Low-Cost Gift Ideas for College Students

If youre like most college students, buying gifts present a complicated dilemma: Youd like to give nice presents but you are, after all, a college student trying to live on a budget. So how can you balance wanting to give nice presents with the limits of your bank account? Luckily, there are ways to give low-cost gifts without coming across as cheap. 8 Low-Cost Gift Ideas for College Students Print out and frame a nice picture. With everything being digital these days, try to remember the last time someone gave you a printed-out picture that you can hang on your wall -- and how nice that present was (or would be!). If youre really short on cash, print something at the highest quality available on your printer and make a nice frame to match. Give a simple college-themed gift. While the $60 sweatshirts in the campus bookstore are pretty nice, they might also be out of your budget. See what else you can find that celebrates your time in school while costing a little less. Keychains, bumper stickers, t-shirts on the clearance rack (will your cousin really know?), plastic cups, and lots of other presents can be had for under $10 -- and even under $5, if you really spend some time looking. Give the gift of time. Money may be in tight supply for you, but time may not be -- especially if you need a gift for the holidays when youre home on break. Consider planning a nice walk with your mom, ​volunteering with your dad, hanging out with your friend at his work one afternoon, or even babysitting for your parents so they can get some time to themselves. Make something from scratch. Nearly everyone has some kind of creative talent. Think about what you do best and run with it. Can you write a few poems? Paint a picture? Mold something out of clay? Take some awesome photographs? Make something from wood? Write a song? Record yourself singing your mothers favorite tunes? Dont sell yourself short as a great source of gifts you can make completely on your own. Put together a piece of your life at college. It doesnt have to be fancy to be effective. If, say, your grandmother never had the chance to go to college, put together a shadow box or collage of images from your time in school. You can collect things like stickers, fall leaves, a page from the course catalog, or articles from the school paper to give her a piece of what your college life is like. Make a memory box for an old friend or family member. You can probably find a nice little box somewhere on campus or at a local big box or drug store. Cut up some nice pieces of paper and write a cherished memory of you and the person youre giving your gift to; fold them over once or twice; Then write a nice card that explains the gift and says how often they can unwrap one of the little memories in the box (once a week? once a month?) It can be a great trip down memory lane for you and a very personal, meaningful gift for an old friend or beloved family member. Frame a design you make. Who says only a photograph can go in a picture frame? Start with a piece of paper and get creative. Print or cut out quotes about the importance of education, snip headlines from your school paper, take (or sketch) a picture of your school -- as long as you put together something with a similar theme (e.g., your campus), its hard to make a homemade gift like this look bad. Let your creativity flow without worrying about the cost. Switch up a usual gift into something different. Dinner and a movie is a pretty classic gift for a girlfriend, boyfriend, or even a parents birthday. But if your money is tight, you can switch things up to have an equally good time without the high cost. Consider, for example, going to breakfast and a movie. The food bill will be cheaper, your movie will likely be a matinee (and cheaper than an evening film), and you and the person you take will have a unique experience, too.

Hospital Mortality Of Stroke A Condition With An Abrupt...

The stroke is a condition with an abrupt onset of a neurological deficit that attributable to a focal vascular cause. (1) It is the third leading cause of death worldwide. (2) Lower-income countries have shown a higher relative stroke burden compared to industrialized ones. (3) Despite the significant achievement in management of acute stroke, it remains also a third cause of death in industrialized countries.(4) Over a third of stroke deaths occur in developing countries(5) In the United States,700000 stroke cases responsible for 165000 deaths each year (6). The number of people having a stroke each year in Iraq is around 24000. (7) Determining predictor of mortality at period of hospitalization could aid a clinical care by providing valuable prognostic information to patients and their family members and identify those at high risk for poor outcomes who may require more intensive recourses. Various clinical variables have been implicated in the etiology of in hospital mortality of stroke. This study is an attempt to evaluate the effect of a number of these variables and whether they could predict in hospital mortality or not. These predictors included important co- morbidities like diabetes mellitus ( DM), ischemic heart diseases(IHD) hypertension( HTN) , and role of diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in first few hours after attack , history of old stroke and medications that expected to change the outcome of

New Historicism free essay sample

There are no facts – just interpretations (Tyson 286) Power circulates from all social levels at all time (Tyson 287) â€Å"history is neither linear (†¦) nor progressive (†¦)† (Tyson 287) no universal spirit of an age – always opposition (Tyson 287) analysis of history is always subjective (Tyson 287) Individual and culture define each other (Tyson 287) New historicism applied to literature â€Å"(†¦) the literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are equally important (†¦)† (Tyson 288) a? â€Å" (†¦) they create each other† (Tyson 289) Therefore New Historicism does not regard a literary text as an isolated object but wants to know more about the background and the way of life of the people at that time when it was written. Cultural Criticism wants â€Å"(†¦) to make connections between the literary text, the culture in which it emerged, and the cultures in which it is interpreted†. (Tyson 295) New Historicism and Cultural Criticism are hard to distinguish – they differ just in few points Differences of Cultural Criticism to New Historicism †¢ †¢ †¢ more political a? often bases on Marxist, feminist or other political theories ( Tyson 294) especially interested in the popular culture ( Tyson 294) existence of a high- / low culture which the dominant class decides ( Tyson 294) New Historical Reading of F. That agethe emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the United Stateshas been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly influenced by this approach. When we discuss Jerome McGanns essay, youll see how it influences Romantic studies. Now the New Historicism wasand this probably accounts for its remarkable popularity and influence in the period roughly from the late seventies through the early ninetieswas a response to an increasing sense of ethical ailure in the isolation of the text as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms of literary study. