Literary Terms Modern Essay free essay sample

The aim of this glossary is not to set in concrete words that are constantly changing and evolving, but rather to help students develop the critical tools and vocabulary with which to understand and talk about poetry. Since poets themselves often disagree about the meaning and importance of terms such as free verse, rhythm, lyric, structure, and the prose poem, and since control of literary discourse is part of each new generation’s struggle for poetic ascendancy, it seems only reasonable and appropriate for the student to view all efforts to define critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a healthy degree of scepticism. This mini-glossary reflects the continuing debate between traditional metrics and free verse, and between differing conceptions of the poet’s craft and role in society. A fuller and more lively debate may often be found in the notes on the poets and in the poetics section. We will write a custom essay sample on Literary Terms Modern Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In a number of instances, I have been less concerned to offer hard-andfast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds certain critical terms. The following list is by no means complete, but is intended to aid and provoke, to stimulate discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more comprehensive sources. I have made use of and recommend highly A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957), by M. H. Abrams; the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974), edited by Alex Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr; and The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard. G. G. ccent The emphasis, or stress, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, duration, and the pressures of grammar and syntax. While all syllables are accented or stressed in speech and in poetry, we tend to describe the less dominant as unstressed or unaccented syllables. In metrical verse, accented and unaccented (stressed and unstressed) syllables are easily identified. Robert Burns’s famous line â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose† might be described as an iambic tetrameter line, with four feet each consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. However, it can be argued that such a reading trivializes and effectively undercuts the emotional power of the poetic utterance, and that the sense of the line dictates a slightly different reading, which locates three strong stresses or accents in the second half of the line: â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose†. See also FEET and METER. 2 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th alexandrine A twelve-syllable line, usually consisting of six iambic feet. alliteration A common poetic device that involves the repetition of the same sound or sounds in words or lines in close proximity. Alliteration was most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon poems such as â€Å"The Wanderer† and â€Å"The Seafarer†, which Earle Birney imitates in his satire of Toronto, â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street†: Dawndrizzle ended dampness steams from Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste Faded house patterns hoary and finicky unfold stuttering stick like a phonograph While such intense piling up of consonants was once a common mnemonic device (an aid to memory), changing literary fashions have, to a large extent, rendered such self-conscious exhibitions too blunt and obvious for the contemporary ear, except when used for comic purposes. Exceptions include rap poetry and spoken word, both of which make extensive use of alliteration and rhyme. Nevertheless, the repetition, or rhyming, of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a still a central component in constructing the soundscape of the poem, just as the repetition and variation of image and idea enrich the intellectual and sensory fabric. The most talented practitioners will be listening backwards and forwards as they compose, picking up and repeating both images and sounds that give the poem a rich and interlocking texture. See ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY. allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary references are common in poetry, though, to be successful, they require an audience with shared experience and values. Biblical or classical allusions, for example, or Canadian political allusions, might be totally unrecognizable to an Asian Muslim reader. Although readers soon tire of verbal exhibitionism, they still expect a degree of allusion to challenge them and to stimulate curiosity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s â€Å"Junkman’s Obgligato† assumes the reader’s familiarity with both T. S. Eliot’s â€Å"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock† and W. B. Yeats’s â€Å"Lake Isle of Innisfree† for a full appreciation of the ironic counterpointing of down-and-out urban images and those of an idealized pastoral landscape. At the same time, the poem also overflows with topical and literary allusions from the junkyard of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American culture. ambiguity Words and the texts they inhabit are susceptible of a variety of interpetations. While a word may denote one thing, usage and context often bring various connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the poem. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his essay â€Å"The Obscurity of the Poet† (in Poetry and the Age, 1953), what we speak of as literature ranges from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its seven levels of meaning, to Reader’s Digest, which, Glossary of Poetic Terms 3 like pulp fiction and greeting-card verse, barely manages half a level of meaning. Sophisticated readers not only enjoy, but also demand a certain level of ambiguity, or mystery, in poems. They find such ambiguity in Shakespeare, who loved puns, double-entendre, and various kinds of wordplay; they find it also in such early Moderns as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, who were influenced by seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets, for both of whom the poem retains something of the quality of a riddle. As a result of declining audiences, a general trend towards a democratization of the arts, and the pressure of new kinds of psychological and political content, the pendulum of taste since mid-century swung towards less ambiguity. While puns and worldplay still add to our sense of the fecundity and depth of poetic expression, contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be intended only as a rose; and they tend to avoid the use of obscure and esoteric references. See Robert Graves’ Poetic Unreason (1925) and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one: / ? ? ? /. See METRE. anaphora The rhetorical device of using the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation. See Ginsberg’s â€Å"Howl† and Cohen’s â€Å"You Have the Lovers† and â€Å"style†. apostrophe A literary device of â€Å"turning away†, usually to address a famous person or idea. In the classical Greek plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the chorus would march across the stage in one direction chanting various stanzas, or strophes, and then reverse their motion in an anti-strophe, or verbal about-face. In twentiethcentury poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be used ironically, or for romantic or satirical purposes. rchetype When you sense that a literary character, situation, or idea has significance far beyond its specific, or particular, occasion in the poem, you are probably in the presence of an archetype. In an essay called â€Å"Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype† (English Institute Essays, 1950), Northrop Frye says: â€Å"By archetype I mean an element in a work of literature, whether a character, an image, a nar rative formula, or an idea, which can be assimilated into a larger unifying pattern. † Psychologist C. G. Jung, in an essay called â€Å"The Problem of Types in Poetry† (1923), gives another dimension to the matter: â€Å"The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon, man, or process, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever creative fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject these images to a closer examination, we discover them to be the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same type. 4 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th Sibling rivalry, the betrayed or rejected lover, the innocent abroad, the rebel, the fool, the seasonal cycles of rebirth, fertility, and death, the enchanter or enchantress—all are common characters or situations in literature that can deepen our appreciation of a work of art. However, the search for universal symbols can be reductive in the reading of a poem ; so, too, can excessive efforts to make a work symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on psychology. ssonance Also called vocalic rhyme, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel sounds within a line (or lines), a stanza, or the overall poem. Listen to the long vowels conjure expiration and death in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Greater Love†: â€Å"As theirs whom none now hear, / Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed. † Assonance is most obvious among words beginning with an open, or initial, vowel (open / eyes / eat / autumn), but equally powerful as an internal rhyming device (tears / mean, thine / divine). allad A popular short narrative folk song, usually transmitted orally, and making use of various forms of shorthand, including truncated action, psychological and historical sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and easy memorizing. A direct link can be drawn between such early folk so ngs as â€Å"Barbara Ellen† and â€Å"The Skye Boat Song†, country western music, and such contemporary ballads such as â€Å"Frankie and Johnny†, Leonard Cohen’s â€Å"Suzanne†, and Stan Rogers’ â€Å"The Lockkeeper†. lank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse has been a staple since it was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540 in his translations of Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakepeare and Christopher Marlowe both used blank verse in their plays; in poetry, Milton used it for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Wordsworth for The Prelude, and T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. Eliot claimed in Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (1930) that the decasyllabic (or ten-syllable) line was â€Å"intractably poetic† yet had many of the capacities of prose. As such, blank verse could be said to be a precursor of the prose poem, which seems more aligned with ordinary speech and the counting of syllables than with poetic meter. broken rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to fulfill the requirements of rhyme: Madame had learned to waltz before the charge of falsehood had been laid . . . cadence When poet John Ciardi describes the poem as â€Å"a countermotion across a silence†, he comes close to defining cadence, which refers to the pattern of melody established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of time slowed down Glossary of Poetic Terms 5 and palpable. While cadence originally referred to regular traditional poetic measures, in which syllables and feet could be counted and identified, the term has come to be used more in relation to irregular patterning, where stress and accent are much looser and determined primarily by phrasing and syntax. Cadence is what Ezra Pound was referring to when he spoke of composing with the musical phrase instead of the metronome. Also worth reading is Dennis Lee’s essay â€Å"Cadence, Country, Silence†, in which he employs the term broadly and with greater cultural import. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, RHYTHM, and SONG. caesura This term is used to refer to any substantial break or pause within the line, though it is most often found in lines of five or more feet. The caesura was a regular feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating units within the line, bluntly drawn in Earle Birney’s â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street† or more subtly in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Arms and the Boy†: Let the boy try along this bayonet blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. anto While in the twentieth century the term is often used to mean, simply, a song or a ballad, the canto was originally a subdivision of epic or narrative, which provided both a simpler organizing principle for the creator of the long poem and a muchneeded respite for the singer during delivery. Ezra Pound draws on both meanings of the word when he calls his great epic-length series of meditations The Cantos. conceit When a METAPHOR or other FIGURE OF SPEECH is extended over many lines, it is called a conceit. oncreteness Concrete nouns referring to objects, such as lip, flint, hubcap, gunbarrel, wheel, smoke, sugar, and fingernail, seem capable of making their appeal through the senses. So, too, verbs, such as run, scream, chop, and lick. Concrete words activate the imagination and anchor poetry in the world of particulars. A gifted poet such as Samuel Johnson can use abstract words in such as way as to make them feel concrete, as in the line â€Å"stern famine guards the solitary coast†, where the abstract idea is given the quality of ternness, the action of guarding, and a spatial location. e. e. cummings concretized abstractions in much the same way: â€Å"love is more thicker than forget, / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail†. concrete poetry This name was first applied in the twentieth century to works that exploit the visual and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary â€Å"visual puns† back to a seventeenth-century â€Å"shape-poem† whose typography was de- 6 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th ployed to create the image of an altar. Since so much of the power of poetry is derived from sound—from rhythmical patterns, the residue of recurring vowels and consonants—it’s hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component syllables and letters, downplaying the intellectual dimension of poetry and emphasizing, instead, the psychic energy to be found in the acoustic dimension of language. See the notes on, and poems and poetics by, bpNichol, as well as An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), edited by Emmett Williams, ed. consonance Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with differing vowels: winter / water / went / waiter. See, for example, Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Strange Meeting†, which proceeds with a series of consonantal half rhymes: escaped / scooped, groined / groaned, moan / mourn. content The substance or subject matter of a poem, as opposed to its style or manner, is what we usually refer to when we speak of content. But content cannot, properly, be discussed apart from form. A poet may begin to write a poem, broadly speaking, about war, love, or beach-combing; however, as soon as his or her thought begins to take shape as poetic language, as form, it is so transformed by the process that it bears little or no relation to the original impulse. Ideas or anecdotes that find their way into a poem are not the poem’s content, though they are certainly germaine to its overall impact. In fact, everything in the poem contributes to what we might call its content. Poets have reacted strongly to attempts to oversimplify their work or reduce it to a generalization or two. Archibald MacLeish argued that â€Å"A poem should not mean, but be. † Most poets believe that the poem is its own meaning. Robert Creeley insisted that content and form are indivisible, and rejected â€Å"any descriptive act . . . which leaves the attention outside the poem†. It’s probably most useful to stop asking what a poem means and begin to consider, as John Ciardi suggests in his book title, How Does A Poem Mean? If you begin to examine the formal and technical elements in a poem, the ways in which certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to arrive at a point of understanding and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY. couplet The couplet—two lines of verse, usually rhymed—is one of the most common and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry. The couplet’s brevity encourages a pithy, epigrammatic quality; its two-line split provides a fulcrum which lends itself to argumentative summary and generalization, as in Alexander Pope’s â€Å"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man†. Closed couplets such as Pope’s or Dryden’s, which use mostly iambic pentameter lines and complete their thought with the final end-rhyme, are also called heroic couplets, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century English neoclassical period. Glossary of Poetic Terms 7 The couplet has many uses, as a concentrating unit within the poem or as a separate stanza form. Shakespeare used the couplet to conclude his sonnets forcefully. See also GHAZAL. dactyl A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables: / ? ? ? /. See FOOT and METER. diction Word choice. The French poet Verlaine felt the need to remind us that poems are made of words, not ideas. This is useful to think about, since poems are often spoken and written of as if they were chunks of autobiography, representations of nature, or little treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. Words are magical. When nature, experience, or ideas—any of which may give rise to a poem—pass through the rucible of language, they are transformed, as surely as white light is split into a spectrum of colour when it passes through a prism. Words, similarly, slow and alter those non-linguistic elements that endeavour to use or pass through them; that’s one reason poems, stories, and other verbal texts give us the impression of time slowe d down, of felt time. Words and the ideas they carry fly rather quickly through the brain, but when you speak or hear them you become aware of being immersed in another element, like a diver suddenly encountering water. These considerations are central to postmodern poetics, which seeks to remind us that the poem is not a mirror of nature or a window through which we see the natural world, or so-called reality, but rather a verbal reality in its own right. When the word, or language in general, is foregrounded, poetry ceases to be simply a vehicle for conveying pictures of, and passing on information about, quotidian reality; it aspires, instead, to the condition of other arts such as music and painting, where representation and referentiality are not the only, or even the primary, concern. In a sense, words are the poet’s paint, his or her primary medium. Coleridge once spoke of poetry as â€Å"the best words in the best order†. He was using the word best in the sense of most appropriate in a specific context, not with the idea that certain kinds of words are forbidden or inherently better or worse than others, though the choice would have its own moral significance. Words are dirty with meaning and can never be washed clean; we use them for ordinary discourse, to sell lawnmowers, to deliver sermons, and to make political speeches. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, using the Archimedean metaphor: Give me the right word or phrase and I will move the world. M. H. Abrams reminds us that diction can be described as â€Å"abstract or concrete, Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, colloquial or formal, technical or common, literal or figurative†, to which we might add archaic, plain, elevated. See CONCRETENESS and WORD, and also Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1952) and Winnifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use (1962). 8 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th idactic While classical and neo-classical poetics argue that poetry should both teach and delight, in didactic poems the teaching function tends to override the imaginative. Such works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeats’s distinction, that his argument with the world produced only rhetoric, whereas his argument with himself resulted in poetry. And yet all great works are overtly or covertly didactic, whether they teach us indirectly and subliminal ly through the senses (by way of imagery and patterns of sound) or by arguing transparently. And, of course, all art, while it may not be a blatant call to arms, is an effort to persuade us to view the world differently. dimetre A line of verse consisting of two feet. dissonance An effect of harshness or discordance in a poem, often achieved by combining rhythmical irregularity and a jarring concentration of consonants. distich A COUPLET. dramatic monologue Unlike the soliloquy, in which a character on stage reveals his or her inner thoughts by â€Å"thinking aloud†, the dramatic monologue assumes and addresses an audience of one or more people. In the process of addresing this audience, the speaker of the dramatic monologue manages to confess, or simply reveal, a character flaw, a dread deed, or an impending crisis. Robert Browning pioneered the form in poems such as â€Å"My Last Duchess†, â€Å"Andrea del Sarto†, and â€Å"Fra Lippo Lippi†, but it has been used by Tennyson in â€Å"Ulysses†, by Eliot in â€Å"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock†, and by many contemporary writers. duration The length of acoustic or phonetic phenomena such as syllables. According to linguists, the sounds we produce when we speak have pitch, loudness, quality, and duration. Aside from grammatical and syntactical considerations, the pacing in, or the speed at which we read, a poem is largely determined by the length of time it takes to enunciate syllables, lines, and stanzas. Short vowels speed up the poem; long vowels slow it down. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG. elegy Originally a specifically metered Greek or Roman form, the elegy has come to refer generally to a sustained meditation on mutability or a formal lament on the death of a specific person. The conventional pastoral elegy included a rural setting, with shepherds and flowers (all nature mourning), an invocation to the muse, a procession, and a final consolation. Classics such as Milton’s â€Å"Lycidas†, Thomas Gray’s â€Å"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard†, and Shelley’s â€Å"Adonais† are clearly the chief source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W. H. Auden’s â€Å"In Memory of W. B. Yeats†, Michael Ondaatje’s â€Å"Letters Other Worlds†, Seamus Heaney’s â€Å"Requiem for the Croppies†, and so many of the poems of Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Lorna Crozier and Michael Longley. In fact, one Glossary of Poetic Terms 9 might safely say that the elegiac tone is dominant in English poetry from Beowulf to the present. enjambment A means of escaping the limitations and rigidity of the end-stopped line or closed couplet, enjambment occurs when a sentence or thought carries over from one line to the next. The enjambed line, with its greater freedom and flexibility, has served to focus a great deal of attention on the position of line-breaks in twentiethcentury poetry. See LINE-BREAKS and also Al Purdy’s poem â€Å"The Cariboo Horses†. pic While the epic, or heroic, poem such as Homer’s Iliad and Odsyssey or the AngloSaxon classic Beowulf—each with its elevated style, tribal or national struggles, invocations to the muse, occasional use of the supernatural, and cast of important, or exalted, figures—belongs to an earlier age, it has not lost its appeal to poets of later ages. From Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s F? r ie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dryden’s and Pope’s mock epic satires to such contemporary long poems as Pound’s The Cantos, W. C. Williams’s Paterson, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or extended, poem has provided an alternative to the limited scope, self-directedness and, perhaps, too intense heat of the lyric. See LONG POEM and NARRATIVE. epigram A short, witty poem or statement, seldom more than four lines long, whose form dates back to Roman epigrammatist Martial. Alexander Pope’s poems are full of condensed witticisms that might be displayed as separate epigrams: â€Å"To err is human; to forgive, divine†. ye-rhyme An eye-rhyme features words or syllables that look alike but are pronounced differently: come / home; give / contrive. feminine ending While it may no longer be politically correct, this term is still used in criticism to refer to a line that ends with one or more unstressed syllables. Far from suggesting weakness or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloquial, and their in formality and irregularity have been especially useful in dramatic blank verse. feminine rhyme A two-syllable (or disyllabic) rhyme, usually a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: witness / fitness. igurative language When language is heightened so that it moves beyond ordinary, or literal, usage, it is said to be figurative. These figures, figures of speech, or tropes (â€Å"turns†), as they are sometimes called, include simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, paradox, and pun. An extended figure of speech is called a CONCEIT. 10 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th figure A group of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage. Consider, for example, Gloucester’s comment in Richard III: â€Å"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York†. oot In A Poet’s Dictionary: Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), William Packard provides an interesting account of the origin of the metrical foot: When the Greeks described poetry as â€Å"numbers†, they were alluding to certain conspicuous elements of verse that could be counted off: â€Å"feet† were strong dance steps that could be measured out in separate beats of a choral ode or strophe or refrain. These â€Å"feet† could then be scanned for repeating pattern s of syllable quantities, either long or short, within strophes and antistrophes of a chorus. Greek metrics, then, did not derive from accent or stress but rather from the elongation required in the pronunciation of certain vowels and syllable lengths. Instead of the quantitative designation of long and short syllables, we now use the terms stressed and unstressed, or accented and unaccented to describe the components of the poetic foot, which is essentially a group of two or more syllables that form a metrical unit in a line of verse. The most common feet are the iambic (/ ? ? /), an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (delight); the trochaic (/ ? /), a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable (action); the anapestic (/ ? ? ? /), two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one (interrupt); the dactylic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (comforting); and the spondaic (/ ? ? /), two stressed syllables (handbook). Other feet include the pyrrhic (/ ? ? /), one or more unstressed syllables; the amphibrachic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed, one stressed, one unstressed; the bacchic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed followed by two stressed; and the chorimabic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed, two unstressed, and a stressed. See METER. form Form in poetry is no less intriguing and no less difficult to define and describe than form in the other arts. We can easily identify obvious elements of form, such as rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, stanza-lengths, and traditional modes like the sonnet and sestina; but the intricacies of language, timing, syntax, counterpoint, verbal play—those elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a poem—require some training and considerable attention. However, in an essay called â€Å"Admiration of Form: Reflections on Poetry and the Novel† (Brick / 34), poet and critic C. K. Williams offers some useful thoughts, reminding us that, among other things, form and content are inextricably allied: The important thing about form, though, is its artificiality. In English poetry, the historically dominant iambic foot is closely related to the actual movement of the voice in our language between stressed and unstressed syllables, but the regularity of the iambic line, and the five beats of the pentameter, for instance, are purely conventional. In irregular, or â€Å"free†, verse, where the Glossary of Poetic Terms 11 cadences are not regular, and not counted, it is what Galway Kinnell has called the â€Å"rhythmic surge†, which defies and controls the movement of language across its grid of artifice; the line in free verse becomes a much more defining factor of formal organization than in more arithmetical versetraditions. The crucial thing about form is that its necessities, though they are conventions, precede in importance the expressive or analytical demands of the work. Although a poem may to a greater or less degree seem to be driven by its content, in fact all the decisions a poet makes about a work finally have to be made in reference to the conventions which have been accepted as defining the formal nature of that work. If a ompelling experience is conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophical speculation occurs in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an intricate and apparently entirely engrossing narrative adventure, these are secondary, although simultaneous with, the formal commitments of the work, and they must be embodied within the terms of those commitments, although in the end these almost playful divisions of an experienitial continuum, whether in the structures of a musical mode, or the pulse and surge of a poetic line, will mysteriously serve to intensify the emo tion and the meaning which the work evokes. I should mention, perhaps, that the dour and puritanical and ferociously self-serving â€Å"new formalism† has nothing to do with the notion of form I am elaborating here: the new formalism is rather a kind of conceptual primitivism which seems to gather most of its propulsive force from a distorted and jealous vision of the literary marketplace; it calls for a return to the good old safe and easily accounted-for systems of verse, with counted meters, rhyme, and so forth. All despite the generation over the last few centuries, from Smart to Blake through Whitman and countless others, of an enormous amount of significant poetry in non-traditional forms; and despite the fact that many verse-systems in the world require neither rhyme nor strictly counted meter, and despite the practice of many modern poets, who have been quite content to use whatever verse-form fitted the poem they were composing. One would not want to sacrifice either Rilke’s â€Å"Duino Elegies† or Lowell’s â€Å"Life Studies†, just to mention two poets who worked in both systems. In his essay â€Å"Rebellion and Art† (in The Rebel, 1956), Albert Camus argues that â€Å"A work in which the content overflows the form, or in which form drowns the content, only bespeaks an unconvinced and unconvincing unity. . . . Great style is invisible stylization, or rather stylization incarnate. † See PROSODY, STRUCTURE, and STYLE, and also Denise Levertovâ⠂¬â„¢s â€Å"Notes on Organic Form† in the Poetics section. free verse Poetry written with a persistently irregular meter (which is not to say without rhythm) and often in irregular line-lengths. The King James translations of 12 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th the Psalms and Song of Songs are often held up as models of how dynamic nonmetrical poetry can be. Ezra Pound advised composing with the rhythms of the speaking-voice sounding in your ear, rather than the regular beat of the metronome; Robert Frost insisted that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net; and T. S. Eliot claimed that no verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job. All three were concerned to emphasize that, whether regular or irregular, the music of poetry bears close scrutiny, for it accounts for much of our pleasure as readers and, far from being incidental or decorative, is fundamental to our total experience of the poem. See LINES-BREAKS, METER, MUSIC, RHYTHM, PROSODY, and SONG. ghazal A Middle Eastern lyric, most commonly associated with the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. The ghazal consists of five to twelve closed couplets, often using the same rhyme. These seemingly disconnected couplets about love and wine are held together not by a narrative or rhetorical thread, but by a heightened tone or emotional intensity. Not surprisingly, the apparently random or non-rational structuring of the ghazal has proven attractive to twentieth-century poets as diverse as as John Thompson (Stilt Jack), Phyllis Webb (Water Light), and Adrienne Rich. hexameter A line of verse consisting of six feet. hyperbole A figure of speech that involves extremes of exaggeration: big as a house, dumb as a doornail. ambic pentameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. Iambic pentameter is considered the poetic rhythm most basic to English speech. See FOOT and METER. image Ezra Pound described the image as â€Å"that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time†. Other poets have spoken of images as concentrations of linguistic energy directed at the senses. The image is a controversial term, which has often been used to m ean, simply, a verbal picture; however, the poetic image may also conjure things, events, and people in our minds by appealing to senses other than sight. Images are so central to language that, in the line a brown cow leapt over the fence, which constitutes a composite image, we also find four discrete images: a cow, a fence, the act of leaping, and brownness. Imagery, along with prosody, is one of the two central ingredients of poetry; and its evocative power cannot be divorced from the texture of sounds through which it is delivered. Specific images seem more likely to stimulate the senses than images that are generic (tree, animal, machine). The difference between a line such as â€Å"I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree† and the following—â€Å"Don’t hang your bones from the branch / of that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahua’s waiting in the Daimler†Ã¢â‚¬â€has as much to do with diction and specificity of image as with the difference between metrical and non-metrical verse. Glossary of Poetic Terms 13 Imagism A poetic movement in England and the US between 1909 and 1917, which reacted against the discursiveness, sentimentality, and philosophizing of late nineteenth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image.

