What you have learned about your own speaking style Essay

What you have learned about your own speaking style - Essay Example Organizing my ideas is one key quality that has helped me improve my overall public speaking. Before acquiring a grasp on this vital quality, there used to be a variety of incoherent ideas jumbled up in my mind. Such chaos in my mind never let me speak with confidence in public. Other people also used to experience mental strain when trying to understand me. However, logical organization of ideas in my mind before publically speaking on any subject has sufficiently resolved this problem. Because of a weak grasp on a foreign language in my initial days, I could not maintain eye contact with others while speaking to them. This has led others to jump to wrong conclusions about me many times. Connecting with the audience is critically important which calls for looking at other person in the eye. This helps to convey a clearer message to the other person. Working on this quality has also helped me to enhance my public speaking

Science Adventures with Children’s Literature Essay Example for Free

Science Adventures with Children’s Literature Essay The goal of using a double entry journal strategy in a multicultural and diverse skill based student population brings in theory great benefit to all students. The chance to learn form fellow students that have diverse talents may lead to greater motivation for all students and the opportunity to have skills outside of reading and writing to be identified and valued in the classroom is another method to bring a sense of achievement to all students regardless of their literacy ability. The text demonstrates a dynamic system based on student group activities that allow the strengths of some students to be highlighted and to be a benefit to other students in the group while all students are active participants (text, pp 50 – 52). This approach is similar in theory to that discussed in Fredericks (1998 p 43) where teachers used group activities that included the procedure of writing a draft of the report, followed by discussion amongst the group and a final version of the report written by all members of the group. It was thought that this approach allows students of lower literacy to learn from the activities and from their fellow students in a buddy system (Fredericks, 1998 p 52). Another philosophy reviewed by Gambrell et al, 1995 p 119) highlighted the benefit of using a group setting with double entry journal writing to give all students a sense of achievement which can aid in raising their motivation for reading and writing. This paper (text, pp 50 – 51) provides an ideal system which has great relevance to my student teaching experiences in an inner New York City public school, first grade class setting which includes a multicultural student population and great diversity in literacy. The paper (text, p 52) demonstrated the need to manage potential behavioral problems quickly before they have a negative impact. From my experience this is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accomplish. Students frustrated by their lack of success with reading and writing often prove unpredictable in when their disruptive behavior may manifest itself. The use of students’ talents in a diverse way as discussed in the text (p 51) is similar to an experience I had in the classroom where a student who had profound reading difficulty showed a positive response to having her drawing skills praised in front of the rest of the class. The opportunities I have had to observe different classrooms which have applied the practical approach of double entry journal writing have found overall positive results for the students. The chance to revise and edit their writing in a group setting brought a sense of achievement to the highly skilled readers and writers in the group and allowed a non-threatening way in which the students with lower levels of achievement in reading and writing can learn from their fellow students. However, I also observed in an active class setting the disruption and complete failure of a lesson where problem behaviors by two of the students led to the lesson having to be abandoned. In this situation the freedom of the practical small group approach led to two students finding it difficult to stay focused on the task and this led to disruptive behaviors that made continuing with this type of lesson impossible for that teacher. This observation led me to realize that the early intervention of potential problem behaviors is critical to the success of group based activities. References Fredericks, A. D. (1998). Science Adventures with Children’s Literature: A Thematic Approach. Teacher Ideas Press, CT. Gambrell, L. B. , Mazzoni, A. and Almasi, J. F. (1995). Engaging Young Readers: Promoting Achievement and Motivation. Baker, L. , Dreher, M. J. and Guthrie, J. (Eds. ) Gulford Press, N. Y. Textbook Chapter 2: Diversity in the multicultural classroom. Pp 50-52.

Behaviors Caused by Hypothalamic and Thalamic Lesions :: Neurological Chemistry Chemical Papers

Behaviors Caused by Hypothalamic and Thalamic Lesions In the field of neuropsychology, the area in the brain that includes the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and the subthalamus is referred to as the subcortex diencephalon (Kalat 2004). In the following section, lesions to these specific areas will be discussed. The results of the lesions will be addressed from the perspective of a neuropsychologist. Neuropsychological assessment refers to the objective evaluation of the cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, and psychomotor performances of a person with the aim of relating the status of his/her performances to the structural and functional condition of his/her brain (Steinhauer, Gruzelier, & Zubin 1991). Neuropsychological assessment can be approached from an experimental method in which the researcher has greater control of the variables affecting the situation but, generalization is more difficult and human subjects cannot be used in studies (Finger 1978). A clinical method is also used and, although this method does not experience the benefit of complete control, brain-behavior relationships are much easier to study because human subjects can be used in this method (Finger 1978). Both methods are usually combined to produce the most efficient and helpful information for the patient. The most prominent neuropsychological tests include the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Halstead-Reitan battery, and the Wechsler Memory Scale (Steinhauer et. al. 1991). These tests provide the opportunity to analyze the components of performance and then identify probable disabilities that would explain the defective performance (Steinhauer, et. al. 1991). The main issue that will be examined in this section will be behavioral effects of lesions to specific parts of the hypothalamus and the thalamus. The hypothalamus is located near the base of the brain and is ventral to the thalamus (Dimond 1978, Kalat 2004). The hypothalamus is part of the limbic system and is responsible for motivational behaviors including emotion, eating, drinking, sexual activity, anxiety and aggression (Kalat 2004, Dimond 1978, Isaacson 1982, Beaumont 1983). The hypothalamus has widespread connections to the rest of the forebrain and also to the midbrain (Kalat 2004). The hypothalamus contains a number of distinct nuclei including the lateral nucleus which controls the initiation of eating and drinking, the ventromedial nucleus which controls the stopping of eating and drinking, the paraventricular nucleus which limits meal size, the supraoptic nucleus which controls the secretion of vasopressin, the suprachiasmic nucleus which constitutes the biological clock,