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction, and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among scholars, especially younger scholars, that somehow or another, especially in response to pressing concerns-post-Vietnam, concerns with globalization, concerns with the distribution of power and global capitalall of these concerns nspired what one can only call a guilt complex in academic literary scholarship and led to a return to history. It was felt that a kind of ethical tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by modes of analysis in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central. I have to say that in debates of this kind theres always a considerable amount of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways its not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about history and undertook to orient the techniques of deconstruction to an understanding of history, just to give one example. The New Historicism, on the other hand, evinced a preoccupation with issues of form and textual integrity that certainly followed from the disciplines, the approaches, that preceded them. Also to a large degreeand 1 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? PRINT Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 this is, of course, true of a good many other approaches that were about to investigate, approaches based in questions of identity alsoto a large degree, appropriated the language of the generation of the deconstructionists and, to a certain extent, certain underlying structuralist ideas having to do with the binary relationship between self nd other, and binary relationships among social entities, as opposed to linguistic entities; but still, as I say, essentially inheriting the structure of thought of preceding approaches. So, as I say, it was in a polemical atmosphere and at a moment of widespread self-doubt in the academic literary profession that the New Historicism came into its owna response, as I say, to the isolation of the text by certain techniques and approaches to it. Chapter 2. The New Historicist Method and Foucault [00:06:16] Now very quickly: the method of New Historical analysis fell into a pattern, a very engaging one, one thats wonderfully exemplified by the brief introduction of Greenblatt that I have asked you to read: a pattern of beginning with an anecdote, often rather far afield, at least apparently rather far afield, from the literary issues that are eventually turned to in the argument of a given essay. For example: a dusty miller was walking down the road, thinking about nothing in particular, when he encountered a bailiff, then certain legal issues arise, and somehow or another the next thing you know were talking about King Lear. This rather marvelous, oblique way into literary topics was owing to the brilliance in handling it of Greenblatt, in particular, and Louis Montrose and some of his colleagues. This technique became a kind of a hallmark of the New Historicism. In the long run, of course, it was easy enough to parody it. It has been subjected to parody and, in a certain sense, has been modified and chastened by the prevalence of parody; but it nevertheless, I think, shows you something about the way New Historicist thinking works. The New Historicism is interested, following Foucaultand Foucault is the primary influence on the New Historicism. I wont say as much about this today as I might feel obliged to say if I werent soon be going to return to Foucault in the context of gender studies, when we take up Foucault and Judith Butler togetherbut I will say briefly that Foucaults writing, especially his later writing, is about the pervasiveness, the circulation through social orders, of what he calls power. Now power is not justor, in many cases in Foucault, not even primarily the power of vested authorities, the power of violence, or the power of tyranny from above. Power in Foucaultthough it can be those things and frequently isis much more pervasively and also insidiously the way in which knowledge circulates in a culture: that is to say, the way in which what we think, what we think that it is appropriate to thinkacceptable thinkingis distributed by largely unseen forces in a social network or a social system. Power, in other words, in Foucault is in a certain sense knowledge, or to put it another way, it is the explanation of how certain forms of knowledge come to existknowledge, by the way, not necessarily of something thats true. Certain forms of knowledge come to exist in certain places. So all of this is central to the work of Foucault and is carried over by the New Historicists; hence the interest for them of the anecdotes. Start as far afield as you can imaginably start from what you will finally be talking about, which is probably some textual or thematic issue in Shakespeare or in the Elizabethan masque or whatever the case may be. Start as far afield as you possibly can from that, precisely in order to show the pervasiveness of a certain kind of thinking, the pervasiveness of a certain social constraint or limitation on freedom. If you can show how pervasive it is, you reinforce and justify the Foucauldian idea that power is, as Ive said, an insidious and ubiquitous mode of circulating knowledge. All of this is implicit, sometimes explicit, in New Historicist approaches to what they do. 2 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 Chapter 3. The Reciprocal Relationship Between History and Discourse [00:10:56] So as I said, Foucault is the crucial antecedent and of course, when its a question of Foucault, literature as we want to conceive of itperhaps generically or as a particular kind of utterance as opposed to other kindsdoes tend to collapse back into the broader or more general notion of discourse, because its by means of discourse that power circulates knowledge. Once again, despite the fact that New Historicism wants to return us to the real world, it nevertheless acknowledges that that return is language bound. It is by means of language that the real world shapes itself. Thats why for the New Historicistand by this means, Ill turn in a moment to the marvelous anecdote with which Greenblatt begins the brief essay that Ive asked you to readthats why the New Historicist lays such intense emphasis on the idea that the relationship between discoursecall it literature if you like, you ight as welland history is reciprocal. Yes, history conditions what literature can say in a given epoch. History is an important way of understanding the valency of certain kinds of utterance at certain times. In other words, history isas its traditionally thought to be by the Old Historicism, and Ill get to