeness strategy, and also the communication between comics as a comedian and the audience in stand-up comedy show which delivered by monologues trough politeness strategies. The research is also enriching the knowledge abo ut the uniqueness of stand-up comedy and some communication aspects of comics when telling a joke that supplies other researchers the reference and literary analysis.References Ardissono, L. , ; Boella, G. (1999). Politeness and speech acts. Torino: http://www. di. unito. it/. Brown, P. , ; Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universal in Language Usage. New York: Cambridge University Press. Falk, O. (2010). Representations of ethnicity in stand-up comedy: A study of the comedy of Dave Chappelle. Gothemburg: University of Gothemburg, Department of languages and literature. Holmes, J. (2008). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Great Britain: Pearson. Jenkins, M. (1985). What's so funny? Joking among women. In S. Bremmer, N. Caskey, & B. moonwomon, Proceedings of the first Berkeley Women and Language Conference (pp. 135-151). California: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Lockyer, S. (2011). ‘It’s about expecting the unexpected’: Live stand-up comedy from th e audiences’ perspective, Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 165-188. Merriam, S. (1998). Qualitative Research and Case Study: Applications in education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Schwarz, J. (2010). Linguistic Aspects of Verbal Humor.Saarlandes: der Universitat des Saarlandes. Stebbins, R. A. (1990). The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy As Art, Business, and Life-Style. McGill-Queen's University Press. Wati, I. P. (2010). Politeness Strategies used in the ‘Today's Dialogue' Talk Show†. Surabaya: Faculty of Humanities Airlangga University. POLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY COMEDIAN IN STAND-UP COMEDY METRO TV INDONESIA (PRAGMATIC STUDY) THESIS WRITING DESIGN ANGGIE BAGUS PURWONO 120710366 ENGLISH DEPARTEMENT FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AIRLANGGA UNIVERSITY SURABAYA 2012

Historiographic Metafiction Essay

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. -Foucault What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. In fiction this means that it is usually metafiction that is equated with the postmodern. Given the scarcity of precise definitions of this problematic period designation, such an equation is often accepted without question. What I would like to argue is that, in the interests of precision and consistency, we must add something else to this definition: an equally self-conscious dimension of history. My model here is postmodern architecture, that resolutely parodic recalling of the history of architectural forms and functions. The theme of the 1980 Venice Biennale, which introduced postmodernism to the architectural world, was â€Å"The Presence of the Past. † The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it â€Å"historiographic metafiction. † The category of novel I am thinking of includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ragtime, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Name of the Rose. All of these are popular and familiar novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their implicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least. 3 LINDA HUTCHEON In the wake of recent assaults by literary and philosophical theory on modernist formalist closure, postmodern American fiction, in particular, has sought to open itself up to history, to what Edward Said (The World) calls the â€Å"world. † But it seems to have found that it can no longer do so in any innocent way: the certainty of direct reference of the historical novel or even the nonfictional novel is gone. So is the certainty of self-reference implied in the Borgesian claim that both literature and the world are equally fictive realities. The postmodern relationship between fiction and history is an even more complex one of interaction and mutual implication. Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the â€Å"world† and literature. The textual incorporation of these intertextual past(s) as a constitutive structural element of postmodernist fiction functions as a formal marking of historicity-both literary and â€Å"worldly. † At first glance it would appear that it is only its constant ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity that distinguishes postmodern parody from medieval and Renaissance imitation (see Greene 17). For Dante, as for E. L. Doctorow, the texts of literature and those of history are equally fair game. Nevertheless, a distinction should be made: â€Å"Traditionally, stories were stolen, as Chaucer stole his; or they were felt to be the common property of a culture or community †¦ These notable happenings, imagined or real, lay outside language the way history itself is supposed to, in a condition of pure occurrence† (Gass 147). Today, there is a return to the idea of a common discursive â€Å"property† in the embedding of both literary and historical texts in fiction, but it is a return made problematic by overtly metafictional assertions of both history and literature as human constructs, indeed, as human illusions-necessary, but none the less illusory for all that. The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers (see Canary and Kozicki): it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces-be