Interpreting Literature By Means Of Psychoanalysis English Literature Essay

Interpreting Literature By Means Of Psychoanalysis English Literature Essay Psychological criticism is a way of interpreting literature by means of psychoanalysis, a form of interpretation developed by Dr. Sigmund Freud. In the practice of psychoanalysis, Freud attempted to understand the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mind. He believed that repressed conflicts and fears could be uncovered by having the patient speak freely and openly so that the listener may decipher hidden meanings and motives the patient might be unaware of. Much of his most famous hypotheses focus on the realm of the unconscious mind and how it goes about manifesting itself. Similarly, the role of psychological criticism is to attempt to analyze and draw conclusions from suppressed desires, conflicts, and fears within the realm of the unconscious of the characters, author, or even the reader of the piece of literature. This form of criticism can easily be applied to William Faulkners A Rose for Emily, a short story about the decaying life of Miss Emily Grierson as seen thro ugh the perspective of the town she lives in. Devastated by the loss of her father, Emily keeps herself isolated from everyone in the community except for Homer Barron, whom she later kills and holds on to in a last act of holding on to the past. To better understand Emily Griersons isolation from a psychological perspective, we must take a look at the underlying motivations within her character. Such motivations, can be discovered from many aspects of the story such as the setting and the relationship that Emily has between her late father and the entire community. Emilys isolation can also be seen in her behavior of avoidance and denial. The shot story  ¿Ã‚ ½A Rose for Emily ¿Ã‚ ½ takes place in a small town in the deep south shortly after the Civil War. Miss Emily came from the Grierson family, a noble, upper-class family from the time. She  ¿Ã‚ ½had been a tradition, a duty, a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town ¿Ã‚ ½ showing that she had noblesse oblige and she intended to keep it that way. The neighborhood that she lived in was quickly changing, where  ¿Ã‚ ½only Miss Emilys house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps ¿Ã‚ ½an eyesore among eyesores. ¿Ã‚ ½ While the town had progressed and modernized as most towns at the time did due to the change in ideals from the old generation to the new one, Miss Emily stagnated. In fact, she refused to change her ways at all.  ¿Ã‚ ½When the town got free postal delivery Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not l isten to them. ¿Ã‚ ½ The house she lives in is old and run-down, and is a displacement for the state Miss Emily is in. It has stayed the same for many years, and so has she, which is the way she wants it. However, by doing so she separates herself from the community. This is our first glimpse, as the reader, of Emilys isolation. At this point in the story, the reader is left unaware why Miss Emily chooses update and modernize her house. It quickly becomes apparent that it must have something to do with her relationship with her father. Emily and her father have a relationship that is only briefly mentioned, but there is an obvious complication that later manifests itself throughout the rest of Emilys life. Even though Emily is described as being very beautiful when she was younger, her father would drive away any suitor who came to court his daughter. This, in a way, shows a sort of revers oedipal conflict where the father is trying to compete against possible husbands for Emilys love and attention. A possible clue for her fathers actions is that the mother is not there and ,in fact, is never mentioned in the story at all which leads the reader to assume that young Emily is the only woman in his life. The narrator of the story, that is, the people of the community, paint a description of their father-daughte r relationship; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background and her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip.This description displays the idea that Emily is just a back drop to her father and his unconscious motive to keep his daughter close to him and him only. Her being in the back shows that she is being protected from suitors that are unworthy in her fathers eye. Also the whip that is holding may be interpreted as a phallic symbol signifying that he is the patriarch and will fight off anyone that wants to change that. Even so, Emily does not put up a fight but, rather, is submissive to her fathers wishes. She actually enjoys her fathers chasing away of men because, in a way, it brings her closer to her father and strengthens their relationship. This can be explained psychoanalytically as females can only gain identities in stories if they identify with a father figure. Even though young Emily is desperately trying to gain an identity, she is ignorant to the fact that by doing so she is creating a lifestyle of isolation that could only be made worse with the passing of Mr. Grierson. After her fathers death and without any other close family, Emily quickly realizes that she is now alone and isolated. She could not cope with this grim fact and instead turned to denial. When the ladies of the town came to offer their condolences,  ¿Ã‚ ½Miss Emily met them at the door , dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. ¿Ã‚ ½ She could not grasp the fact that with the loss of her father came the loss of her female identity and instead represses the idea as she stayed barricaded in her house for a  ¿Ã‚ ½long time ¿Ã‚ ½. The next time she is seen  ¿Ã‚ ½her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl ¿Ã‚ ½. Its quite obvious that at this point she is trying to live in the past to cope with her isolation. The cutting of her hair shows that she is unconsciously trying to go back to a place in her mind where her father is still alive and she is still a girl living under his rule. Shortly after, however, she is seen with Homer Barron,  ¿Ã‚ ½a Yankee ¿Ã‚ ½a big, dark, ready man ¿Ã‚ ½. Her infatuation with Homer was not that of romance as the townspeople thought, rather she was only displacing the idea of her father onto Homer. The only way she could have her father back and for everything to be how it was, Miss Emily must marry Homer; or at least that is what she believed. Her relationship with Homer was not meant to be because Homer was actually a homosexual. The story alludes to this with phallic symbols such as,  ¿Ã‚ ½his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth ¿Ã‚ ½. When Emily discovers this fact she, again, is in denial. Her last chance of living in the past rushes away in an instant. So instead of letting go of Homer, she again tries to hold on to the past, more successfully this time, by poisoning Homer Barron and holding on to his body, a final act of desperation to save herself from isolation. With Homers body in her possession, she is no longer isolated in her mind. She has her displaced father back but it is different this time; now she is the provider of the duo, or in other words, she has now taken the role of the father. Because of this new found identity her character actually begins to drastically change.  ¿Ã‚ ½She had grown fat and her hair was [ ¿Ã‚ ½] that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man. ¿Ã‚ ½ This physical change in her appearance signifies that she has now become patriarch of the so-called family. But she is still incomplete in her role because Homer, who has now been dead for some time, cannot ever identify with Miss Emily. So once again, Emily is left isolated by her own accord and she remains this way until the day she dies. In conclusion, by using a psychoanalytic approach to analyze William Faulkners A Rose for Emily, many overlooked details paint an overall theme of isolation in the short story. Her old deteriorating house is a stand in for Emilys mental condition and unwillingness to change. Father daughter issues are prevalent in the story and end up determining the fate of Miss Emily. Devastated over the discovery that her displaced father figure, Homer Barron, is a homosexual she poisons him and denies his death while she holds on to his body, much like she did with her father, in an attempt to live in the past. In the end of her life, Miss Emily is isolated in world of her own creation where she lives in the past and desperately tries to hold on to the present.