that in a minutehistory is a background to discourse or literature. But by the same token there is an agency, that is to say a capacity, to circulate power in discourse in turn. Call it literature: I am Richard II, know you not that? says Queen Elizabeth when at the time of the threatened Essex Uprising she gets wind of the fact that Shakespeares Richard II is being performed, as she believes, in the public streets and in private houses. In other words, wherever there is sedition, wherever there are people who want to overthrow her and replace her with the Earl of Essex, the pretender to the throne, Richard II is being performed. Well, now this is terrifying to Queen Elizabeth because she knowsshes a supporter of the theatershe knows that Richard II is about a king who has many virtues but a certain weakness, a political weakness and also a weakness of temperamentthe kind of weakness that makes him sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings, that kind of weakness, who is then usurped by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV, introducing a whole new dynasty and focus of the royal family in England. Queen Elizabeth says, Theyre staging this play because theyre trying to compare me with Richard II in preparation for deposing me, and who knows what else they might do to me? This is a matter of great concern. In other words, literatureFredric Jameson says history hurtsliterature hurts, too. [laughs] Literature, in other words, has a discursive agency that affects history every bit as much as history affects literature: literature out there, and theaterespecially if it escapes the confines of the playhouse because, as Greenblatt argues, the playhouse has a certain mediatory effect which defuses the possibilities of sedition. One views literary representation in the playhouse with a certain objectivity, perhaps, that is absent altogether when interested parties take up the same text and stage it precisely for the purpose of fomenting rebellion. Literature, especially when escaped from its conventional confines, becomes a very, very dangerous or positive influence, depending on your point of view on the course of history. So the relationship between history and discourse is reciprocal. Greenblatt wants to argue with a tremendous amount of stress and, I think, effectiveness that the New Historicism differs from the Old Historicism. This is on page 1443 in the right-hand column. John Dover Wilson, a traditional Shakespeare scholar and a very important one, is the spokesperson in Greenblatts scenario for the Old Historicism. The view Im about to quote is that of John Dover Wilson, a kind of consensus about the relationship between literature and history: Modern historical scholarship [meaning Old Historicism] has assured Elizabeth [laughs] that she had [this is the right-hand column about two thirds of the way down] [laughs] nothing to worry 3 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 about: Richard II is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the deposition of the legitimate king as a sacrilegious act that drags the country down into the abyss of chaos; that Shakespeare and his audience regarded Bolingbroke as a usurper, declares J. Dover Wilson, is incontestable. But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure†¦ Greenblatt wins. Its a wonderful example. Its the genius of Greenblatt to choose examples that are so telling and so incontrovertible. We know Queen Elizabeth was scared [laughs] on this occasion, which makes it quite simply the case that John Dover Wilson was wrong to suppose that Richard II was no threat to her. Its not at all the point that a broad, ideological view of Richard II was any different from what Wilson said; that was perfectly true. Bolingbroke wasconsidered a usurper. It was considered tragic that Richard II was deposed; but that doesnt mean that the text cant be taken over, commandeered and made subversive. Wilson doesnt acknowledge this because his view of the relationship between history and literature is only that history influences literature, not that the influence can be reciprocal. You see, thats how it is that the New Historicism wants to define itself over and against the Old Historicism. If there is a political or ideological consensus about the legitimacy of monarchy, the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of succession under the sanction of the Church of England and all the rest of itall of which is anachronistic when youre thinking about these history playsif there is this broad consensus, thats it, thats what the play means according to the Old Historicism, even though plainly you can take the plot of the play and completely invert those values, which is what the Essex faction does in staging it in those places where Queen Elizabeth suspects that its being staged. Chapter 4. The Historian and Subjectivity [00:19:24] Okay. Now another way in which the Old Historicism and the New Historicism differcorrectly, I think according to Greenblatt is that in the Old Historicism there is no questionIm looking at page 1444, the right-hand column about a third of the way downof the role of the historians own subjectivity. It is not thought, says Greenblatt, to be the product of the historians interpretation†¦ History is just what is. One views it objectively and thats that. Now notice here that were back with Gadamer. Remember that this was Gadamers accusation of historicism, the belief of historicismwhat Greenblatt calls the Old Historicismthat we can bracket out our own historical horizon and that we can eliminate all of our own historical prejudices in order to understand the past objectively in and for itself. This is not the case, said Gadamer, remember. Gadamer said that interpretation must necessarily involve the merger of horizons, the horizon of the other and my own horizon as an interpreter. I cannot bracket out my own subjectivity. Okay. If thats the case, then Gadamer anticipates Greenblatt in saying that the naivete of the Old Historicism is its supposition that it has no vested interest in what its talking aboutthat is to say, its supposition that it wants history to accord in one way or another with its own preconceptions, but isnt aware of it. The anecdoteagain, wonderfully placed in the polemical argumentthat after all, John Dover Wilson delivered himself of these opinions about Richard II before a group of scholars in Germany in 1939 is, after all, ather interesting. Hitler is about to be the Bolingbroke of Germany. John Dover Wilson wants his audience to say, Hey, wait a minute. Stick with vested authority. [laughs] You have a weak democracy, but it is a democracy. Dont let it get away from you. And so he is speaking, the horse already having escaped from the barn, in this reassuring way about German politics as a means of sort of reinforcing his own view of the politics of Elizabethan England. of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 But this, Greenblatt supposes, is something about which he has very little