Plains Indians

The destruction of the Plains Indians' cultures connected with the technological developments and government actions in the United States. During the period of struggle between Indians and Whites in the late 19th century, Indian leaders often traveled east to plead their case before the federal government, with few results. The building of the transcontinental railroads and all their branches was an inevitable part of the Industrial Revolution that drove America following the Civil War. The Indians were repressed due to the railroad, which cut through their territory in the West, the declining population of the buffalo, wars, and the loss of their land to White settlement. The federal government tried to quiet the Indians' protests by signing treaties with the chiefs of the tribes. However, the treaties failed because those who signed didn’t necessarily represent groups of people in Indian culture, and in most cases, the Indians didn’t recognize the authority chiefs outside of their own tribes. In the 1860s, the U. S. government made new efforts to relocate Indians into even smaller reservations than before. Indians were often promised that they wouldn’t be bothered further if they would just move out of their ancestral lands, and often, Indian agents were corrupt and sold off cheap food and products to their own fellow Indians. White men often ignored the treaties, though, and frequently scammed the Indians. In frustration, many Native American tribes attempted to fight back. After the Civil War, the U. S. Army’s new mission became to move the Indians out of the West so the White settlers could move in. A couple of Indians and Whites battled between 1860s to 1890s in a series known as the Indian Wars. Many times though, the Indians were better equipped than the federal troops sent to stop their revolts because arrows could be fired more rapidly than their rifles. However, the invention of the Colt . 45 revolver and Winchester repeating rifle put the Indians at a disadvantage. During this period, there was much violence among the Indians and Whites. Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer all battled Indians in battles such as Little Big Horn. The building of the railroads is connected with the settlement of the West and the steady destruction of Indian cultures. The main food source for Plains Indians were the bison. In the early days, millions of bison populated the American prairie, and by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 million buffalo. Many people killed buffalo for their meat and their skin but many people killed the bison for sport and just left the rest of the carcass to rot. However, it was the expansion of the railroad that really started the bison massacre. Railroads enhanced the value of the land enormously, but made farmers dependent on railroads. The need for open land led them to kill off the bison for railroad land. Railroad construction led to further settlement of the West, which in turn complicated conditions for the Indian tribes. The Plains Indians were driven out of their territory and into too small reservations. With the expansion of the railroad, down came their number one food source, the bison. Inventions such as the Winchester, led to the disadvantage of Indians during battles when protecting their land. The wars, overall, also affected the Indians. The government actions, building of the railroad and other inventions, contributed to the steady decline in the Plains Indians' population.