they literary or historical. Clearly, then, what I want to call postmodernism is a paradoxical cultural phenomenon, and it is also one that operates across many traditional disciplines. In contemporary theoretical discourse, for instance, we find puzzling contradictions: those masterful denials of mastery, totalizing negations of totalization, continuous attest4 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION ings of discontinuity. In the postmodern novel the conventions of both fiction and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and subverted, asserted and denied. And the double (literary/historical) nature of this intertextual parody is one of the major means by which this paradoxical (and defining) nature of postmodernism is textually inscribed. Perhaps one of the reasons why there has been such heated debate on the definition of postmodernism recently is that the implications of the doubleness of this parodic process have not been fully examined. Novels like The Book of Daniel or The Public Burning-whatever their complex intertextual layering-can certainly not be said to eschew history, any more than they can be said to ignore either their moorings in social reality (see Graff 209) or a clear political intent (see Eagleton 61). Historiographic metafiction manages to satisfy such a desire for â€Å"worldly† grounding while at the same time querying the very basis of the authority of that grounding. As David Lodge has put it, postmodernism short-circuits the gap between text and world (239-4 0 ) . Discussions of postmodernism seem more prone than most to confusing self-contradictions, again perhaps because of the paradoxical nature of the subject itself. Charles Newman, for instance, in his provocative book The Post-Modern Aura, begins by defining postmodern art as a â€Å"commentary on the aesthetic history of whatever genre it adopts† (44). This would, then, be art which sees history only in aesthetic terms (57). However, when postulating an American version of postmodernism, he abandons this metafictional intertextual definition to call American literature a â€Å"literature without primary influences,† â€Å"a literature which lacks a known parenthood,† suffering from the â€Å"anxiety of non-influence† (87). As we shall see, an examination of the novels of Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, and others casts a reasonable doubt on such pronouncements. On the one hand, Newman wants to argue that  postmodernism at large is resolutely parodic; on the other, he asserts that the American postmodern deliberately puts â€Å"distance between itself and its literary antecedents, an obligatory if occasionally conscience-stricken break with the past† (172). Newman is not alone in his viewing of postmodern parody as a form of ironic rupture with the past (see Thiher 214), but, as in postmodernist architecture, there is always a paradox at the heart of that â€Å"post†: irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm-textually and hermeneutically-the connection with the past. When that past is the literary period we now seem to label as 5 LINDA HUTCHEON modernism, then what is both instated and then subverted is the notion of the work of art as a closed, self-sufficient, autonomous object deriving its unity from the formal interrelations of its parts. In its characteristic attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the â€Å"world,† postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this formalistic view. But this does not necessitate a return to the world of â€Å"ordinary reality,† as some have argued (Kern 216); the â€Å"world† in which the text situates itself is the â€Å"world† of discourse, the â€Å"world† of texts and intertexts. This â€Å"world† has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality. It is a contemporary critical truism that realism is really a set of conventions, that the representation of the real is not the same as the real itself. What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naive realist concept of representation and any equally naive textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world. The postmodern is selfconsciously art â€Å"within the archive† (Foucault 92), and that archive is both historical and literary. In the light of the work of writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, D. M. Thomas,John Fowles, Umberto Eco, as well as Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Ishmael Reed, and other American novelists, it is hard to see why critics such as Allen Thiher, for instance, â€Å"can think of no such intertextual foundations today† as those of Dante in Virgil (189)’ Are we really in the midst of a crisis of faith in the â€Å"possibility of historical culture† (189)? Have we ever not been in such a crisis? To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. And this is the postmodern paradox. The theoretical exploration of the â€Å"vast dialogue† (Calinescu, 169) between and among literatures and histories that configure postmodernism has, in part, been made possible by Julia Kristeva’s early reworking of the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony, dialogism, and heteroglossia-the multiple voicings of a text. Out of these ideas she developed a more strictly formalist theory of the irreducible plurality of texts within and behind any given text, thereby deflecting the critical focus away from the notion of the subject (here, the author) to the idea of textual productivity. Kristeva and her colleagues at Tel Quel in the late sixties and early seventies mounted a collective attack on the founding subject (alias: the â€Å"romantic† cliche of the author) as the original and originating source of fixed and fetishized meaning in the text. And, of course, this also put into question the entire notion of the â€Å"text† as an autonomous entity, with immanent meaning. 