self-consciousness. That is to say, his own interest, as of course it should be on this occasion, is in the preservation of vested authority, and his own interest then folds back into his understanding of Elizabethan ideology in such a way that it can conform to that interest. He has, in other words, as we say today, a hidden agenda and is very little aware of it, unlike the New Historicist who, following Gadamer in this respect, is fully cognizant of the subjective investment that leads to a choice of interest in materials, a way of thinking about those materials, and a means of bringing them to life for us today and into focus. In other words, its okay for Greenblatt, as it was for Gadamermuch to the horror of E. D. Hirschto find the significance of a text, as opposed to the meaning of a text. The significance of the text is that it has certain kinds of power invested in it. Those kinds of power are still of interest to us today, still of relevance to whats going on in our own world. All of this is taken up openly as a matter of self-consciousness by the New Historicists in ways that, according to Greenblatt and his colleagues, were not available consciously in the older Historicism. Now the world as the New Historicism sees itand after Ive said this, Ill turn to McGannis essentially a dynamic interplay of power, networks of power, and subversion: that is to say, modes of challenging those networks even within the authoritative texts that generate positions of power. The Elizabethan masque, for example, which stages the relation of court to courtier, to visitor, to hanger-on in wonderfully orchestrated ways, is a meansbecause its kind of poly-vocalof containing within its structure elements of subversion, according to the argument thats made about these things: the same with court ritual itself, the same with the happenstance that takes place once a year in early modern England, in which the Lord of Misrule is so denominated and ordinary authority is turned on its ear for one day. Queen for a day, as it were, is something that is available to any citizen once a year. These are all ways of defusing what they, in fact, bring into visibility and consciousnessmainly the existence, perhaps the inevitable existence, of subversion with respect to structures and circulatory systems of power. Its t Chapter 5. Jerome McGann and Bakhtin [00:26:12] his relationship between power and subversion that the New Historicism, especially in taking up issues of the Early Modern period, tends to focus on and to specialize in. Now its not wholly clear that Jerome McGann has ever really thought of himself as a New Historicist. He has been so designated by others, but I think there is one rather important difference in emphasis, at least between what hes doing and what Greenblatt and his colleagues do in the Early Modern period. McGann doesnt really so much stress the reciprocity of history and discourse. He is interested in the presence of history, the presence of immediate social and also personal circumstances in the history of a text. His primary concern is withat least in this essaytextual scholarship. He himself is the editor of the new standard works of Byron. He has also done a standard works of Swinburne, and he has been a vocal and colorful spokesperson of a certain point of view within the recondite debates of textual scholarship: whether textual scholarship ought to produce a text thats an amalgam of a variety of available manuscripts and printed texts; whether the text it produces ought to be the last and best thoughts of the authorthats the position that McGann seems to be taking in this essayor whether the text, on the contrary, ought to be the first burst of inspiration of the author. All the people who prefer the earliest versions of Wordsworths Prelude, for example, would favor that last point of view. In 5 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 other words, McGann is making a contribution here not least to the debates surrounding editing and the production of authoritative scholarly texts. Its in that context that the remarks hes making about Keats have to be understood. I think the primary influence on McGann is not so much Foucault, then, with the sense of the circulation of power back and forth between history and literary discourse, as it is Bakhtin, whom he quotes on pages eighteen and nineteen; or whose influence he cites, I should say rather, in a way that, I think, does pervade what you encounter in reading what he then goes on to say at the bottom of page eighteen in the copy center reader: What follows [says McGann] is a summary and extrapolation of certain key ideas set forth by the so-called Bakhtin School of criticism, a small group of Marxist critics from the Soviet Union who made an early attack upon formalist approaches to poetry [just as he, McGann, is, and as the New Historicists are themselves, in their turn, doing]. The Bakhtin Schools socio-historical method approaches all language utterancesincluding poemsas phenomena marked with their concrete origins and history. That is to say, phenomena voiced by the material circumstances that produce them or phenomena, in other words, in which the voice of the Romantic solitary individual is not really that voice at all, but is rather the polyglossal infusion of a variety of perspectives, including ideological perspectives, shaping that particular utterance and also, in the case of the textual scholar, shaping which of a variety of manuscripts will be chosen for publication and for central attention in the tradition of the reception of a given text. So all of this McGann takes to be derived from Bakhtin rather than from Foucault. I do think thats a significant difference between our two authors. Chapter 6. McGann on Keats [00:30:28] Now McGanns most important contribution to the return to history of the seventies and eighties is a short book calledThe Romantic Ideology, and this bookwell, what it is is an attack on Romanticism. At least its an attack on certain widely understood and received ideas about Romanticismideas ith which, by the way, I dont agree, but this course isnt about me. The Romantic Ideology is an amalgam of two titles. One of them is the important early critique of Romanticism by the German poet and sometime Romantic Heinrich Heine called Die romantische Schule, or The Romantic School, in which the subjectivity, even solipsism, and the isolation from social concern and from unfolding historical processes of the Romantic poets is emphasized and criticized. In addition to thatthats where the word Romantic comes from in the title The Romantic Ideologythe other title that it amalgamates is Marxs book The German Ideology, which is about many things but is in particular about Lumpenproletariat intellectuals who think with Hegel still following Hegel despite believing themselves to be progressivewho think with Hegel that thought produces material circumstances rather than the other way around: in other words people, in short, who are idealists and therefore, under this indictment, also Romantic. McGanns title, as I say, cleverly amalgamates these two other titles and sets the agenda for this short book, which is an attack not just on Romanticism but on what he believes to be our continued tendency still to be in Romanticism, still to be Romantic. There his particular object of attack is the so-called Yale school, which is still under attack in the essay that youve read for today. Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartmans well-known essay on Keatss To Autumn are singled out for particular scorn and dispraise, all sort of on the grounds that yes, its all very well to read Romanticism, to come to understand it, and even to be fascinated by it; but we cant be Romantic. In other words, our reading of Romanticismif we are to be social animals, politically engaged, and invested in the world as a social communitymust 6 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 necessarily be an anti-Romantic critique. This is, as I say, still essentially the position taken up by McGann. All right. So Ive explained the ways in which he differs from Greenblatt in leaning more toward Bakhtin than toward Foucault. I have explained that McGann is engaged primarily in talking about issues of textual scholarship in this particular essay, that he defends Keatss last deliberate choices, that he believes the so-called indicator text of 1820 of La Belle Dame Sans Merci is Keatss last deliberate choice, as opposed to the 1848 text published by Monckton Milnes in the edition of Keatss poems that he brought out at that time. Now I think that in the time remaining to sort of linger over McGann, I do want to say a few things about what he says about Keats. I want to emphasize that his general pronouncements about the historicity of texts, about the permeation of texts by the circumstances of their production, their conditioning by ideological factors, is unimpeachable. It seems to me that this is a necessary approach at least to have in mind if not, perhaps, necessarily to emphasize in ones own work of literary scholarship. The idea that a text just falls from a treeif anybody ever had that idea, by the way [laughs] is plainly not a tenable one, and the opposite idea that a text emerges from a complex matrix of social and historical circumstances is certainly a good one. So if one is to criticize, again its not a question of criticizing his basic pronouncements. It seems to me nothing could be said really against them. The trouble is that in the case of McGannwho is a terrific, prominent Romantic scholar with whom one, I suppose, hesitates to disagreeeverything he says about the text that he isolates for attention in this essay is simply, consistently, wrong. Its almost as if by compulsion that he says things that are wrong about these texts, and the reason I asked you in my e-mail last night to take a look at them, if you get a chance, is so that these few remarks that I make now might have some substance. Take for example La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In the first place, who says we only read the 1848 text? A scholarly editionand his main object of attack is Jack Stillingers scholarly edition of Keatsgives you basically a variorum apparatus. Yeah, maybe it gives you a particular text in bold print, but it gives you the variant text in smaller print in a footnote. It doesnt withhold the variant text from you. It says, No, look, theres this too. Take your choice. Really the atmosphere of a variorum scholarly edition is an atmosphere of take your choice, not a kind of tyrannical imposition on the public of a particular version of the text. Everybody knows the 1820 Indicator text. What can ail thee, wretched wight? is at least as familiar to me, as a Romanticist, as What can ail thee, knight at arms? the way in which the 1848 text begins; and frankly how many people who arent Romanticists know anything about either text? What are we talking about here? [laughter] [laughs] The Romanticists know whats going on. Theyre not in any way hornswoggled by this historical conspiracy against the 1820 indicator text, and people who arent Romanticists dont care. Thats what it comes down to; but, if its not enough simply to say that, turning to the question of which text is betterwell, its hard to say which text is better. McGanns argument is that the 1820 version is better because its a poem about a guy and a girl who sort of meet, and the next thing you know theyre having sex and that doesnt turn out so well. In other words, its about the real world. These things happen. Its not a romance, whereas the What can ail thee, wretched knight? in the 1848 versionand all of its other variants, the kisses four and so onthe 1848 version is a kind of unselfconsciousin McGanns viewromance subscribing to certain medieval ideas about women, simultaneously putting them on a pedestal and fearing, at the same time, that theyre invested with a kind of black magic which destroys the souls and dissipates the sap of deserving young gentlemen: all of this is ideologically programmed, 7 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. du/transcript/469/engl-300 according to McGann, in the 1848 version. Why? Because Charles Brown behaved despicably toward women, he didnt like Fanny Brawne, and because Monckton Milnes, the actual editor of the 1848 edition, loved pornography and was a big collector of erotica. So thats why the 1848 text with its fear of and denigration of women, in contrast to the 1820 text, is inferior. Well, two things: f irst of all, whos to say the 1848 text wasnt Keatss last thoughts? In other words, yes, he was already ill when the Indicator text was published in 1820. It is pretty close to the end of his ability to think clearly about his own work and to worry very much about the forms in which it was published, but at the same time we dont know when Brown received his version of the text. We cant suppose, as McGann more than half implies, that Brown just sort of sat down and rewrote it. [laughs] Nobody has ever really said that, and if he didnt rewrite it, then Keats must have given it to him in that form. Whos to say that wasnt his last and best thoughts? Whos to say Keats didnt really want to write a poem of this kind? After all, the title, taken from a medieval ballad by Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, bears out the What can ail thee, knight at arms? version. Its about a Morgan Le Fay-type. For better or worse, whatever we think of that ideologically, it is about, if the title is right, the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1848 version, as opposed to the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1820 version. So the 1848 version is simply more consistent with the title. Thats one point to be made, but the additional point to be made is that taking advantage of the New Historicist acknowledgement that ones own subjectivity, ones own historical horizon, is properly in play in thinking about these things, McGann is then able to infuse Keatss text and