Fantastic Literature Essay

Fantasy is a product of our subconscious minds. Just like the stories of the past, fantastic literature tries to give its messages with an indirectly way for making an impact to our subconscious minds. In other words, Fantastic literature is a genre of fiction that uses imagination, magic, supernatural elements such as ghosts, harpies, trolls, mermaids, nymphs, vampires, centaurs, personifications, allegories and unrealistic elements as its primary plot element, theme or setting. Many fantastic works includes an imaginary world where magic and fantastic creatures are common. The best known and successful English work for the genre is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings triology. But there are lots of successful works and famous writers of the genre such as Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and H.P. Lovecraft’s collection of stories ab out Cthulhu Mythos. The fantastic literature starts with the bed time stories in childhood such as fairy tales or folk tales to give instructions. We can say, it has a special appealing to children because of its didactic nature for giving moral lessons. Moreover, the children are too young to know the difference between real and the fantasy. Much of these folk tales comes from the times of Middle Ages where the place storytelling has an importance. This importance changed by the time due to technological advancements because rational progress decreased the amount of these stories. It happens to everyone when you grow up, the advancement of rational progress can decrease your superstitious beliefs and imagination. But using the middle age as setting, establishes a perfect base for fantastic stories because of the lack of technology, dogmatic thoughts and the importance of storytelling. Therefore even in our time, the fantastic works uses the middle age as its setting and much of the works in fantastic literature takes place in Middle age. When we come to its origin, in western culture, the origin of the fantastic literature depends on the mythic stories. But if we specifically give a document name for the genre, then we can say its origin comes from the stories of Homer The Iliad and The Odyssey. In eastern culture, this origin comes from Arabian Nights. The iliad and odyssey gives us the definition of the genre in the first place because of its contents. In case of Odyssesy, it includes gods, monsters such as centaurs, Cyclops or witches and wizards. And there is also a quest in the story as its plot. Odysseus tries to return to his home at Ithaca but he is not allowed by Poseidon because of his insults such as killing his cyclop son and claiming that he won the troy with only his own mind tricks. It is quiet similar to the stories of the Arthurian Romance such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because of their usage of quest as framework. Same thing is in use in the case of LOTR. As a characteristic of the genre, there is always a quest in a fantastic work. Many of them include a universe as their setting look alike Middle ages because it is easy to create stories when you created the universe. There are also some common themes of the genre such as Good vs. Evil, Deceived heroes, making a sacrifice for saving the earth, journey to unknown etc.. All of these elements are in Fantastic literature to give lessons. The sign of a Fantast ic work is the inclusion of fantastic elements, a self-coherent setting as a universe to take place in and the inspirations from the mythology or folk stories. It gives a freedom of expression to author for explaining a rational sense within a supernatural framework. Therefore it may confuse the reader but there is always a message in these fantastic stories. It starts with the fairy tales in childhood. Fairy tale: Fairy tales a stories that contains a message and has an appealing to children for giving instructions with an indirectly style and by showing example through the story. Fairy tales aims to give moral lessons to its audience. Therefore, it is the first tutor of the mankind. They may include elves, dwarves, fairies, giants, ogres, trolls, goblins, mermaids, witches and wizards. There is always an adventure or a quest in these stories. But they are different than the legends in essence because there may be a truth behind the legends. Ancient Greeks are often accepted the legends as real events and told their stories for centuries but they didn’t the same thing for the folk tales. There is always a certain pattern in these fa iry tales, all of them starts with same word Once upon a time for implying that the story takes place in an unknown time. There is also a happy conclusion at the end of these stories such as â€Å"they lived happily ever after†. They can be found in oral or literary form but it is hard to trace their origins. Many of them may appear in different cultures with variations. Much of them appeals to adults but they are often associated  with children. There are some collectors of these folktales such as Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault. Folklorists have classified the fairy tales with various ways. Among them Vlademir Propp is one of the most notable with his Morphology of the Tale. Vladamir Propp was a Russian folklorist scholar who analyzed the framework of Russian folk tale and published his analysis with name of Morphology of the Folktale in 1928. In his work, he divided fairy tale into sections and through these sections he tried to define the series of sequences within a fairy tale. To him, a fairy tale usually starts with an initial situation. And right after that there are 31 different se quences with different functions. He used this method to analyze the frame work of the Russian folk tales. Propp’s morphology is an exemplar for the analysis. In this type, the structural organization of a folkloristic text follows a chronological order as linear. Therefore, we can see if the tale has all of these elements from A to Z. Also we can give a name to those sequences. A tale usually starts with an initial situation such as with the enumeration of the family or the brief introduction of the hero. And after this point there are 31 sequences. Absentation: In this part, a member of the family leaves the home such as a prince may leave home to go for a journey by leaving his wife back. This absentation can also be someone’s death or going for a walk, fishing..Interdiction: In this point, the instruction comes to the hero such as don’t change your way, don’t talk with stranger, take care of your little brother to preparing a base for the further calamity. Violation: A counter action happens against to interdiction such as hero often violates this limitatio n and leaves the right way, talks with strangers. At this point a new person enters the story. And it could be a dragon, wolf, witch or a stepmother as a villain. Reconnaissance: Villain makes an attempt to find something. Villain is in search of something valuable or information such as the location of the children, wolf’s aim to find the goal of Little Red Cap by questioning her. Delivery: Villain receives a directly information to his questions. The wolf learns the house of the grandmother. Trick: The villain makes a persuasion. It is an attempt to trick his victim in order to take possession for his victim. Dragon turns into a golden goat, the witch turns into an old beggar and tries to give poisonous apple, wolf tries to act like grandmother by wearing her clothes. Complicity: The victim accepts the deception and helps  his enemy without knowing. Princess accepts the apple, The wolf acts like grandmother and little red cap could not recognize it. Villainy or lack of something: The villain causes harm or injury such as princess falls into a sleep after taking a bite from the apple, the wolf devours the little red cap as a result o f violation of the interdiction. One member of the family is in lack of something or desires to have something. The Prince intends to search for his bride, A magical agent is needed to wake someone up, huntsman tries to find a prey Mediation: the hero enters into tale with a quest or he is dispatched. The prince appears and decides to go for a journey to the tower of sleeping beauty, the huntsman appear hearing the snores of the wolf by thinking that there must be something wrong. Beginning counteraction: The hero sees the situation and decides to do something, the huntsman sees the belly of the wolf and thinks that he devoured them, the prince hears the story of sleeping beauty. Departure: the hero leaves home to make a counterattack. First function of the donor: A donor appears and meets with the hero or greets him for testing him to give some kind of a magical agent. The hero’s reaction: hero gives an answer to donor such as making a help to him, showing mercy, completes a service, learns some tactics, The hero receives the magical agent: he receives some kind of a power to defeat to evil. The transference between two kingdoms: The hero is transferred from one place to another to whereabouts an object or search. The hero flies through air on a bird, or travels on a boat. Struggle: The hero and the villain fights to get something for themselves. Branded: the hero receives a wound during the fight. Victory: the villain is beaten during the open battle or loses the game of cards. Liquidation: The initial misfortune resolved, spell casts off, captives freed Return: the hero returns to his home Pursuit: The some kind of evil pursues the hero and tries to kill him Rescue: the hero is rescued from the pursuit, an obstacle may delay the pursuer, the hero hides or saves his life from the pursuer. Unrecognized arrival: hero returns his home but no one recognizes him just like in the case of  Odysseus. False claims: A false hero appears and presents unfounded claims. DIFFICULT TASK: Difficult task proposed to the hero (trial by ordeal, riddles, test of strength/endurance, other tasks); SOLUTION: Task is resolved; RECOGNITION: Hero is recognized (by mark, brand, or thing given to him/her); EXPOSURE: False hero or villain is exposed; TRANSFIGURATION: Hero is given a new appearance (is made whole, handsome, new garments etc.); PUNISHMENT: Villain is punished; WEDDING: Hero marries and ascends the throne (is rewarded/promoted). Grimm Brothers were two unusual German scholars, linguists, academicians and great philologists that lived in the 19th century. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were two brothers and these brothers were nationalists and intended to collect the old Germanic stories and publish them to show the universality of German language. They were very interested with the Germanic folklore tales and dedicated rest of their lives to collect these tales. Therefore they collected stories and folk tales from the country and represented a pure form of national literature and culture. They established a kind of methodology for recording and collecting these folk tales and later on it became a basis for the folklore studies. They published their first collection of Germanic stories, and folk tales in 1812 with the name of Children’s and Housholde Tales. Their stories, includes the all details of German language and Germanic cultural identity. Their works translated into more than 100 languages. The most important and famous stories of them are Rapunzel, The Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, The Frog Prince and Little Red Cap. Little Red Cap Little red cap is a Germanic folk tale that published by Grimm brothers in their story collection known as Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. It is the 26t1h story of this story collection. It tells the story of a sweet but not obedience girl known as little red cap because of her famous Red Hood. But behind the background of the story, it is a story about grow up by leaving the naà ¯ve thoughts behind. It is a story that questions the curiosity of the children and urges them to leave these thoughts and get mature by following rules. By using the big bad wolf as a villain, it gives  us a message that don’t be so naà ¯ve, these fine gentlemen are nothing but greedy wolfs and they are so hungry for using your naivety for their own sexual purposes. So, follow your rules and don’t ever change your way. It can be interpreted as a moral tale, to give a message such as don’t talk with sexual predators. After the brief presentation of the characters, the story starts with an absentation in which the grandmother is sick. So her mother gives her a bucket and says bring this to grandma and don’t leave the path or you might break the glass. This is our interdiction and our quest. But she doesn’t listen to her mother, a counter action (violation) happens against to interdiction and wolf makes an entrance to story. The wolf questions the little red cap, this is our reconnaissance. And she answers all its questions with a naivety and describes the way that goes to her grandma. (delivery). The wolf goes there devours grandma and takes place of her (trick). She comes to house and accepts its trick without knowing what it is (complicity). And wolf devours her as result of her wrong actions (Villainy harm). Some versions of the story like Charles Perrault version ends in here but Grimm version continues. The huntsman makes an entrance to story (mediation). And he decides to free grandma and little red cap(beginning of counter reaction). He cuts the bell of wolf with a scissor and saves them both. This is the rebirth of Little red cap as a mature (Struggle, branding, victory, liquidation ). In any case, it is a story of puberty rite in which the red cap born again as an adult woman and learns how to act against to odds. After that point she doesn’t