6 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION In America a similar formalist impulse had provoked a similar attack much earlier in the form of the New Critical rejection of the â€Å"intentional fallacy† (Wimsatt). Nevertheless, it would seem that even though we can no longer talk comfortably of authors (and sources and influences), we still need a critical language in which to discuss those ironic allusions, those re-contextualized quotations, those double-edged parodies both of genre and of specific works that proliferate in modernist and postmodernist texts. This, of course, is where the concept of intertextuality has proved so useful. As later defined by Roland Barthes (Image 160) and Michael Riffaterre (142-43), intertextuality replaces the challenged authortext relationship with one between reader and text, one that situates the locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse itself. A literary work can actually no longer be considered original; if it were, it could have no meaning for its reader. It is only as part of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance. Not surprisingly, this theoretical  redefining of aesthetic value has coincided with a change in the kind of art being produced. Postmodernly parodic composer George Rochberg, in the liner notes to the Nonesuch recording of his String Quartet no. 3 articulates this change in these terms: â€Å"I have had to abandon the notion of ‘originality,’ in which the personal style of the artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of the one-idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture which seems to have dominated the esthetics of art in the aoth century; and the received idea that it is necessary to divorce oneself from the past. â€Å"In the visual arts too, the works of Shusaku Arakawa, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselman, and others have brought about, through parodic intertextuality (both aesthetic and historical), a real skewing of any â€Å"romantic† notions of subjectivity and creativity. As in historiographic metafiction, these other art forms parodically cite the intertexts of both the â€Å"world† and art and, in so doing, contest the boundaries that many would unquestioningly use to separate the two. In its most extreme formulation, the result of such contesting would be a â€Å"break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable† (Derrida 185). While postmodernism, as I am defining it here, is perhaps somewhat less promiscuously extensive, the notion of parody as opening the text up, rather than closing it down, is an important one: among the many things that postmodern intertextuality challenges are both closure and single, centralized meaning. Its willed and willful provisionality rests largely upon its acceptance of the inevitable textual infiltration of prior discursive 7 LINDA HUTCHEON practices. Typically contradictory, intertextuality in postmodern art both provides and undermines context. In Vincent B. Leitch’s terms, it â€Å"posits both an uncentered historical enclosure and an abysmal decentered foundation for language and textuality; in so doing, it exposes all contextualizations as limited and limiting, arbitrary and confining, self-serving and authoritarian, theological and political. However paradoxically formulated,  intertextuality offers a liberating determinism† (162). It is perhaps clearer now why it has been claimed that to use the term intertextuality in criticism is not just to avail oneself of a useful conceptual tool: it also signals a â€Å"prise de position, un champ de reference† (Angenot 122). But its usefulness as a theoreticalframework that is both hermeneutic and formalist is obvious in dealing with historiographic metafiction that demands of the reader not only the recognition of textualized traces of the literary and historical past but also the awareness of what has been done-through irony-to those traces. The reader is forced to acknowledge not only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both the value and the limitation of that inescapably discursive form of knowledge, situated as it is â€Å"between presence and absence† (Barilli). halo Calvina’s Marco Polo in Invisible Cities both is and is not the historical Marco Polo. How can we, today, â€Å"know† the Italian explorer? We can only do so by way of texts-including his own (Il Milione) , from which Calvino parodically takes his frame tale, his travel plot, and his characterization (Musarra 141). Roland Barthes once defined the intertext as â€Å"the impossibility of living outside the infinite text† (Pleasure 36), thereby making intertextuality the very condition of textuality. Umberto Eco, writing of his novel The Name of the Rose, claims: â€Å"1 discovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told† (20). The stories that The Name of the Rose retells are both those of literature (by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, among others) and those of history (medieval chronicles, religious testimonies). This is the parodically doubled discourse of postmodernist intertextuality. However, this is not just a doubly introverted form of aestheticism: the theoretical implications of this kind of historiographic metafiction coincide with recent historiographic theory about the nature of history writing as narrativization (rather than representation) of the past and about the nature of the archive as the textualized remains of history (see White, â€Å"The Question†). 