therefore Keatss intentions with a pleasing political correctness. That is to say, Keats cant possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. By the way, everything I like Keats, but everything in his letters suggests that he didbut back to McGann: Keats cant possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. Therefore, the 1820 text is the text that he intended and preferred. Okay. That, of course, makes Keats more consistent with our own standards and our own view of the relations between the sexes, but does it, in other words, make sense vis-a-vis the Keats whom we know and, despite his weaknesses and shortcomings, love? There is a great deal, in other words, to be said over against McGanns assertions about this textual issue, not necessarily in defense of the 1848 text but agnostically with respect to the two of them, saying, Yeah, wed better have both of them. Wed better put them side-by-side. Wed better read them together; but if by some fiat the 1820 were somehow subsequently preferred to the 1848, that would be every bit as much of an historical misfortune as the preference, insofar as it has actually existed, of the 1848 or the 1820. I think thats the perspective one wants to take. Now I was going to talk about To Autumn. Ill only say about his reading of To Autumn that McGann, who doesnt seem to like the poem very muchhe likes La Belle Dame Sans Merci, so he makes it politically correct. He doesnt like To Autumn because he thinks that Autumn was published in collusion with Keatss conservative friends in the Poemsof 1820, which bowdlerized everything he had to say of a progressive political nature. He thinks that To Autumn is a big sellout, in other words, and that yes, 1819 happened to be a year of good harvest, and so Keats turns that year of good harvest into something permanent, into a kind of cloud cuckoo-land in which the fruit falls into your basket and the fish jump into your net and everything is just perfect. Well, do you think the poem is really like that? Youve read the third stanza, which McGann totally ignores apart from Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? In other words, he gives you 8 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 the opening but he doesnt give you any sense of the rest of the stanza, because for him To Autumn is all about the first stanza. For him, Keats seems to identify with the bees who think warm days will never cease, for Summer has oer-brimmed their clammy cells. Keats is like a bee. Hes all into the sensuous. Well, again just in terms of historical evidence, this is outmoded by at least eighteen months if we consult Keatss letters. He was like that early in his career, but he has had severe misgivings about a point of view which is represented in what he said in an early letter: Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts†¦ Thats no longer Keatss position when writing To Autumn. Keatss position when writing To Autumn is the position of a guy who has a sore throat just as his tubercular brother did, who is increasingly afraid that hes going to die soon and is trying to confront mortality in writing what is in factand I say in fact advisedlythe most perfect lyric ever written in the English language, and which is most certainly not a celebration of sort of wandering around like an aimless bee, thinking that the autumn is perfect but that autumn is always perfect, that warm days will never cease, and that everything is just lovely in the garden. It is not that kind of poem, and its really a travesty of it to suppose that it is simply on the grounds that it was published in the Poemsof 1820 as a kind of sellout to the establishment under the advice of Keatss conservative friends. Chapter 7. Tony the Tow Truck Revisited [00:45:54] All right. So much then for McGanns remarks on Keats, which I want to say again in no way impugn or undermine the general validity of the claims that hes making about taking historical circumstances into account. Precisely, we need to take them into account and we need to get them right. Thats the challenge, of course, of working with historical circumstances. You have to get it right. With that said, let me turn quickly to a review of Tony from Bakhtin to the New Historicism. I may glide over Tonyaccording to Jameson, because we did that at the end of the last lecture, so let me go back to Bakhtin. You can see the way in which in the structure of Tony the Tow Truck the first part of the poem is absolutely saturated with the first person singular: I do this, I do that, I like my job, I am stuckI, I, I, I. Then as you read along through the text you see that the I disappears, or if it still appears, its in the middle of a line rather than at the beginning of a line. In other words, the I, the subjectivity, the first person singular, the sense of having a unique voicethis is gradually subsumed by the sociality of the story as it unfolds. I am no longer I defined as a Romantic individual. I am I, rather defined as a friendthat is to say, as a person whose relation with otherness is what constitutes his identity, and in that mutuality of friendship, the first person singular disappears. What is spoken in Tony the Tow Truck, in other words, in the long run is not the voice of individual subjectivity but the voice of social togetherness, the voice of otherness. According to Jauss, the important thing about Tony the Tow Truck is that it is not the same story as The Little Engine that Could. In other words, in each generation of reception, the aesthetic standards that prevail at a given time are reconsidered and rethought, reshuffled. A new aesthetic horizon emerges, and texts are constituted in a different way, much also as the Russian formalists have said, only with the sense in Jauss of the historical imperative. The Little Engine that Could is all about the inversion of power between the little guy and the big guy, so that the little guy helps the big guy and that is unequivocal, showing, as in Isaiah in the Bible, that the valleys have been raised and the mountains have been made low. Thats not the way Tony the Tow Truck works. The little guy himself needs help. He needs the help of another little guy. There is a reciprocity not dialectically between little and big, but a mutual reinforcement of little-by-little, and that is the change in aesthetic horizon that one can 9 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 witness between The Little Engine that Could and Tony the Tow Truck. In Benjamin the important thing, as I think weve said, is the idea that the narrator is the apparatus. The humanization of a mechanized world, through our identification with it, is what takes place in Tony the Tow Truck. In other words, all these cars and trucks, all these smiling and frowning houses, of course, have as their common denominator their non-humanity, but the anthropomorphization of the cars and trucks and of the houses constitutes them as the human. They are precisely the human. We see things, in other words, from the point