cares about the other childish things. The advancement of her rational progress is ending her childhood. The Frog King- Iron Heinrich The frog king is the first story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm which they published it in their folk tale collection known as Children and Household Tales. The frog king is all about the glimmers of emotional life where they are developing in the first place, the childhood. It is story about sexual awakening in human beings, its acceptance and maturation process in human beings. There are some symbols in the story such as the frog, the princess and the Golden ball. The frog is the symbol of production and fertility and it is connected with witchcraft. Princess is the symbol of purified aspect of human soul and the golden ball is the symbol of perfection. The princes  in this story, is so beautiful, even more beautiful than sun that is explains her relationship and her desires towards to golden ball. When she lost the ball, she grieves at not only her ball but also grieves over her loss of innocence. She thinks that she will not be the whole again. But the only thing that can make her whole again is an ugly frog. She likes herself and this situation represents her narcissistic psyche. In the story, the princess increasingly becomes more anxious, angry and full of fear with the idea of marrying with a frog. She is not yet ready for the marriage. As the frog comes closer to her, she becomes more disgusted. This is also gives us her idea about awakening of sex throughout the puberty. But actually she becomes more a person while the frog comes closer to her. The father in this story is responsible for the marriage of the princess and he commands her to keep her word. Her actions are all under her id and there is a need for the development of super ego in her personality. Therefore, the responsible conscience of King helps to development of superego in child’s mind for bringing happiness, love and marriage to her life. And to become whole again, she finally decides to throw it against to wall by taking all the risks to gain her independence. This moment of violence is a painful experience but it is necessary. By doing so, she transcends her anxiety and hatred into a love. She becomes more a person by developing identity and her ugly frog turns into a handsome prince in her eyes. Snow White The story of Snow white is a Germanic Folktale that published in 1812 by Grimm brothers in their Collection of stories known as Children’s and Household Tales as the 53rd story. It is a story about the cycle of life as can be seen from the color symbolism of the story. But it also increases the theme of maturation process of a girl through some tests. It is a very common theme which can be found in the stories of Grimm brothers maybe because of the fact that their informants were woman or to put an emphasis on marriage for representing its importance in a feudal and patriarchal German society. Who knows? Anyway most of their stories are including these themes of Marriage, maturation, loss of innocence, growing up and including these damsels in distress as main characters. And in most of their stories the true love comes after the defeat of self-love as reward of maturation. Story starts with a queen’s wish to have a baby like white as snow, red as  blood and black as wood. It is a kind of symbolism of life that represents the natural cycle of life in which after every death a life starts to its lifetime. As a result snow white represents this natural cycle, she is the personification of this cycle. As soon as she born, her mother dies in order to give a birth to her. And that is also another emphasis that given to represent this cycle. After this point her unconcerned king father marries with another woman who is wicked. The unconcerned personality of King, although there is no king in the story, represents the feudal European perspective of seeing women as object. The personality of stepmother is another issue; she is the personification of immatureness. It is clear that she has failed in her personality development to have an identity. Therefore, she has only the self-interest just like the princess in The Frog King or Iron Heinrich. Therefore she plays her role to prevent Snow White for reaching her age because of her envy, pride and hatred. She orders to huntsman to kill her but he spares instead of killing her. He spares her because of potential status as a woman and bringer of new life. Therefore, the existence of huntsman also is a foreshadowing for the union of the opposite forces such as man and woman. In the story she deceives Snow White for three times and each times represents another aspect of life just like the color symbolism. In the first with a lace to prevent breath (White) which represents the spiritual matureness, second with a comb (Black) to represent the physical matureness and in the last with a red apple (red) to represent death or blood for establishing a basis for the death of childhood and the rebirth of as mature woman. Sleeping in a glass coffin also supports this idea of rebirth as a mature woman. Glass coffin represents the being in a woman’s womb. In essence, the witchcraft of queen was nothing but a test. After completing all these tests she becomes a mature woman and young prince appears as a reward. She marries with him. Therefore, completing these tests is essential in human life and story tries to put an emphasis especially to this aspect of life. The real love comes with maturation and with the sacrifice of childhood, it is necessary to get a real identity. And the time of union puts an end to the efforts of retarding powers with the hot iron shoes. The queen dies as dancing for celebrating the rhythmic cycle of life and death. All in all, Snow white is a story that explains the nature of creation, how something new comes into being through the  repetition of same cycle of transformation which is necessary in a traditional society. Cinderella The story of Cinderella is a European folk tale which published in 1812 by Grimm Brothers as the 21st story in their collection of Folk tales known as Children’s and Household Tales. It was also published by Charles Perrault in 1697. The Grimm version of the story is a dark version because it doesn’t include a fairy mother, pumpkin that turns into a carriage, animals that turns into henchmen. In Grimm version there is a Grant tree and talking pigeons. There is forgiveness in Perrault’s story for stepsisters but Grimm version there is a punishment for sisters in which stepsisters are blinded by pigeons. It is a story about an orphaned girl and it focusses on her rising into higher status and redeeming with happiness through hard work, suffer and marriage. Then again, the story gives us the patriarchal perspective of marriage and its importance by showing a poor girl’s struggling for rising into power and changing her status within this hierarchical society. The story can be interpreted from so many perspectives such as sociological, Freudian, feminism. But its theme is simple, young women can be saved by wealthy men. The golden slipper in the story stands there as a symbol of perfectness or perfect life. The story narrates the recovery process of a poor girl’s after an early wound such as loss of her mother. It is a process of person’s redeem and reaching happiness through hard working. Therefor the story represents a person’s search for identity and self-esteem. The tale opens with an initial situation and the narration of characters as usual but then suddenly a member of the family leaves the family as it happened in the case of mother. Interdiction also comes in this moment, the mother tells her daughter right before her death, remain pious and good only then our dear god will protect you. After a time later, her ignorant father marries again and evil stepmother and stepsisters appears as villain to start their devilish deeds. She loses her social status and starts to live her life as a maid in the kitchen. Throughout the story she keeps her dignity against to all evil dee ds of the sisters and as a result her donor appears in the form of pigeons and grant tree. The donor offers her dreams to her and also through these it tries to test her. Eventually she passes all her tests by remaining pious and takes care of the wicked  step family. As a result, her foot fits to slippery shoe as an embodiment of perfectness. The story ends with a happy ending. There are different explanations of the story. We can think the slippery as the woman and we can think the foot as the man and their union as the perfect union of man and woman. From this point of view, story is about a woman’s search for sexual fulfillment. We can also look at it with a sociological perspective. Then we can say, it is about a woman’s struggle for rising into power within a patriarchal society through marriage. Prince choses Cinderella because her foots are tiny while sisters not. Her foots are tiny because she is coming from an upper class unlike them, but she loses her social status. In the end of the story, she manages to replace her social status through marriage and redeems with life. It is also a good role model for feminism for showing how young girls and women should not be. Cinderella is a kind, pious and passive girl. She can’t make stand for herself. She is waiting a prince for herself to rescue her from the misery and all of her actions are against to feminist ideas. Modern woman is expected to be more assertive in order to survive in the world but she can’t. Instead of that she is acting more pious by thinking that her dignity will save her. And this situation is giving us a sociological insight about the feudal European society. Enter Sandman Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic writer, critic, musician and composer who opened his eyes to earth in 1776. He was famous with his works of horror and fantasy fiction. He is the author of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which famous The Nutcracker ballet based. In 1816, he composed one of his fantastic, horror stories which known as â€Å"The Sandman† and published it in 1817 within short story collection, known as â€Å"The Night Pieces†. The sandman is story about a childhood trauma that in the form of letters. It starts a bizarre and horrifying childhood story about a creature known as Sandman. The first letter is from Nathanael to Lothar. According to Nathanael, The sandman is a creature of night who is visiting unsleeping children and bleeding them with his sands to steal their eyes for feeding his own children on the moon. Scary isn’t it? This story becomes an obsession for him. And one night he plans to spy it and hides himself t o his father’s room. In there he sees Coppelius, a lawyer and one of his father’s associates and he catches him and desires to burn his eyes. But his father  stands against for him. Nathanael becomes ill and his father dies after a while in an experiment while working with Coppelius. The Coppelius disappears. Nathanael becomes a student and meets with an optician known as Coppola and buys a Spy-glass from him. Through this spy-glass he sees Olympia, an automaton created by Spalanzani and Coppola. And he loves this automaton unreasonably. But two men falls into an argument and Coppolla takes the eyes of automaton and throws them to Nathanael. This event reminds Nathanael the argument between his father and Coppelius. And Nathanael falls into a state of sanity. After recovering his mind, he goes directly to Clara to marry with her. While spending time with her, he suddenly sees Coppelius and goes insane. He tries to kill clara, but her brother saves him. Unfortunately he jumps off from the tower and dies. The uncanny is a concept in human psychology that means something extraordinary familiar and not familiar at the same time. Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who wrote about this concept in his The Uncanny and published it in 1919. He tried to analyze this concept by using Hoffmann’s The Sandman because of its extraordinary content. According the Freud, the uncanny is the mar k of the returning repressed memory. For Freud, the reason of the uncanny in this story is the fear of losing eyes. He associates the idea of losing eyes with the fear of castration and he suggests the story of Oedipus as his example. He argued that the most appropriate punishment of Oedipus’ crimes was the castration yet this showed on the stage in the form of losing eyes. Coppelius is Nathanael’s hatred against of his father for his castration and he interferes his all relationships which he both loves and hates. After this bad experience, he represses all his bad memories and forgets what happened in the past. With the reanimation of first shocking scene (losing of one’s eyes) in the second scene, he once again remembers everything but also loses his mind. This is the uncanny of the story which reminds his past. Coppola and Spalanzini are nothing but the representation of his father’s sides and Olympia which they made together is the personification of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. It is his doppelganger. That is why Nathaniel confronts Olympia as a person and loves it with a narcissistic kind of senseless love. It is a natural situation which he created after his castration because of being unable to love. As a result, he realizes this truth with the reappearance of Coppelius  once again while looking through the spy-glass. Looking through the glass is a kind of rationalization process. Nathaniel tries to explain all these events with the imagination until his usage of glass. And in each time when he use it, he loses his mind because of confronting with the sober truth.