8 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION In other words, yes, postmodernism manifests a certain introversion, a self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing itself; but it is also much more than that. It does not go so far as to â€Å"establish an explicit literal relation with that real world beyond itself,† as some have claimed (Kirernidjian 238). Its relationship to the â€Å"worldly† is still on the level of discourse, but to claim that is to claim quite a lot. After all, we can only â€Å"know† (as opposed to â€Å"experience†) the world through our narratives (past and present) of it, or so postmodernism argues. The present, as well as the past, is always already irremediably textualized for us (Belsey 46), and the overt intertextuality of historiographic metafiction serves as one of the textual signals of this postmodern realization. Readers of a novel like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five do not have to proceed very far before picking up these signals. The author is identified on the title page as â€Å"a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace. † The character, Kurt Vonnegut, appears in the novel, trying to erase his memories of the war and of Dresden, the destruction of which he saw from â€Å"Slaughterhouse-Five,† where he worked as a POW. The novel itself opens with: â€Å"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true† (7). Counterpointed to this historical context, however, is the (metafictionally marked) Billy Pilgrim, the optometrist who helps correct defective vision-including his own, though it takes the planet Tralfamadore to give him his new perspective. Billy’s fantasy life acts as an allegory of the author’s own displacements and postponements (i. e. , his other novels) that prevented him from writing about Dresden before this, and it is the intratexts of the novel that signal this allegory: Tralfamadore itself is from Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, Billy’s home in Illium is from Player Piano, characters appear from Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The intertexts, however, function in similar ways, and their provenience is again double: there are actual historical intertexts (documentaries on Dresden, etc.), mixed with those of historical fiction (Stephen Crane, Celine). But there are also structurally and thematically connected allusions: to Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East and to various works of science fiction. Popular 9 LINDA HUTCHEON and high-art intertexts mingle: Valley of the Dolls meets the poems of William Blake and Theodore Roethke. All are fair game and all get re-contextualized in order to challenge the imperialistic (cultural and political) mentalities that bring about the Dresdens of history. Thomas Pynchon’s V. uses double intertexts in a similarly â€Å"loaded† fashion to formally enact the author’s related theme of the entropic destructiveness of humanity. Stencil’s dossier, its fragments of the texts of history, is an amalgam of literary intertexts, as if to remind us that â€Å"there is no one writable ‘truth’ about history and experience, only a series of versions: it always comes to us ‘stencillized'† (Tanner 172). And it is always multiple, like V’s identity. Patricia Waugh notes that metafiction such as Slaughterhouse-Five or The Public Burning â€Å"suggests not only that writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design† (48-49). Historiographic metafiction is particularly doubled, like this, in its inscribing of both historical and literary intertexts. Its specific and general recollections of the forms and contents of history writing work to familiarize the unfamiliar through (very familiar) narrative structures (as Hayden White has argued [â€Å"The Historical Text,† 49-50]), but its metafictional selfreflexivity works to render problematic any such familiarization. And the reason for the sameness is that both real and imagined worlds come to us through their accounts of them, that is, through their traces, their texts. The ontological line between historical past and literature is not effaced (see Thiher 190), but underlined. The past really did exist, but we can only â€Å"know† that past today through its texts, and therein lies its connection to the literary. If the discipline of history has lost its privileged status as the purveyor of truth, then so much the better, according to this kind of modern historiographic theory: the loss of the illusion of transparency in historical writing is a step toward intellectual self-awareness that is matched by metafiction’s challenges to the presumed transparency of the language of realist texts. When its critics attack postmodernism for being what they see as ahistorical (as do Eagleton, Jameson, and Newman), what is being referred to as â€Å"postrnodern† suddenly becomes unclear, for surely historiographic metafiction, like postmodernist architecture and painting, is overtly and resolutely historical-though, admittedly, in an