of view of the apparatus. Just as the filmgoer sees things from the point of view of the camera, so we see Tony the Tow Truck from the point of view of the tow truck, right? And what happens? Just as the camera eye point of view leaves that which is seen, as Benjamin puts it, equipment-freeso, oddly enough, if we see things from the standpoint of equipment, what we look at is the moral of the story: in other words, the humanity of the story. What we see, in other words, surrounded by all of this equipment, is precisely the equipment-free human aspect of reality. So Tony the Tow Truck works in a way that is consistent with Benjamins theory of mechanical reproduction. For Adorno, however, the acquiescence of this very figurethe apparatus of mechanical reproduction, of towing again and again and againin the inequity of class relations, rejected as always by Neato and Speedy, proves that the apparatus which Benjamins theory takes to be independent of the machinations of the culture industry, that the apparatus in turn can be suborned and commandeered by the ulture industry for its own purposes. All right. I will skip over Jameson. The Old Historicist reading of Tony simply reconfirms a status quo in which virtue is clear, vice is clear, both are uncontested, and nothing changesin other words, a status quo which reflects a stagnant, existent, unchanging social dynamic. The New Historicism in a lot of ways is doing this, but let me just conclude by suggesting that if literature influences history, Tony the Tow Truck might well explain why today were promoting fuel-efficient cars, why the attack on the gas guzzler and the SUV or minivanremember the car that says I am too busyis so prevalent in the story, and why if we read todays headlines we need to get rid of the Humvee if GM is to prosper, and we need to downsize and streamline the available models. The little guys, Tony and Bumpy, reaffirm the need for fuel-efficient smaller vehicles and you can plainly see that Tony the Tow Truck is therefore a discourse that produces history. All of this, according to the prescription of Tony, is actually happening. All right. Thank you very much.

Pornography Essays (1396 words) - Human Sexuality, Feminism

Pornography Sexual morality has declined in America today. The immoral life can be seen all around us. We see it in drugs, alcohol, movies, magazines, gangs, teenage pregnancy, pre-marital sex, and society as a whole. A person can walk into almost any convenience store and purchase a magazine depicting naked women. Videos and movies with graphic sex scenes can be rented or watched in any movie theater. They have become more common than ever before. Almost every movie with an R rating will have at least one sex scene. Even Forrest Gump, a highly acclaimed movie, had a sexual act and nudity involved. Also public television has been known to show nudity and sex. Allusions are made to sex in every part of our life. Work, school, sports, and recreation are all forums through which unhealthy sexual views are expressed. One of the more predominant and obvious forums for the proliferation of unhealthy sexual desires is pornography. Pornography is displaying the human body in a perverse, sexual way. It can be found in film, magazine, television, on CD-ROM, and even the internet, and can range from soft-core, depicting natural poses and action, to hard-core, or depicting sex combined with violence, that any reasonable, decent, well- adjusted human being would recognize as horrible and disgusting. Much pornography is socially acceptable, with few people actively speaking out against it. Pornography can be bought at many adult or adult novelty shops. One only has to listen to any popular local radio station after 8 P.M. to hear strings of advertisements for local pornographic outlets. Television advertisements are shown also, but not as often as on the radio. Pornography is so socially acceptable in today's society, that it is protected by the same amendment to the constitution that allows Pro-Life groups to protest abortion, the first amendment to the constitution. For years, the first amendment has been quoted to support pornography, as well as everything from freedom to protest abortion, to freedom of holding Nazi views. The first amendment was drafted, not to protect boring, popular, or inoffensive views, however, but to protect the right of people to hold and express controversial ideas. There is a line, though. A television network cannot show images of children having sex, but it can show a naked woman, if the perspective is such that certain parts of her body are not seen. In Germany, access is blocked to certain chat rooms which contain pedophile pornography. In Denmark, the government has dropped all legal barriers against pornography for adults. Explicit magazines cannot be sold to anyone under the age of eighteen, showing some morality is still intact in America today, if not entirely. The Church's stand on pornography is clear and obvious. The Catholic Church is adamantly against all pornography. Pornography ...offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. The church's view is that ...civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. God has willed that the expression of sexual ideas be within the confines of marriage. No man has the right to violate the will of God, and pornography is a violation of this will. It is an unnatural act, a immoral human act. The responsibility of the church over the matter of pornography is to be a clear, constant teacher of the faith, especially objective moral truth. We live in a time of permissiveness of moral violation and confusion. It is a time that demands that the church be a clear voice of morality and its role in society. Pornography and wanton violence in the media can blind people to the divine images, the very likeness of God, in the human being. We are made in the image of God, and to portray that image in a perverse and corrupt way for the enjoyment of others is not only immoral, but goes against our human nature and purpose, to know, love, and serve God in this life, as well as through to the next. To willingly disobey God and pervert one of

Hitler Essays (634 words) - Hitler Family, Adolf Hitler, Nazism