Fuel Cells in Transportation †Engineering Essay

Fuel Cells in Transportation – Engineering Essay Free Online Research Papers Fuel Cells in Transportation Engineering Essay Is it possible to produce a limitless battery? Since the industrial revolution, a lot of people have looked for an answer to this question, but unfortunately, they have not found it yet. Fuel cell systems can be an opportunity to realize this dream. These systems which are the most significant batteries of the last years are the electrochemical energy conversion devices that convert hydrogen and oxygen into water, producing electricity and heat in this process. Since around the beginning of the 19th century, a great number of researches have been done about these popular battery systems. Thanks to this, practical fuel cell systems are available for a wide diversity of applications today. Transportation is one of these application areas in which fuel cells can be used. Despite the fact that fuel cells have high initial cost, they provide more benefits in transportation than other fuel systems, because of their environmental advantages, engineering simplicity, and economy. First of all, zero or low emissions, lack of noise pollution, and no waste of natural resources are the environmental advantages of fuel cell technology that make it attractive. A lot of research done by different scientists supports this fact clearly. For instance, as mentioned in â€Å"Fuel Cell Basics: Benefits†, the Energy production systems which are depending on fuel burning are more harmful to Nature than fuel cells (n.d., p. 2), because burning fossil fuels such as gasoline or diesel adds greenhouse gases to the earth’s atmosphere. CO2 is one of these harmful gases which cause greenhouse effect. But, fortunately, the amount of CO2 could be decreased by wide usage of fuel systems, according to source generated fuel (â€Å"Fuel Cell Buses†, n.d., p. 1). Furthermore, harmful gases production of fuel cells can be reduced to a minimum relying on the hydrogen production method (â€Å"Fuel Cell Buses†, n.d., p. 1). Also, it should certainly be said that , fuel cells prevent noise pollution. â€Å"Fuel Cell Benefits†, emphasizes that despite the fact that outer disturbances become effective when driving at high velocities, fuel cell vehicles produce less sound pollution compared to other conventional cars (n.d., p. 2). In addition to these advantageous features of fuel cell systems, fuel cells can be an opportunity to stop or reduce wasting of natural energy resources. The dependence on fossil fuels such as gasoline can be decreased by usage of Fuel Cells. This assertion is supported in the article â€Å"Hydrogen Future Drives Into Big Apple† on page 2 by claiming that using hydrogen as fuel, dramatically decreases the need of petroleum based fuels due to its renewable and limitless source opportunities (n.d). On the other hand, Rose claims that, safe and renewable energy can be obtained from fuel cells due to their effective, modular and wide source opportunity properties (2003, p. 12). Secondly, appropriate features for engines and engineering applications can be obtained with fuel cells. They exhibit high thermodynamic efficiency, simple operation variety, and high co-generation capability. â€Å"Benefits of Fuel Cells in Transportation† points out that fuel cell vehicles, not limited by Carnot Cycle, are expected to achieve energy efficiencies of 40 to 45 percent and very possibly higher (n.d., p. 1). Also, effective responses can be obtained from fuel cells due to uncomplicated reactions (â€Å"Fuel Cell Basics: Benefits†, n.d., p. 2). Furthermore, Rose highlights that, lack of productivity can be decreased to level of 13% by using fuel cells in co-generation mode (2003, p. 20). In addition, Fuel cells, having hydrogen as a source fuel, have many special features for engineering applications. For example, according to â€Å"Types of Fuel Cells†, due to having high power density, and low working temperatures, fuel cells can easily give responses to various power demands (n.d., p. 1). Another superior facility of hydrogen is its high diffusivity. Hugely reactive hydrogen’s low density gives it a high diffusivity (â€Å"Hydrogen Safety†, n.d., p. 1). What is more, fuel cells can be used to provide propulsion or auxiliary power for many transportation applications. â€Å"Fuel Cells In Use† asserts that, Programs of production of fuel cell cars, due to be exhibited from 2003 to 2006, have been planned by nearly all big auto factories (2004, p. 1). In the same article it is also told that submarines, on the other hand, have been one of these areas in which fuel cell development started early on. Also it is added that, we can apply fuel cell systems for aerospace works (â€Å"Fuel Cells In Use†, 2004, p. 1). Due to many reasons, it is easier to design a fuel cell vehicle than conventional vehicles. In other words, a strong system, more reliable features and motionless parts can be obtained easier. For example, as it stated in â€Å"Fuel Cell Technology†, there are â€Å"no transmission and distribution losses because of dispersed generation† in fuel cell vehicles (n.d., p. 2). In addition, fuel cells are 99.9999 % reliable way of converting power. (â€Å"Fuel Cell Basics: Benefits†, n.d., p. 3). Seperately, â€Å"according to Stroash, ‘conventional gasoline tanks are thin and flimsy compared with the robust hydrogen fuel tanks being developed’† (â€Å"Alternetive Fuel Tanks†, n.d., p. 1). Finally, in addition to environmental and engineering advantages fuel cells have lots of economical benefits. These advantages of fuel cells provide them to be related with various applications, especially with buses. But, it seems that the fuel cells are convenient to use in urban transit buses but certainly in time they are going to spread among vans and cars, railways and marine applications. Hà ¶rmandinger supports this claim by stating that using fuel cells are very attractive in transportation because of some characteristic properties of buses (1995, p. 38). Also as it mentioned above, due to air pollution, energy efficiency, security and global climate, cars and small vans are another part of fuel cells applications in transportation. When fuel cells are used in these types of vehicles they offer to their owner some economical benefits. For instance, fuel cells decrease the overall price of power generation thanks to having a static structure and less upkeep necessity (â₠¬Å"Fuel Cell Technology†, n.d., p. 1). And, to consist of completely motionless parts means fuel cells have low upkeep (â€Å"Benefits of Fuel Cells in Transportation†, n.d., p. 2). In addition to two modes of transportation, urban buses and cars, fuel cells have more application areas such as railways and marine applications. Hà ¶rmandinger claims that fuel cell powered trains are more useful in areas wihout electric rail network (1995, p. 72). By this feature of fuel cell, they reduce the overall cost of urban transportation, reducing the usage of electricity. On the other hand, marine aplications are expensive due to some reasons. For example, as Hà ¶rmandinger highlighted, submarines serve mainly for military, where costs are less important than that of civil purposes (1995, p. 74). However, using fuel cell provides reducing the cost of the marine applications. In conclusion, as a result of being useful for our environment, being appropriate for engines and engineering applications and having various economical advantages, compared to other fuel systems, a lot of benefits can be obtained with Fuel Cell Systems in transportation despite their initial cost problems. It is obvious that after the problem of not being affordable is solved by scientists, Fuel Cell Systems will become the most popular battery system of the world. Today, all big companies producing battery systems for different applications are working on Fuel Cell Systems being a good long-term investment for them. In addition to these works, the parliaments of governments should encourage manufacturers to produce Fuel Cells and pass useful laws about using Fuel Cell Systems in different application areas. It should not be forgotten that Fuel Cell Systems are the best solution to the problem of energy production that might be the most important problem of the world. References Alternative fuel tanks. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from llnl.gov/ str/News900.html Benefits of fuel cells in transportation. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from fuelcells.org/basics/benefits_transp.html Fuel cell basics: Benefits. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from fuelcells.org/basics/benefits.html Fuel cell buses. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from navc.org/benefits.html Fuel cells in use. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from U.S. Department of Energy Web site: eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/ education/fc_use.html Fuel cell technology. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from fuelcellmarkets.com/article_flat.fcm?articleid=219subsite=720 Fuel cell vehicles: Benefits. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from fueleconomy.gov/feg/fcv_benefits.shtml Hydrogen future drives into the big apple. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/100_news/shell_012705.html Hydrogen safety. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from gexcon.com/ index.php?src=research/hydrogen/hydrogen.html Hà ¶rmandinger, G. (1995). Fuel cells in transportation. Retrieved November 23, 2005, from iccept.ic.ac.uk/pdfs/hoermandinger.pdf Rose, R. (2003). The Path Forward. Retrieved November 23, 2005, from http://193.145.15.40/queesmadrimasd/Pricit/PlanNet/comun/includes/download.asp?IdDoc=1394 Types of fuel cells. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from fuelcells.org/ basics/types.html Where will fuel cells be used? (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2005, from http://fuelcellworld.org/article_flat.fcm?articleid=74subsite=1172 Research Papers on Fuel Cells in Transportation - Engineering EssayGenetic EngineeringBionic Assembly System: A New Concept of SelfOpen Architechture a white paperRiordan Manufacturing Production PlanPETSTEL analysis of IndiaIncorporating Risk and Uncertainty Factor in CapitalComparison: Letter from Birmingham and CritoThe Project Managment Office SystemTwilight of the UAWRelationship between Media Coverage and Social and