The Pay Gap between Genders

The Pay Gap between Genders Free Online Research Papers The Pay Gap between Genders Back in 1960s, President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, making it illegal to pay men and women employees in the same establishment different wages for substantially equal work. Even though federal laws protect women against discrimination, a pay gap persists. Women earn less than men in general. According to a study, â€Å"women employed full-time earn only 76.6 cents on average for each dollar earned by males by 2003† (Hughes 264). Masculine â€Å"ideal worker† norm lives in most of the high-reward occupations such as engineering and medicines. In contrast, female employees usually take the subordinate roles in the workforce, and these positions usually provide lower salaries. This inequality has been socially constructed, and it is caused by many forces including occupational segregation, â€Å"glass ceiling† and family responsibility. Men and women tend to work in different occupations and wages differ substantially according to the gender composition of the occupation. In order to write this paper, I did a little research at salary.com. The average yearly salary of an engineer in California is about $70,000 comparing to the average salary of a registered nurse is only about $55,000. I also find out that a firefighter earns far more than a high school teacher; a corporate lawyer earns more than a family lawyer. When I mention the terms â€Å"engineers†, â€Å"firefighters†, and â€Å"corporate lawyers†, people will automatically have a male figure in their mind to match up these occupations. This phenomenon is caused by one form of stereotype called occupational segregation in the labor market. In other words, occupational segregation is the concentration of a similar group of people (males, females, whites, blacks, etc) in a particular job. For the same reason, when I mention â€Å"nursesâ⠂¬ , â€Å"school teachers†, and â€Å"family lawyers†, people naturally imagine a female face to match up these occupations since these positions are usually dominated by women. From these finding, I conclude that male dominated occupations usually provide higher pay than female occupied positions. Despite the different distribution of male and female workers in the labor market, a few women change their fates by challenging some careers traditionally dominated by male. They obtain success through market experiences and educations. Nevertheless, there is always a â€Å"glass ceiling† which means a set of invisible barriers that prevent women from further advancing. For example, my aunt’s friend, Nancy, entered a company as an accountant right after she graduated from business school in the University of Los Angeles. Five years later, her working experiences only allowed her to climb up a little higher in the managerial hierarchy with only 15 percent wage rise. It is true that there are many jobs that classified as executive, administrative, and managerial were held by women, but only a very few of these women were at the very top. Their advancement was limited by a set of invisible wall. The absence of women in the top management level is a result of gender discri mination. Even though they had the qualified education level and experience, sadly, they are not able to break through the â€Å"glass ceiling† to reach the uppermost level in institutional hierarchy. Some people argue that women work fewer hours than men because they need more time to take care of their families, especially if the family consists of more than one child. Women who have at least a child are less likely to have a full-time career than those who are childless. This is what happens to my mother. My mother told me that she never worked in a full-time job after she gave born my brother and me. When my brother and I were still infants, she even quitted her job to be full-time taking care of both of us. Many working mothers choose to be part-time workers in order to balance their family responsibilities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 29.7 percent of custodial mothers were part-time workers in 2001. With nearly one-third of the mothers bringing in less income, this will explain more about the pay gap between male and female workers. In addition, working mothers are no longer free to take on time-consuming tasks or are less motivated because of their family responsib ilities. Nevertheless, the high-pay positions usually concentrate on the top of management such as board executive in a corporation, and the tasks are always considered time-consuming. Therefore, married women or working mothers are usually excluded from those high-paying jobs. In conclusion, the trend of pay gap between male and female is the result of many forces. Primarily, the occupations that are dominated by male have higher pay than those occupied by female. Secondly, the invisible â€Å"glass ceiling† has become a hand string to women’s success in the top and has kept them away from promotions. Thirdly, the family responsibilities carried by women are much heavier than those carried by men, which have affected women’s status of their work. As a woman myself, I feel this pay gap is a form of gender discrimination and it needs to be changed immediately. We want more women to participate in male-dominated occupations. In order to do so, we need to have more female students to major in areas such as engineering, architecture, and management. We can break through the â€Å"glass ceiling† by the means of educations and practices. I think employers will see our motivations and strengths through hardworking. Moreover, as many goo d quality daycare centers emerge, working mothers can take a break from babysitting so that they can have more time and focus to develop a full time career. To narrow down the pay gap between man and women is going to be time-consuming and challenging since this gap has been socially constructed for hundreds of years; yet, women are commendable to be the victors in this long run. Research Papers on The Pay Gap between GendersResearch Process Part OneInfluences of Socio-Economic Status of Married Males19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraPersonal Experience with Teen PregnancyMoral and Ethical Issues in Hiring New EmployeesHip-Hop is ArtTrailblazing by Eric AndersonComparison: Letter from Birmingham and CritoThe Fifth HorsemanStandardized Testing

Psychological and cultural insights Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Psychological and cultural insights - Essay Example The binary nature of the ethnic perception has created two distinct cultural segments â€Å"the east and the west†. The segments are not only geographically separated by political borders but are also diversified in terms of psychographic nature of the residing people ((Luo, 2008). On a geographical perspective, the western countries include the nations like the UK, USA, France, Germany, etc and on contrary the eastern countries encompasses Mainland China, India, UAE, Thailand, etc. Although the geographic distinction is quite apparent, however, that is not the only rationale for diversity of perception. According to The Hofstede Centre (2015), the cultural practices vary largely across national borders. The people bear different psychological profile and engage in different social practices, which is a clear reflection of psychographic diversity.Eng and Bogaert, (2010) mentioned that the psychographic profile of an individual largely influences his perception of a particular stimulus. To put it simply, two individuals belonging from different cultural background is most likely to react differently to a same stimulus. This theory stands corrected in the Watson and Wright’s (2000) study of ethnocentric consumer behaviour. A consumer’s perception of a particular brand is largely influenced by his ethnicity. His country of origin and his cultural background plays a major role in deciding the perceived value of a brand. This is mostly because of the fact that an individual designs his perception based on his surroundings.