Hitler More than twelve million people were killed in concentration camps, six million were Jewish. All of these horrifying events were consequences of the evening, April 20, 1889, when the one man responsible for all of this was born. Adolf Hitler was born into a loving family of small farmers and craftsmen. He had one half-sister, Angela, and one half-brother, Alois, Jr. Hitler's mother loved him very much and anyone could tell, because she showered him with affection. In his early school years, Adolf was a truly good student. He even took singing lessons and sang in the choir at a Benedictine monastery. He found the church festivals fascinating. His enthusiasm for the church soon began to fade, though. As his teen years approached, he began to rebel against the church and the career plans that his father had made. These plans were for him to become a civil servant, just as he had been. Hitler loved art and wanted to become a painter. He refused to go by his father's plans. This was just one thing that him and his father did not get along about. There really wasn't much they did agree on. Sometimes Alois criticized and even struck his son. Although they didn't get along very well, Adolf was devastated at his father's death when he was a merely thirteen years old. He even cried when he saw his body laying in the casket. Hitler was devoted to his mother and loved her deeply. She was very kind to him and encouraged to be an artist, or whatever else he decided to be. He even thought of himself as his mother's darling, and he carried her picture with him everywhere he went. In 1905, Hitler visited the country where he would later become dictator. While he was there, as a pale and sickly looking teenager, he stuck everyone as a shy and reserved young man. After that, he spent a few months studying, drawing in Munich, Germany. In October of 1907, he moved to Vienna, planning to study art. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts Academy, but got rejected. The next year, in December, his beloved mother, Klara passed away. Later that year, he applied again for the art academy, but got rejected again. In the month of October, 1914, World War One broke out and Hitler joined the Bovarian Army. Hitler felt he needed to defend Germany, his adopted country. On August 4, 1918, Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class for bravery. Then, on June28, 1919, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, ending WW1. Several years later , in 1942, Hitler and his army shattered many lives by capturing and killing the inferior races the slowest and most painful ways possible. The inferior races, according to him were all Jewish people, the terminally ill, the physically and mentally handicapped, and anyone not of German descent. Hitler was a horrible and sick man, who brought on tough times for all people. Many people agree that it was very hard to speak up and if you did, you would get killed. Hitler even had doctors testing to find the most painful and horrible deaths on people. Hitler had a great relationship with his mother, but he and his father argued most of time. His father even beat him on occasion. Hitler was a scrawny and sickly looking boy who only had only one friend. He had gotten rejected from art school twice. All of this made him feel that he had no purpose in the world. Doing these horrible things probably made him think that he was making people feel the same way he felt all of those years and for a small amount of time, made him feel better about himself. I think that the German people were willing to follow and believe Hitler, because they had been through some rough times and would believe anyone who said that they could give them jobs and raise their income. They also wanted to hear that they were the best and when he said this, he won many Germans over.

same-sex ban essays

same-sex ban essays Here in a Georgia, a proposal named Senate Resolution 595 recently passed the House of Representatives by a 122-52 vote. This means that voters will decide on 2 November whether the state government should amend its constitution to ban same-sex marriage. This resolution, however, has done little to appease gay-rights activists here in Georgia. Many feel that their civil-rights and liberties are being violated. They feel that the land of the free is trying to take away their freedom to choose. Another component of this argument stems from this being in the legislature at any level of government. Many feel like this is an infringement upon the Constitutions Free Exercise Clause, which forces the government to totally operate on the basis of separation of church and state. One of the major components of this argument is centered on civil-rights, or lack thereof. In other words, would a same-sex marriage ban infringe upon anyones civil-rights or liberties? Opponents to this ban obviously say yes. Every person I interviewed that opposed this ban agreed that they should be free to choose and do as they please. Many of these interviewees also brought up the point that they were born gay, much like people are born black or Asian. This was not a choice for them and therefore the government has no right to place restrictions on their liberties solely because of their sexuality. This is where advocates for the ban tend to disagree. Many of these people say that being gay is a lifestyle choice. Therefore civil-rights are not an issue because civil-rights are inalienable. These are rights that people are born with. Everyone born a citizen of the United States has an equal shot at things like life, liberty, and property... not sexuality. They also say that homosexuals have no right to redefine marriage for the entire country. Since gays are not having their rights trampled on, then they ...

Ethics Dilemmas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Ethics Dilemmas - Essay Example In articulating my response I have made the greatest effort to remain objective and refrain from imbuing the reasoning with personal morality or religious influence. Still, with personal reasons aside the risk associated with revising the report greatly outweighs the benefits. Recently, the risk associated with producing misguided reports was brought to light in the case of the Wakefield Paper Retraction. In this instance, â€Å"Two decades of an antivaccine movement were essentially built on this paper, creating a decrease in MMR vaccination and an increase in measles outbreaks†¦Despite countless other scientific studies†¦it’s been challenging to convince parents as to the lack of link between autism and the MMR vaccine† ("The wakefield paper," 2010). In this instance, the falsifying of the report created a paradigm shift that caused significant medical detriment to many individuals with autism. While this specific report may not have the wide-ranging implica tions of the Wakefield Paper, the potential for such a pervasive influence is an extremely viable concern. Another major reason why it will not be ethically responsible to change the contents of the report relate to the potential of such a change to detrimentally harm individuals. When considering historical instances of such medical malpractice, there are many examples wherein such practices had long-term harmful effects. From as early as 1932, with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where, â€Å"Researchers withheld treatment even when penicillin became widely available† (Resnik, 2010), it’s clear that the nature of medical responsibility is of the utmost importance. Numerous instances in the 20th century demonstrate instances where short-term financial gain was followed, and in later years detrimental consequences followed. In these regards, if the report were revised, while it might be possible for the company to gain short-term market share and a competitive