The future of large face

The future of large face The field of information technology is one of the fastest growing innovations in the world. Among the many innovations is the advent of the internet, which has brought many changes in to our society today among them being virtual-meeting technologies, digital document processing and telecommunication advances.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The future of large face-to-face meetings with regards to information technology specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More New technology tools such as the email, intranet, fax, video conferencing, chat or mobile phone conversations have contributed a lot in advancement of communication. This essay gives an insight on how the future of large face-to -face meetings is likely to be affected by more innovations in information technology. People hold meetings to discuss different ideas and aspects concerning them. Face to face, meetings are important as they help in building trust and confide nce among the individuals involved. However, these meetings are currently becoming outdated with the advent of virtual meeting technology and expansion of social media like Facebook and twitter. This is because they enable a faster way of communicating with people far away and help to save on time. Face to face, meetings are costly as people have to travel from one destination to another, Food, accommodation has to be availed to those attending, and organization of the venues may be very complex. Many companies have cut down these costs because of virtual meeting technologies. Technology has made it possible for some companies to import cheap labor from employees oversees as they do not necessary require them to be on site to carry out their responsibilities. Invention of webcams has caused video conferencing to be more preferred than face-to-face meetings though they were initially considered as an extra cost by some companies. Contrastingly, some information such as one’s f eeling is well communicated through facial expressions or hand gestures. In addition, some situations may not be handled perfectly through the social media or virtual meetings, as they need coordination, consensus, timing, persuasion, or even negotiation. These situations can only be achieved best through a personal face-to-face meeting.Advertising Looking for essay on communications media? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Negotiating for important contracts such as building and construction requires all the parties involved to meet and discuss elements of the contract that may not be clear. Signing an agreement with minor mistakes can lead to serious consequences. Recruiting the best employees is the ultimate goal of any human resource department in any organization. This may not be easily achieved if carried out over internet as the employer may be looking for a certain character that can only be drawn from ones be havior during the interview. Holding a conversation with a person face-to-face may enable one to draw many conclusions such as the person’s passion, motivation, strengths, and weaknesses. This information is very valuable as one is able to understand clearly the individual he is dealing with. Some business entities are still adopting large face-to-face meetings though with well-defined purpose for long-term results. Although tight budgets may be a great constraint, they put more emphasis in establishing the impact of the meetings. They count their profits in terms of the outcomes in productivity achieved from those who attend the meeting. Some prefer to incur some losses at the beginning but gain good profits in future as an outcome of the ideas exchanged during meetings. In view of the above, the number of large face-to-face meetings held by different organizations has drastically reduced with the advent of information technology. Although some companies believe that integra ting face-to-face meetings with internet technology would be only best option to be adopted in future, I strongly believe that more is yet to be discovered in the world of information technology. My opinion therefore is that these large face-to-face meetings will be eliminated by virtual meeting technology and social media in future.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The future of large face-to-face meetings with regards to information technology specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More

How to Write a PhD Personal Statement

How to Write a PhD Personal Statement How to Write a PhD Personal Statement A person might be required to write a personal statement when he or she is completing a PhD application. Professionals in this area have specific guides that need to be followed when completing the application process. The reader is supposed to understand what type of PhD program is being sought and the reasons behind the student’s preference to study in the proposed university. The reader must understand clearly what is of most interest to the customer in the specific field of study. A good PhD personal statement should have all of these details, and the writer should be able to provide a background of their earlier academic credentials and empirical experience which may highlight his or her interest in the specific area of study. When applying for a PhD, experience and prior knowledge is very important to help convince the board that one actually qualifies for the program. This is the highest level of study and hence professionalism and integrity applies at all times. As such, the skills and experience acquired by the applicant are vital in the process of transition from the undergraduate program to the postgraduate program. This also guarantees the level of success in the area of study. One may not want to apply the same statement to every application, and instead make each application unique based on the area of interest and the person who will be reading it. In addition, it is of great use to a writer if they conduct thorough research on the University that offers the program that they are applying to. Grammar and type of vocabulary used must be well thought out. Very long sentences with repetition should be avoided at all cost. The sentences should be short and precise and the tone of the statement should be positive and enthusiastic. The word limit should also be adhered to. The statement should be structured with an introduction, main body and a conclusion. The purpose of the introduction is to captivate the reader and make them interested in reading the statement to the end. The reasons for choosing that particular institute of learning must be explained and the individual’s strength and personal skills should also be highlighted. The ability to communicate effectively and work as part of a team should be brought out by the writer. What’s more, the relevance of the undergraduate program to the PhD study should be described to demonstrate the foundation which was laid for further research and study. The career aim should be exemplified to demonstrate the intended c ontribution to society. One must try to make their statement unique; it must stand out among the rest. Professional personal statement help at is provided by academic experts. They can write a custom personal statement paper starting at $13/page. High quality and on-time delivery guarantee!