Research Diary 5 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Research Diary 5 - Essay Example I therefore, think that by correctly addressing the letter and using language that is non-offending and is able to send the desired message are important principles of writing business letters. Using rhetoric approach in business writing has emerged as critical issue because it exploits the tenets of human psychology to ensure that the basic purpose of writing business letter is accomplished with high success. Rhetoric enables individuals to use persuasive language that adds to the effectiveness of written discourse. According to Aristotle, the three appeals of rhetoric are ethos, pathos and logos (2011). Ethos conveys writer’s credibility, pathos appeals emotionally and logos use rationalization to emphasize their points. The three paradigms of writing are therefore vital ingredients that significantly lend credibility to the writer and the written discourse. Consequently, business writing exploits rhetoric principles to communicate effectively one’s intended message to persuade the reader and exhort desired response. These are essential benefits of rhetoric approach in business writing. The various methods of persuasion become highly crucial imperatives as they tend to provide information and send appeal in manner that clearly rationalizes the issues so that reader is convinced. If the business letter lacks conviction and strong logical explanations, the reader is not able to understand the points raised and fails to respond appropriately or as desired. Thus, the very purpose of writing business letter fails and writer is not able to achieve his/her goal. As such, effective business writing becomes important for communicating the desired message in manner that requires least effort in understanding the core issue by the reader/ audience. The success of project completion relies heavily on effective teamwork and strong communication channels within team members.

Masculinity and Violence in Fight Club and Drowning Tucson Essay

Masculinity and Violence in Fight Club and Drowning Tucson - Essay Example However, when â€Å"a generation of men† is raised by women, there is no â€Å"male example† (Palahniuk 50) to follow and males only have that urge for liberalization and the need to ascertain their masculinity. One can see that the Tyler in Fight Club is the real macho man who tries to struggle away from the feminized Narrator, or, in other words, Tyler is the real male self of the Narrator. In fact, what Palahniuk points out and what the reader feels is that real masculinity involves surplus aggressiveness and sexual and emotional desires. In the real society, most males are forced to employ surplus repression to look civilized. Thus, there are institutions of male bonding which offer them a way to unleash this hidden aggression in the safest possible way. They engage in fist fight in such institutions and enjoy a sense of power. In the novel, the Narrator is a person who has lost his sense of manhood. He does not have a name, lives alone, and is unable to make health y relations with others. This extreme pain and alienation makes the real man in him struggle away and become Tyler who wants to become the leader of the â€Å"space monkeys† (Palahniuk 132).... The more comfortable the Narrator becomes with Marla, the more detached he gets with the destructive plans made by Tyler. Finally, by the time he admits he likes her, the Narrator is in total contradiction with Tyler, and eliminates him (Palahniuk 15). However, the men who are still isolated continue demanding the return of the anarchic Tyler. At least the Narrator realizes Marla is not the reason behind anarchy. Thus, one can see that there are various factors Palahniuk tries to point out as the reasons behind violence. The first one is the lack of role models of maleness for the new generation which is often brought up in a feminized society. The feminist era took away everything that is good as the virtues of femaleness and men of the post-feminist period were left with nothing more than mere ambiguity regarding masculinity and parenting (Palahniuk 141). The second important factor is the ‘homophobia’ developed by men in a patriarchal society. It is admitted facts tha t many hate crimes occur as a result of doubts over sexual orientation. In Fight Club, the Narrator gives Angel Face a severe beating to see that his beauty is reduced because the Narrator hates the favoritism Tayler shows towards him. (Palahniuk 96) Evidently, males have their own ways of measuring masculinity. To illustrate, in Fight Club, it is seen that the ability to conquer a woman is an important aspect of deciding ones maleness. As a result, there is a kind of rift between males that arises out of this competition to win women, and in the novel, there is a great degree of tension between Tayler and the Narrator in this regard. (Palahniuk 113) Thus, it becomes evident that men’s lives are structured around aggressiveness and power relations. The highly phallic notion of masculinity