ironic and problematic way that acknowledges that history is not the transparent record of any sure â€Å"truth. † Instead, such fiction 10. HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION corroborates the views of philosophers of history such as Dominick LaCapra who argue that â€Å"the past arrives in the form of texts and textualized remainders-memories, reports, published writings, archives, monuments, and so forth† (128) and that these texts interact with one another in complex ways. This does not in any way deny the value of history-writing; it merely redefines the conditions of value in somewhat less imperialistic terms. Lately, the tradition of narrative history with its concern â€Å"for the short time span, for the individual and the event† (Braudel 27), has been called into question by the Annales School in France. But this particular model of narrative history was, of course, also that of the realist novel. Historiographic metafiction, therefore, represents a challenging of the (related) conventional forms of fiction and history through its acknowledgment of their inescapable textuality. As Barthes once remarked, Bouvard and Pecuchet become the ideal precursors of the postmodernist writer who â€Å"can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them† (Irnage 146). The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the  scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these. Or, if it is seen as a limitation-restricted to the always already narrated-this tends to be made into the primary value, as it is in Lyotard’s â€Å"pagan vision,† wherein no one ever manages to be the first to narrate anything, to be the origin of even her or his own narrative (78). Lyotard deliberately sets up this â€Å"limitation† as the opposite of what he calls the capitalist position of the writer as original creator, proprietor, and entrepreneur of her or his story. Much postmodern writing shares this implied ideological critique of the assumptions underlying â€Å"romantic† concepts of author and text, and it is parodic intertextuality that is the major vehicle of that critique. Perhaps because parody itself has potentially contradictory ideological implications (as â€Å"authorized transgression,† it can be seen as both conservative and revolutionary [Hutcheon 69-83]), it is a perfect mode of criticism for postmodernism, itself paradoxical in its conservative installing and then radical contesting of conventions. Historiographic metafictions, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drurn, or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (which uses both of the former as intertexts), employ parody not only to restore history and memory in the face of the distortions of the â€Å"history of forgetting† (Thiher 11 LINDA HUTCHEON 202), but also, at the same time, to put into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality. When linked with satire, as in the work of Vonnegut, V. Vampilov, Christa Wolf, or Coover, parody can certainly take on more precisely ideological dimensions. Here, too, however, there is no direct intervention in the world: this is writing working through other writing, other textualizations of experience (Said Beginnings 237). In many cases intertextuality may well be too limited a term to describe this process; interdiscursivity would perhaps be a more accurate term for the collective modes of discourse from which the postmodern parodically draws: literature, visual arts, history, biography, theory, philosophy,  psychoanalysis, sociology, and the list could go on. One of the effects of this discursive pluralizing is that the (perhaps illusory but once firm and single) center of both historical and fictive narrative is dispersed. Margins and edges gain new value. The â€Å"ex-centric†-as both off-center and de-centeredgets attention. That which is â€Å"different† is valorized in opposition both to elitist, alienated â€Å"otherness† and also to the uniformizing impulse of mass culture. And in American postmodernism, the â€Å"different† comes to be defined in particularizing terms such as those of nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Intertextual parody of canonical classics is one mode of reappropriating and reformulating-with significant changes-the dominant white, male, middle-class, European culture. It does not reject it, for it cannot. It signals its dependence by its use of the canon, but asserts its rebellion through ironic abuse of it. As Edward Said has been arguing recently (â€Å"Culture†), there is a relationship of mutual interdependence between the histories of the dominators and the dominated. American fiction since the sixties has been, as described by Malcolm Bradbury (186), particularly obsessed with its own pastliterary, social, and historical. Perhaps this preoccupation is (or was) tied in part to a need to fmd a particularly American voice within a culturally dominant Eurocentric tradition (D’haen 216). The United States (like the rest of North and South America) is a land of immigration. In E. L. Doctorow’s words, â€Å"We derive enormously, of course, from Europe, and that’s part of what Ragtime is about: the means by which we began literally, physically to lift European art and architecture and bring it over here† (in Trenner 58). This is also part of what American historiographic metafiction in general is â€Å"about. † Critics have discussed at length the parodic 12 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION intertexts of the work of Thomas Pynchon, including Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness (McHale 88) and Proust’s first-person confessional form (Patteson 37-38) in V. In particular, The Crying of Lot 49 has been seen as directly linking the literary parody ofJacobean drama with the selectivity and subjectivity of what we deem historical â€Å"fact† (Bennett). Here the postmodern parody operates in much the same way as it did in the literature of the seventeenth century, and in both Pynchon’s novel and the plays he parodies (John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, among others), the intertextual â€Å"received discourse† is firmly embedded in a social commentary about the loss of relevance of traditional values in contemporary life (Bennett). Just as powerful and even more outrageous, perhaps, is the parody of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos, where political satire and parody meet to attack white Euro-centered ideologies of domination. Its structure of â€Å"A Past Christmas† and â€Å"A Future Christmas† prepares us for its initial Dickensian invocations-first through metaphor (â€Å"Money is as tight as Scrooge† [4]) and then directly: â€Å"Ebenezer Scrooge towers above the Washington skyline, rubbing his hands and greedily peering over his spectacles† (4). Scrooge is not a character, but a guiding spirit of 1980 America, one that attends the inauguration of the president that year. The novel proceeds to update Dickens’ tale. However, the rich are still cozy and comfortable (â€Å"Regardless of how high inflation remains, the wealthy will have any kind of Christmas they desire, a spokesman for Neiman-Marcus announces† [5]); the poor are not. This is the 1980 replay of â€Å"Scrooge’s winter, ‘as mean as ajunkyard dog† (32). The â€Å"Future Christmas† takes place after monopoly capitalism has literally captured Christmas following a court decision which has granted exclusive rights to Santa Claus to one person and one company. One strand of the complex plot continues the Dickensian intertext: the American president-a vacuous, alcoholic, ex-(male) model-is reformed by a visit from St. Nicholas, who takes him on a trip through hell, playing Virgil to his Dante. There he meets past presidents and other politicians, whose punishments (as in the Inferno) conform to their crimes. Made a new man from this experience, the president spends Christmas Day with his black butler, John, and John’S crippled grandson. Though unnamed, this Tiny Tim ironically outsentimentalizes Dickens’: he has a leg amputated; he is black; his parents died in a car accident. In an attempt to save the nation, the president goes on televi13 LINDA HUTCHEON sian to announce: â€Å"The problems of American society will not go away †¦ by invoking Scroogelike attitudes against the poor or saying humbug to the old and to the underprivileged† (158). But the final echoes of the Dickens intertext are ultimately ironic: the president is declared unfit to serve (because of his televised message) and is hospitalized by the business interests which really run the government. None of Dickens’ optimism remains in this bleak satiric vision of the future. Similarly, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Reed parodically inverts Dostoevsky’s â€Å"Grand Inquisitor† in order to subvert the authority of social, moral, and literary order. No work of the Western humanist tradition seems safe from postmodern intertextual citation and contestation today: in Heller’s God Knows even the sacred texts of the Bible are subject to both validation and demystification. It is significant that the intertexts ofJohn Barth’s LETTERS include not only the British eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Don Quixote, and other European works by H. G. Wells, Mann, and Joyce, but also texts by Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper. The specifically American past is as much a part of defining â€Å"difference† for contemporary American postmodernism as is the European past. The same parodic mix of authority and transgression, use and abuse characterizes intra-American intertextuality. For instance, Pynchon’s V. and Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in different ways, parody both the structures and theme of the recoverability of history in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Similarly, Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets (1984) both installs and subverts Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (Levine 80). The parodic references to the earlier, nineteenth-century or classic American literature are perhaps even more complex, however, since there is a long (and related) tradition of the interaction of fiction and history in, for example, Hawthorne’s use of the conventions of romance to connect the historical past and the writing present. And indeed Hawthorne’s fiction is a familiar postmodern intertext: The Blithedale Romance and Barth’s The Floating Opera share the same moral preoccupation with the consequences of writers taking aesthetic distance from life, but it is the difference in their structural forms (Barth’s novel is more self-consciously metafictional [Christensen 12]) that points the reader to the real irony of the conjunction of the ethical issue. The canonical texts of the American tradition are both undermined and yet drawn upon, for parody is the paradoxical postmodern way of coming to terms with the past.