International Business - Cultural Differences Essay

International Business - Cultural Differences - Essay Example With specific reference to HRM and marketing, this essay will examine the potential problems which a UK owned hotel, operating in China and Russia, among numerous other countries, may confront. In order to understand the challenges which the UK-owned hotel may confront in the management of its operations in China and Russia, it is important to begin with a clarification of the implications of the culture construct. The reason is that since culture has been identified as the source of challenges, it is necessary to know why and how it can function as a challenge to cross-cultural management for the purposes of constructively confronting and resolving these challenges. As an ever-present force of concern to all social sciences, culture represents an abstract and extremely complex construct. Attempts by scholars to define culture have resulted in countless definitions. For example, in their seminal study on culture, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) identified more than 160 definitions of culture. Although there is probably no single best definition of culture, the main thread running through the numerous definitions of culture, as noted by Hall (2004) is that the construct of culture appears to have the following characteristics: Culture is multidimensional and interrelated. ... Culture is multidimensional and interrelated. It consists of a number of common and interdependent elements such as beliefs and attitudes, values and norms. All aspects of culture are deeply connected with one another; to change one part is to change the whole. It is the interaction of various elements of culture that results in cultural distinctiveness. Culture is shared by the members of a social group and defines the boundaries between different groups. Culture is adaptive. Culture and its values, though enduring in the short term, do change over time. Cultural meanings are not static, but constantly in motion. Culture continues to evolve through constant embellishment and adaptation to both physical and social environments. Culture includes both conscious and unconscious values, and other meaningful symbols that shape human behaviour. Cultural differences are not necessarily visible, especially to people who remain embedded in one cultural environment. It takes a prolonged stay abroad and mingling with the locals to recognize the numerous and often subtle and hidden differences in various cultures. In sum, culture provides people with a sense of identity and an understanding of appropriate behaviour within a soda1 group. It has pervasive and profound impacts on virtually all aspects of human life. For instance, Harris and Moran (2005, pp. 206-211) have identified ten important areas pertaining to human values, attitudes. and behaviours that are directly influenced by culture: Sense of self and space; Communication and language; Dress and appearance; Food and feeding habits; Time and time consciousness; Relationships; Values and norms; Beliefs and attitudes; Mental process and learning; Work

Issues in Internet Sales Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Issues in Internet Sales Law - Essay Example ld there be a contract and the case goes before the courts, according to the freedom on contract set forth in article 6 will not only enforce it but also to specific trade terms commonly used in international commercial transactions, such as Incoterms. (Butler, 2007) However in the absence of an agreement the CSIG provides for the passing of risk from the seller to the buyer with reference to the price ask or payment of the goods, due to loss or damage, as set forth in Part III Chapter IV: Passing or Risk, Articles 66-70 (Butler, 2007). Should Pretel contemplated not going to court, her lawyer would advise her otherwise because according to Butler (2007), Article 66 states; â€Å"Loss of damage to the goods after the risk has passed to the buyer does not discharge him from his obligation to pay the price, unless the loss or damage is due to an act of omission of the seller.† For the most part according to Steingold (2005), the same legal rules apply when one does business online as when one sells brick and mortar to a customer or by mail (Steingold F.S., 2005). This is possible the attorney went on to say, as long as the federal and state statutes and regulations are not violated. However, a look at the condition of sale on Cheryl’s website as well as the condition British received the goods, will set the stage for the arguments and case studies to be mentioned. Cheryl’s website advertised to prospective sellers read, â€Å"all our toys are boxed in good condition for their age.† It went on further to inform that, â€Å"all goods are sold as seen and although we will wrap up goods, we cannot be held responsible for any loss in transit.† After winning the auction for Death Star and Tie Fighter, the toys arrived damaged and in badly battered packaging at Pritesh address, and promptly requested a refund. The case comes to life because the seller, Cheryl, refused to honor the request for a refund, saying that the risk had rest with the buyer. It seemed that Cheryl

PREPARING THE FEASIBILITY STUDY 2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

PREPARING THE FEASIBILITY STUDY 2 - Essay Example This aids in determining whether or not the project is valuable to the organization. Furthermore, CBA is useful to the organization as it gives them a clear picture of the CBR (cost, benefit and risks) which can also be used in comparing alternate investments that can be rolled out by the organization (FreeTutes 1). CBA determines the benefits as well as the savings anticipated from the system and compares it with estimated project cost. There are several examples of cost lifecycle including; personnel, supplies, equipment, overheads and consultants’ fees (Plowman 1). Costs can also be broadly divided into two broad categories which are development and operating costs. Development costs includes wages and equipment, while operating cost includes supplies and overhead costs. Maintenance also is cost intensive, and should be checked on in the future to avoid any losses from the project. It should be noted that maintenance fees are required to ensure that the machines are up and running at all times (FreeTutes 1). CBA has a three parts associated with it. First, the potential costs to be incurred, secondly, anticipated benefits associated with the proposed actions and finally, the difference to determine if the project is feasible (+results) or non-feasible (-results) (Plowman 1). The procedure to be followed when doing a CBA includes evaluation of the projects’ benefits and cost. To effectively achieve a perfect CBA, the team leader of the project must take into consideration the steps one has to follow. Includes brainstorming the costs and benefits of doing the project. The list of all the costs and benefits should be made available while undertaking the study. They should also think of unexpected cost during the process. The next step involves assigning the monetary value to the cost and these includes the resources required, that of human effort used. This is relatively easy to come up with the estimates. Step three is assigning

News Article Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 2

News Article - Assignment Example very essential in determining the STD that one may be infected with as both viral and bacterial STDs have different treatment methods and some have may have no symptoms, but attack when it is too late. The issue on STD transmission, treatment, and prevention is covered in the biology concepts and connections chapter 27.7. As the article notes, a part from the viral and bacterial STDs, fungi and other organisms can csues some STDs. The article suggests that knowing the cause of the STD would make it much easier to treat, with the most common STD cause being bacteria that affects over 90 million people globally. The article reports that one advantage of bacterial STDs is that they are curable, comparing the viral STDs such as AIDs that has defied any treatment methods. Gonorrhea and syphilis are examples of bacteria transmitted STDs. Therefore, knowing the actual cause of the STD makes it much easier to and prevents cases of misdiagnoses. Lack of enough knowledge about these diseases may be fatal and lead to complications in late stage of some such as syphilis that may attack that nervous system. The article has some scientific facts. The article assesses the main pathogens of many STDs and tries to differentiate them through elaborating on the nature of STDs. Similarly, the article calls for care when dealing with STDs; some are contagious and finally stresses on the need to go for necessary test to determine the actual STD in question. Understanding STDs and the Importance of Regular Testing, Mod to Modern, 24March, 2013 http://www.modtomodern.com/understanding-stds-and-the-importance-of-regular-testing/ (accessed, 12th April,