The Great Gatsby Analysis

The Great Gatsby Analysis As a profound commentary on the American dream and a reflection of the period in which it was written, F. Scott Fitzgeralds American classic, The Great Gatsby, remains an enduring work in the American literature canon. Though the novel is relatively simple in terms of plot, the symbolism and intricacies related to that plot provide meaning and context to the reader (Gross and Gross 5). Articulating these intricacies and the basic mechanisms of the plot, however, are holistically tied to the point of view from which the story is told. The entire story is told through the eyes of the 29 year old Nick Carraway. As a result, the reader is left to determine if Nicks account is romanticized or if it is told with the necessary realism to be considered unbiased and therefore taken at face value. The process of this meaning making requires an analysis of Carraway and the way in which his point of view is expressed throughout the story. The nature of the narrative, however, provides other clue s useful to making such decisions. In this capacity, Carraway also sometimes switches to the third person, which allows for other perspectives to be considered by other characters interacting throughout the novel. Based on Carraways perception alone, Gatsby is presented as a mysterious and tragically romantic figure. This point of view is passed on to the reader; however, the addition of the third person elements also allow for commentary by other characters. This balancing process used by the author, demonstrates Gatsby for what he truly was, a complicated, tragic, romantic figure that was consumed with becoming what he thought constituted success in his respective era. Also having flaws and questionable morality, the point of view literary mechanism employed by Fitzgerald is more of a commentary on the American dream than a value judgement on Gatsby alone. Nick Carraway: A Character Analysis To understand the point of view expressed in the novel, it is first necessary to understan d who Nick Carraway is as the narrator. Carraway is man who is newly relocated to West Egg, which is a fictional place based on Fitzgeralds home of Great Neck, New York (Columbia 230). West Egg is a home to the newly rich and it is geographically located on the North Shore of Long Island (230). Bordering the Long Island Sound and close enough to New York City to be an escape for the rich, the culture of the area is affluent and a microcosm of values associated with socialites. Carraway, however, is enterprising and not yet rich himself. Having a degree from Yale and experience serving in the American military during the Great War, Carraway has the balance of a worldly person and the pedigree of an Ivy League university. Based on this two factors, Carraway is presented as a balanced character whose point of view should be taken seriously. His relocation to West Egg was connected to a desire to learn the bond business in New York City. As Daisy Buchanans cousin (Gatsbys love interest) and a neighbor of Gatsby, he naturally became part of the society movement present in the area at that time. The primary function of Carraway in Fitzgeralds tale is to translate the mysterious mans [Gatsbys] dramatic gestures into a revelation of their hidden significance (Bloom 178). Whether or not this occurs is a matter of reader perception. According to Bloom, Nick is essentially private; personality appears in public performance.[Gatsby and Nicks] individuals essential qualities remain forever hidden (178). Bloom continues, Fitzgerald makes it clear that to know another person in any substantial way lies somewhere between a leap of imaginative faith and the sheerly impossible (178). It is in the this tradition where the mystery in the Gatsby character proliferates. Though some is known about Carraways past, his character is rather benign and only seen through social interactions and his perspective on Gatsby. This leaves much to the imagination of the reader and is part of the meaning making process in Fitzgeralds point of view mechanism. Nick Carraway: Viewing Gatsby From a Romantic Perspective Gatsby can be viewed by the reader and is viewed by varying characters throughout the story as a lot of things. He could be considered a driven man, a tragic figure, an amoral character, a grossly misunderstood man or any combination thereof. As romantic figure, however, Gatsby is nearly entirely the creation of Carraways point of view (Bloom 178). Early in the novel, Carraway described the movements of the title character, Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens (Fitzgerald 20). Based on this description and word choices alone, the point of view expressed by Carraway is clearly one of admiration and infatuation. Nick, through his point of view, serves as a translator of the dreams and social ambitions of the people who surround him (Giltrow and Stouck 476). As a result, designating Carraway as having a romantic view toward Gatsby is a reflection of all of the characters that live in West Egg. These characters looked at their lives, their ambitions, their potential and the material nature of their entire social microcosm romantically. It is easily reflected in the narrative that the characters overestimated the importance of themselves, their actions and their entire existence. In comparison to world events like World War I, the social ambitions of these residents seem benign; yet, these people are consumed by their designations of success. This is designated by Barrett as The unreality of reality for these people (150). In this capacity, for Carraway to be the translator of the mood and ambitions of those around him, he had to see Gatsby through the eyes of a romantic. Gatsby, in this capacity, was the extreme example of what this social world could spawn. Point of View: Third Person and Character Dialogue The way in which Fitzgerald employs point of view affords the supplemental insights of those characters sur rounding Gatsby and the third person sequences that are strewn sporadically and calculated throughout the novel. In party conversation that occurred between a female party goer, Jordan and Lucille, the following was said of Gatsby, Theres something funny about a fellow thatll do a thing like thatHe doesnt want any trouble with anybody (Fitzgerald 43). This quote is in reference to an event where Gatsby replaced the dress of girl who torn her dress at one of his parties. This act is not being heralded as a grandiose gesture by Gatsby; instead, it is being looked upon with scrutiny. This point of view reveals that Gatsby had ulterior motives for many of his actions. Gatsby was less concerned about the girls dress in this situation and more about his reputation in the social scene in which he was trying to assimilate. Assimilation into this social scene meant acceptance and the potential for winning Daisys affection. Gatsby was not born into money, as a result, he had to find ways to e arn a reputation and to earn the amount of capital that was necessary to live in the type of luxury that was common on the North Shore of Long Island at this time. His reputation was built around maneuvers like the one described by the aforementioned example and the parties that he had. In terms of the parties, they were just a built in mechanism of the desired social circle. Carraway explained, I believe on the first night I went to Gatsbys house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited they went there (41). Building his wealth provided another designation about Gatsbys by any means necessary approach to social mobility. Gatsby was and had earned his money in the trade of illegal alcohol at the time. Set during the era of prohibition, Gatsby was able to fund his aspirations through criminal means. This would ultimately lead to his undoing as once this was common knowledge it would forever tarnish his reputation. For Daisy, despite feelings she may have had for him, she could only be with Gatsby if he were of the right social standing and reputation, his criminal enterprise reintroduced a reputation wedge forever that was temporally lifted when he returned to her life as a man with means. Despite the mystery and the scrutiny other characters placed on Gatsbys behavior, he was earning a positive reputation before his enterprise was ultimately discovered toward the end of the novel. Henry Gatz explained to Carraway about Gatsby, He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous to me (Fitzgerald 172). While these point of views present conflicting imagery of Gatsby, they present a unified critique of the American Dream, as it is this mechanism that ultimately drove Gatsby to pursue the life that would ultimately lead to his undoing at the end of the novel. Point of View and the American Dream Gatsby ending up shot in his swimming pool at the conclusion of the novel firmly classifies the novel as a tragedy. Through the eyes of Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes his own obituary of the American dream through the eyes and voice of Nick Carraway (Barrett 150). This makes the meaning of the entire novel one that is equivalent to an Anti-fairy tale 150). The pursuit of the empty American Dream is sandwiched between the conditions of the Great War and the Great Depression (Canterbery 297). The social Darwinistic nature of the life that Gatsby wanted to live ended up costing him his life (297). Through the sum of the point of view, the reader is left at the conclusion of the novel with a firm sense that it had all been for nothing. The victory, even if it had been achieved by Gatsby, would have been empty and somewhat convoluted. Had Gatsby achieved the matrimony of Daisy it would have been as much a product of him being a man of reputation and society as much as it would have been out of genuine love for the character. Love and social standing were one in the same in this dream and this sets a critique by the author of entire process. According to Layng, By novels end, Gatsby is the ghost-literally dead, his past with Daisy lost and Nick emerges as the apostle protagonist (93). As an apostle type figure, it is Carraway who is left to warn the people reading the tale about the negative potential of the American dream. The novel is very much American and many of the dynamics and intricacies of the novel are connected with these subtleties that are often lost on foreign readers (Dyson 45). Though steeped in tragedy, there is hope that can be connected with the point of view. Carraway has the potential to either leave the scene or to stay in the scene himself but serve as a warning to others venturing down the same path. Gatsbys death, therefore, has the potential to not have been in vain. According to Hawkes, For many years hope has been a word that has been lost, forgotten, and banished to the margins of romantic longing and wi shful thinking (20). In reality, the point of view used by the author expresses the unfinished American Epic (20). Using the words of Fitzgerald, Hawkes explained, But thats not matter-to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms fartherAnd one fine morning- are once again being heard (20). Though Gatsby and the romance associated with his dream may be problematic, that does not mean that are more responsible and less empty dream is not possible. Point of view in The Great Gatsby demonstrates a flawed dream that can be used to contrast a positive one that is only limited by the readers imagination. Point of View Conclusion The link between The Great Gatsby and the American dream is one that will be present for generations to come in any discussion of the American literary tradition. Fitzgeralds perspective on a flawed and empty American dream is articulated primarily through the point of view expressed by protagonists, Nick Carraway. Carraway, though romantically linked to the ent ire social scene of his era, is a reliable narrator that weaves his commentary in with third person dialogue that provides a very round multifaceted perspective of Jay Gatsby. Carraway is not wrong to romanticize Gatsby; however, alone this would not be enough to understand the full scope of the character. Gatsby was driven and he was willing to step outside of traditionally held values of the time when it suited his needs. Making a value judgement on Gatsby, on the other hand, requires making a judgement on the entire concept of the American dream during this particular time period. Fitzgerald skillfully establishes complexity of the entire pursuit of wealth and reputation through compelling point of view narrative.

Use of Technology in Teaching Essay -- education, pedagogical approach

In this paper I will introduce you to my reflections that helped influence my pedagogical approach in the use of technology to address my learner needs. I will deliberate how this impacted on my current and future teaching, learning and assessment practices. I aim to discuss technological advances in my industry, which is health, and how this impacts on my students now and into the future. I will explain ways I made adjustments in the use of technology within my teaching area to better meet both mine and the student’s needs. My goal is to explain the strategies I will use to strengthen this area for ongoing development and how this will help in making adjustments to specific occupational and personal needs of my students. Reflections on past, current and future approach in the use of technology I would like to discuss how I went from delivering a face to face class of 12 students to today having over 100 students externally using technology as my main delivery method. Lets go back to the beginning of my delivery of a Certificate IV level in the health area. I started at my workplace by being given a qualification to deliver, and nothing much else. I wrote the material required for a face to face class, as that is all that I knew to do at the time. I did this for over a few years in which time I collated a reasonable amount of feedback from both my current and prospective students. This started me on a journey of critical reflection resulting in distant and online delivery. Looking back on my reflective practice approaches and journey, I have come a long way but still have a way to go. John Dewey’s vision in1923, was â€Å"School should be less of a preparation for life and more like life itself.† (Dewey, 1923) Although he was... ...reditation MIMS Australia . (2013). Retrieved from MIMS Australia : http://www.mims.com.au/index.php/products/product-overview Dewey, J. (1923). Democracy and Education-An introduction to the Pilosophy of Education. Los Angeles, Calafornia: Indo European Publishing. Martha Burkle, M. C.-I. (2013, January). Defining the role adjument profile of learners and instructors online. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks,, 17(1), 73 -87. Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (2005). Distance Education: A Systems View of online learning. Belmont,CA : Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Rory McGreal, M. E. (2011). Technologies of online learning (E-Learning). In T. Anderson (Ed.), The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Edmonton: Au Press, Athabasca University. Rushton, I. S. (2012). Reflective Practice For Teaching In Lifelong Learning. Maidenhead, GBR: Open University Press.