What are the methods, justifications and impacts of transgression on Essay

What are the methods, justifications and impacts of transgression on the rhetorics of the media South Park - Essay Example The use of rhetoric in various mediums is able to define and express specific approaches to those that are developing specific ideologies. In some instances, the traditional rhetoric is altered because of the expression which is used. This develops a sense of persuasion and understanding in a way that is able to create alternatives. The transgression is used to express opposition to the current political, social and economic environment, while developing personalized theories from the authors that are expressed in each episode. Transgression of Rhetoric of South Park â€Å"South Park† is now recognized as one of the most controversial shows on television. The show aired in 1992 with the â€Å"Spirit of Christmas,† which starred Jesus Christ battling his rival Satan. From this point, the show developed into productions based on Hollywood flicks, political controversies and statements which rebelled against the popular culture in society. The approach is one which continu es to develop with the issues which are currently associated with conflict in society while approaching these with a sense of cultural and political humor. The approach which has been taken by â€Å"South Park† in the last 20 years has developed it as a show noted as an oppositional culture. Instead of defining acceptable in terms of the political and social order, the show transgresses all of the order and opposes every angle with dichotomies and by negotiating the ideologies which are currently accepted in society (Gournelos, 2009: 15). ... The communication which is used is developed by taking apart the popular communication and showing that this exposure is one which does not provide relevant content to the current approaches. By opposing the statements which are made, â€Å"South Park† uses the transgression to make an even stronger statement. This is based on how the exposure in popular culture and in politics is irrelevant and is usually a substitute or metaphor toward an issue which is not being confronted or which does not exist at all. The tactic of oppositional culture then creates a transgression that shows another theory the authors effectively express (Pype, 2011: 114). An example of the oppositional culture that is created and the transgression that shows the irrelevance of the points is from the episode â€Å"Imaginationland† in season 11. This particular show was defined with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that began to take over the popular media. The oppositional culture is one which define d the terrorist attacks as non – existent. The opposition was based on the continuous statement by the main characters of the â€Å"terrorists taking over the imagination† of those that were a part of the area. This moved into a red alert with the fear that was shown by the government of the terrorists taking over all of imagination land with no recovery. The show leads into not only oppositional statements about the terrorist attacks, but shows the clips as controversial because of the absurd which is used, such as seen in figure 1. Figure 1: Imaginationland The opposition which is created is based on rejection of the theories and media of terrorism. This is combined with the discourse and rhetoric which rejects the political and cultural theories about terrorism

News Article Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 2

News Article - Assignment Example very essential in determining the STD that one may be infected with as both viral and bacterial STDs have different treatment methods and some have may have no symptoms, but attack when it is too late. The issue on STD transmission, treatment, and prevention is covered in the biology concepts and connections chapter 27.7. As the article notes, a part from the viral and bacterial STDs, fungi and other organisms can csues some STDs. The article suggests that knowing the cause of the STD would make it much easier to treat, with the most common STD cause being bacteria that affects over 90 million people globally. The article reports that one advantage of bacterial STDs is that they are curable, comparing the viral STDs such as AIDs that has defied any treatment methods. Gonorrhea and syphilis are examples of bacteria transmitted STDs. Therefore, knowing the actual cause of the STD makes it much easier to and prevents cases of misdiagnoses. Lack of enough knowledge about these diseases may be fatal and lead to complications in late stage of some such as syphilis that may attack that nervous system. The article has some scientific facts. The article assesses the main pathogens of many STDs and tries to differentiate them through elaborating on the nature of STDs. Similarly, the article calls for care when dealing with STDs; some are contagious and finally stresses on the need to go for necessary test to determine the actual STD in question. Understanding STDs and the Importance of Regular Testing, Mod to Modern, 24March, 2013 http://www.modtomodern.com/understanding-stds-and-the-importance-of-regular-testing/ (accessed, 12th April,

Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936 War Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936 War - Essay Example However, the real skill of Pirandello in War lies in his ability to show to the readers the actual human side of these characters, which does not understand the claims of the country and the King and which mourns and bereaves the loss of the loved ones. The message of the story is that the emotional side of the human existence is simply unaware of the artificial concepts like national pride, courage and bravery, and tends to miss and bereave the loved one’s lost to such noble sounding and lofty causes. The fat man in the story asserts that, â€Å"it is natural at their age (boys) should consider the love of their country (I am speaking of decent boys, of course) even greater than the love of us (Pirandello 109)?† While saying so, the fat man as a father sounds to be very matter of fact and committed to the larger claims of nationalism and the duty towards one’s country. While saying so, the fat man appears to be very successful in suppressing the emotional side o f his personality to support his so called loyalty towards his country. However, once â€Å"the woman in deep mourning (Pirandello 107)† poses a simple question â€Å"Then†¦ is your son really dead (Pirandello 109)?† the entire idea of national pride simply gives way. What emerges is a father who is deeply sad and disturbed at the death of his son. â€Å"†¦ At the silly, incongruous question- he suddenly realized that his son was really dead- gone forever- forever (Pirandello 109).† A simple question by a grieved mother simply unravels the hollowness inherent in the notions of country, national pride, and selfless sacrifices, to show to the readers the sad, bloody and ruthless side of war. Certainly, the claims of the country look smaller compared to the more pressing claims of the human heart. In War, Pirandello uses the third person point of view. This approach allows the writer to bring out the typical waste and tragedy of war, by extending to the r eaders an insight into the emotional confusion and anxiety of the characters. To begin with, the omniscient point of view makes the readers think that they are witnessing a simple conversation taking place in a group, during a war. Almost all the travelers in that second class carriage are shown to be talking about the young men from their families, who have been sent to the war. Yet, the very same omniscient narrator brings down these displays of patriotism and national cause, by bringing out the emotional confusion gripping the characters. All the men in the carriage try to score over each other by declaring the magnitude of sacrifices made be their family to the national cause, to be greater than others. To one gentleman’s claim that â€Å"You should thank God that your son is only leaving now for the front. Mine has been sent there the first day of the war (Pirandello 108)† the second passenger responds that â€Å"I have two sons and three nephews at the front (Pi randello 108).† In this competition for sacrifice and selflessness, these men simply seem to be unaware of the pain of losing their family members. This very emotional confusion shows how much emotionally disturbed they are. The characterization by Pirandello in the story is very appropriate and masterfully brings out the superiority of human feelings over artificial concepts of patriotism an

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay Example for Free

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworths romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keatss great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and womens, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwoods Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. - Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.