Education as Most Important Factor in Developing Country

Education is the single most important factor in the development of a country. Do you agree? What is actual value of education today? Nowadays, when our world is constantly developing in the area of economics, and other fields there’s  a strong growing need in experienced and talented people  who will be able to make significant contribution in the economy of the country’s life. Thus, it is important to say that  education plays a significant role in the development process of countries.To answer on my question, firstly I would like to point the importance of education. In real life, people can live without education but education is the quickest and surest way to help people improve their knowledge and to gain experiences. Basic education provides people with a greater understanding of basic daily information about life as well as of their own potential. Higher education  is not obligatory for young people. Thus, it means that they have only their experience to learn from.But those people who are longing for obtaining high positions in the society are required to have good knowledge basis. How can education improve development of country? A country with a strong educational system can more definitely develop in the future. In developing countries, improving people's knowledge is very important because their attitude can be influenced by the development of the country. There's a famous saying â€Å"If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach the man to fish you feed him for a lifetime†.Education is long term investment. Maybe we will not be able to see the results imediately, but it is essential to ensure growth and prosperity. Also it is important to put quality before quantity – the goal must be for all education programmes to be of the highest quality, with the number of places tailored to the needs of the labour market. It is not the quantity of graduates that determines our competitiveness, but the qual ity of our programmes from an international perspective.With a good educational system, people can study easily, they can understand the newest technology, and then they can improve their lives. However, even with good educational system in one country, problem may arise. It is so called â€Å"brain drain†. It is defined as the loss of skilled intellectual and technical labor through the movement of such labor to more favorable geographic, economic, or professional environments. Individuals that are educated in developing country may move to the developed countries such as USA, England, and countinue their lifes there.In this case, education cannot bring any good for country where young people are more concerned about their own prosperity than prosperity of their native country. Although there are a lot of other factors that are of huge importance for growth of one country, I agree that education is the single most important development in the country. Of course, every person possesses good qualities along with bad ones, but  higher education gives us an opportunity  to develop our better sides by providing our society with members, whose aim is to contribute to the country’s development.

The Society Within Romania and Trompenaars principles †History Essay

The Society Within Romania and Trompenaars principles – History Essay Free Online Research Papers The Society Within Romania and Trompenaars principles History Essay The Power Distance Power distance describes the degree of equality between different people within a particular society or group. Also described Hofstede, as: â€Å"power distance is the extent to which people expect and are willing to accept that power is distributed unequally. Inequality of power is a basic fact of life. It cannot be 100% eliminated. It is impossible to have no power distance, because this means that everyone is exactly equal (skills, actions, genetics etc) unless you are on about a bunch of identical lumps of rocks. Inequality can take many forms – the differences of physical and mental characteristics, social status and prestige, wealth, political power, rights, privileges etc. All of these are somewhat independent of each other, and in fact the link between them is culturally dependant. Not to put too fine a point on it, Romania is obviously a country with a high power distance. First of all, Romanians seem to expect differences in power between people, yet they are often cynical about personas in positions of authority. They love to ridicule authority and people in position of power. For example, the president of the country is said to be the most popular person among the population due to his hilarious way of behaving in different situations. Furthermore, offices in Romania are ruled by formality. Subordinates are rarely allowed to call their supervisors by their first name. The same thing happens in schools too. While in American schools one can find sheer informality, in Romania is exactly the opposite. If the society wants a lower power distance level, someone should take steps to make this exaggerated formality from schools a thing of the past. In addition, even the ways to say HELLO in Romania are bound to follow up certain rules. For example, if you are the secretary you can’t greet the same way your working colleagues and your boss. Greetings are subject to the same strict rules of formality and informality. Some extremely important consequences of a high power distance level are the sudden changes in government and the autocratic / absolutist governments. In days gone by, this has been more than obvious in our country. Let’s think of the 1989 Revolution when the Communist leaders were killed. In this day and age we find a certain polarization of left / right wing parties which is another consequence of a high power distance. If we now summarize, it stands to reason that Romania has a high power distance level. INDIVIDUALISM Individualism – this dimension focuses on the degree to which a society reinforces individual or collective achievement and interpersonal relationships. If a country has a high Individualism score, this indicates that individuality and individual rights are dominant. Individuals in these societies tend to form relationships with larger numbers of people, but with the relationships being weak. A low individualism score points to a society that is more collectivist in nature. In such countries, the ties between individuals are very strong and the family is given much more weight. In such societies members lean towards collective responsibility. In my opinion, Romania is among the most individualistic countries in the world. First of all, the combination of this individualism with the communist emphasis upon engineering and task skills has resulted in a nation with almost no sense of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck refers to as â€Å"the other†. People do not give much consideration to their group needs when making decisions. Witness the selfishness if the political class, or the greed of the national business elite, both on the back of great poverty and exploitation. Too frequently do Romanians show little concern for pride in their own work. This leads the task element of leadership being measured in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. For example, people often ask themselves â€Å"Did I finish all my paperwork† rather than â€Å"How much value did I add by doing so?† . Journalists, for example, complain every day about their subjects (politicians) but they do not take personal responsibilities for their own actions. Whilst such complaints can be heard the world over, the scale of the problem is more widespread, deep rooted and damaging here than anywhere else. Apart from this, there is another issue to present. Whenever something goes wrong in Romania, there is a strong tendency for people to consider themselves as victims of circumstance, which leads to two subsequent effects. First of all, they exhibit passivity in the face of gross public abuses. Secondly, they have the tendency to find outsiders to blame. This can be proved by a very good example: the Emma Nicholson scandal over children’s homes. Rather than face the issue, the country seemed to unite in outrage at how this foreign woman dared to expose the things that we don’t speak about. This, of course, underlines the weakness of the society. UNCERTIANTY AVOIDANCE Uncertainty avoidance – this dimension concerns the level of acceptance for uncertainty and ambiguity within a society. A country with a high uncertainty avoidance score will have a low tolerance towards uncertainty and ambiguity. As a result it is usually a very rule-orientated society and follows well defined and established laws, regulations and controls. A low uncertainty avoidance score points to a society that is less concerned about ambiguity and uncertainty and has more tolerance towards variety and experimentation. Such a society is less rule-orientated, readily accepts change and is willing to take risks. Another definition is given by Hofstede: â€Å"uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations†. The essence of uncertainty is that is a subjective experience. But according to Hofstede, feelings of uncertainty are not only personal, but may also be partly shared with other members of society. Risk taking is an important factor, which is usually associated with entrepreneurial activity. When a cultural distance between countries increases, also will the uncertainty and the perceived risk. Romania is part of the group of countries with a high uncertainty avoidance score. A good example to prove this fact is to use Sanna Sundqvist’s study, entitled â€Å"Cross-cultural adoption of wireless communications: effects of cultural distance and country characteristics†. The study tries to analyze the cultural differences in adoption of wireless communications. In order to test the effects of cultural similarity, the study groups some countries on the basis of their cultural dimensions. Based on Hofstede indices, the 48 countries were classified using hierarchical cluster analysis into five segments. For example, cluster five contained countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Netherlands, cluster four: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, cluster two: USA, Austria, U.K., Australia etc, cluster one: Argentina, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Germany etc. while cluster three had countries like Chile, Baltic countries, ROMANIA, Venezuela, Taiwan, Thailand, Peru etc. The results proved that cluster V has adopted wireless communication earliest while cluster three has adopted significantly later. This proves the fact that Romania, situated in cluster 3, is a country that does not accept changes easily. Another reason for this high level of uncertainty avoidance could be the fact that the Romanian nation is very old, and it has survived numerous wars, political upheavals and economic changes. Hence, Romanians have a greater fear of the unknown. Moreover, it is known that a country with a high uncertainty avoidance level will adopt due to imitation or in order to diminish risks and uncertainty, in Romania’s case, F the integration in the E.U. We are among the last countries to make this step. While it is true to say that we don’t have the necessary economic standards to join the E.U. I nevertheless think that from a different point of view this delay is also due to the high uncertainty avoidance level. Citizens being critical of their own nation is another characteristic feature of a country with a high uncertainty avoidance level. Romania’s population is never satisfied by any performances of the country. They always find a reason to put the negative part of an achievement in front of the positive one. MASCULINITY Masculinity – this dimension pertains to the degree societies reinforce or do not reinforce, the traditional masculine work role model of male achievement, control and power. A high masculinity score indicates that a country experiences a higher degree of gender differentiation. In such cultures, males tend to dominate a significant portion of the society and power structure. A low masculinity score means a society has a lower level of level of differentiation and inequity between genders. In these cultures, females are treated equally to males in all aspects of the society. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women’s values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to woman’s values on the other side. The assertive pole has been called masculine and the modest, caring pole feminine. It stands to reason that Romania has a high masculinity score. To begin with, most of the VIP’s in Romania are men. The president is a man, the prime minister is a man, most of the other ministers are men, the secretaries of the state are men and so on. I would like to analyze the administration board of BNR, the national bank of my country, to prove my point. This board has the following structure: Governor: Ph.D Mugur Isarescu First Deputy Governor: Ph. D. Florin Georgescu Deputy Governor: Ph.D. Eugen Dijmarescu Deputy Governor: Ph.D. Cristian Popa Member: Ph.D. Silviu Cerna Member: Maria Ene Member: Agnes Nagy Member: Ph.D. Napoleon Pop Member: Ph.D. Virgiliu Stoenescu As we can see, 77.77% of the members are men while only 22.23% are women. Another important fact is that the inequalities between men and women in Romania are structural, rather than merely contingent, and a pervasive phenomena rather than a temporary consequences of the transition. It is a fact that the rising of unemployment has constantly affected women more than men, while women are over-represented in the lowest wage sectors of the economy (especially agriculture, healthcare and education). Furthermore, even the legislation from this country encourages masculinity. The best example to list here is the age of retirement which is not the same fro men and women. Women have lower retirement ages than men. Fewer years of contributing to the system combined with the data that indicates that women earn on average 83% of men’s earnings will result in lower average pensions for women. More worrying is the increase number of women moving from formal, paid employment to the informal sector or into unpaid family labor, situations in which it is unlikely that contributions will be made into the social, health or pensions system, resulting in a growing number of women potentially facing old age without pensions at all. The employers in Romania often regard the aspect of gender when hiring new people. For example, they prefer men engineers rather than women engineers, which is, of course, a discrimination as the only difference between men and women should be made when a job implies physical effort. By and large, I think that these characteristic features of Romania are really clear and that they are not unchangeable. In my opinion, each feature of each country varies in time. Maybe in some decades, the high level of masculinity and power distance will be a thing of the past, and we shall live in a better country with better people and smarter rules. Research Papers on The Society Within Romania and Trompenaar's principles - History EssayQuebec and CanadaCapital Punishment19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraBringing Democracy to AfricaEffects of Television Violence on ChildrenPETSTEL analysis of IndiaStandardized TestingAssess the importance of Nationalism 1815-1850 EuropeInfluences of Socio-Economic Status of Married MalesRelationship between Media Coverage and Social and

Free Essays on Platos Soul

Plato argues that the soul is composed of three parts. The argument supporting this claim is obtained by analyzing the conflict in decisions. Plato has observed that an individual will act in different ways to the same situation. Also, the parts of the soul are defined in a way in which they can be derived from the functions in Plato’s ideal state. The three parts of the soul are present in every individual and designated as appetite, reason, and spirit. The first part of the soul defined as appetite, which Plato believes is contained in the belly and organs, is represented in the ideal state as the function of the producers. The appetite is present in the desires of the individual. Plato uses the notion of an individuals thirst for drink to demonstrate this desire, as people naturally want to drink. According to Plato, one part of the soul does not function alone. So, as one has the thirst for drink, they must also determine whether the drink they seek could have dire consequences on their health. The decision whether to abstain or proceed is not completely determined by their appetite, but instead is influenced by reason, another part of the soul. Reason is part of the soul believed to be contained in the head, and is demonstrated by the function of the rulers. Reason, compared to the rulers who exercise wisdom and knowledge for the good of all, is used on the behalf of the good of the entire individual. The example of an individuals thirst for drink demonstrates the ability of reason to master the motives of appetite and desire. In Plato’s ideal state, the rulers can master the producers and auxiliaries who all interact. The same concept is shown in the individual, with reason having the ability to master the appetite and spirit. The third part of the soul is spirit, represented in the ideal state as the auxiliaries. Spirit is believed to be contained in the chest, and is defined by the emotions on how to act. Spiri... Free Essays on Plato's Soul Free Essays on Plato's Soul Plato argues that the soul is composed of three parts. The argument supporting this claim is obtained by analyzing the conflict in decisions. Plato has observed that an individual will act in different ways to the same situation. Also, the parts of the soul are defined in a way in which they can be derived from the functions in Plato’s ideal state. The three parts of the soul are present in every individual and designated as appetite, reason, and spirit. The first part of the soul defined as appetite, which Plato believes is contained in the belly and organs, is represented in the ideal state as the function of the producers. The appetite is present in the desires of the individual. Plato uses the notion of an individuals thirst for drink to demonstrate this desire, as people naturally want to drink. According to Plato, one part of the soul does not function alone. So, as one has the thirst for drink, they must also determine whether the drink they seek could have dire consequences on their health. The decision whether to abstain or proceed is not completely determined by their appetite, but instead is influenced by reason, another part of the soul. Reason is part of the soul believed to be contained in the head, and is demonstrated by the function of the rulers. Reason, compared to the rulers who exercise wisdom and knowledge for the good of all, is used on the behalf of the good of the entire individual. The example of an individuals thirst for drink demonstrates the ability of reason to master the motives of appetite and desire. In Plato’s ideal state, the rulers can master the producers and auxiliaries who all interact. The same concept is shown in the individual, with reason having the ability to master the appetite and spirit. The third part of the soul is spirit, represented in the ideal state as the auxiliaries. Spirit is believed to be contained in the chest, and is defined by the emotions on how to act. Spiri...

What is the view of mission presented by the Book of Acts Essay

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Foreign Exchange Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Foreign Exchange - Essay Example Looking at Table ll.1(Foreign Exchange Quotations, p.5) I see that the Monday 1-month forward for the Japanese yen, using the Direct Quote, is $0.009048 compared to the spot rate of .009035. The 3-month forward is .009074 and the 6-month forward is .009124. This means that the Japanese currency is expected to progressively appreciate during this period. The indirect quote column (Japanese currency calculated in US dollar terms) confirms the expected trend, showing that gradually it will require more dollars to pay for a fixed amount of Japanese yen. I use the spot rate when I need the currency immediately. I go to a lending institution or a bank to arrange for a forward exchange contract when I need to protect the value of the US dollar against the possibility that the Japanese yen will rise in value (appreciate), and it would require me to spend more money to purchase a product priced or denominated in that currency. In this particular case, if I have to purchase Y100,000 now, at the rate of $0.009035 per yen, the amount I have to pay will be $903.50, which is obtained by multiplying these two numbers. Since the 1-month forward rate is $0.009048, the amount of our contract with the bank will be $904.80, which is higher by $1.30. A month from now, I will obtain from the bank Y100,000 at this price. I can either buy Y100,000 now at the spot market price at the rate of 1 Yen = $0.009035 and hold the currency until a month from now when I need to use it for payment, or I can arrange a forward contract which, at $0.009048, is $1.30 higher. The forward contract will protect me in case the Japanese yen appreciates. For example, if the Japanese yen, contrary to market expectations, rises to $0.009200 (or, conversely, $1 = 108.70, obtained by computing its reciprocal - i.e., 1/.009200), I will need to pay $920.00 a month from now – or $16.50 higher - because I did not hedge my position by using the forward contract. This is also