Critical Review of the Andromeda Strain Essay -- Novels War Violence E

Critical Review of the Andromeda Strain Imagine walking into a town that normally populates 48 vivacious residents, and discovering 46 non-moving non-living bodies. There are no guns, no bombs, and no visible pre-manufactured weapons of any sort. A few minutes later death strikes, observations can no longer be made, and a black curtain falls. This is what happened to two Army recovery personnel in the town of Piedmont, Arizona (population 48). They set off to retrieve SCOOP VII, a military satellite sent to bring back alien microorganisms. The satellite did its’ job, it brought back a microorganism; something its six predecessors were not able to do. The microorganism SCOOP VII brought back was lethal, killing almost everybody in its’ path, except an old anemic man and a crying infant. Four specialized scientists: Jeremy Stone, Charles Burton, Mark Hall, and Peter Leavitt; are plucked from their everyday lives and placed in the secret building of Project Wildfire, located in Nevada. The five-floored facility was built entirely underground, with each floor more sterile than the one above. Here the four scientists work with the microorganism, now code named â€Å"Andromeda strain.† They try to discover how the agent kills, what it is composed of, where it came from, and why those two civilians survived. The scientists conclude their work on the fifth floor, when disaster strikes. A seal is broken which sets off an automatic nuclear explosio...

Models of decision making Essay

When we speak of rational behavior, we should remember that our focus in this discussion is not on making decisions, but rather on how to support the process of making decisions. Managers are change agents, not just decision makers, so the steps before and after a decision are as important as the actual choice of action. Preparatory steps include creating tension for change, understanding the positions of the various constituencies, and developing political support for a chosen action. Steps after the decision include naming the change monitor and identifying the monitoring methods. Therefore, the mission of good information system is broader than just collecting data to make a choice. Designers of information systems must understand not only how managers think but also how the decision process will be implemented in the managers’ environment. An information system that is well design is an information system that is used. Thus, an information system, in order to be useful, must be implemented. To understand the implementation process better, we review three models of organizational decision making rational, administrative, and political. The Rational Model. The rational model of decision making was introduced earlier in this chapter. It is based on the logic of optimal choice: the choice that would maximize value for the organization. The manager is assumed to be an objective, totally informed person who would select the most efficient alternative, maximizing whatever amount and type of output s/he values. We can summarize the rational choice process as follows: 1. An individual is confronted with a number of known alternative courses of action. 2. Each alternative bears a set of possible consequences. These consequences are known and are quantifiable. 3. The individual has a system of preferences or utilities that permits him or her to rank the consequences and choose an alternative. There is no empirical support for the contention that these three phases are actually used. In reality, managers seldom have the time or money to analyze all alternatives or envision all consequences. If rationality were ever-present among members of an organization, the organization would appear as a coherent and rational  policy-making entity that maximizes the attainment of a unique set of goals and has no internal conflicts. In other words, a rational decision process implies a rational organization. A rational organization is an organization that has (1) centralized power, (2) harmony and consistency of goals across boundaries, and (3) members who are objective, fully informed, and inclined to choose alternatives that maximize the common good of the organization. The rational model represents a sanitized vision of how organizations make decisions. In reality, organizations often seem more like complex groups of coalitions fighting for shares of limited resources, and using multiple sources of information with varying reliability to achieve a set of fluid goals. Individuals within organizations typically have widely divergent perceptions and goals and act to maximize their own gains, not necessarily those of the organization. Because of this disparity between the rational model and reality, we prefer to accept the rational model primarily as a benchmark for comparing the remaining two organization decision-making processes. In searching for a more realistic description of how organizations make decisions, we turn to the satisficing, or administrative, model. The Administrative Model. The quest for a more realistic description of organization decision making produced a variation called the administrative model. This model sees decision makers as people with varying degrees of motivation who are besieged by demands but have little time to make decisions and thus seek shortcuts to find acceptable solutions. Under the administrative model, a decision maker does not try to optimize but instead â€Å"satisfices† treats objectives as loose constraints that can tighten if there are many acceptable alternatives that fulfill those constraints. While optimization would require choosing the alternative with the highest value, satisficing requires finding the first alternative with an acceptable value, that is, an alternative with a value above a minimally acceptable level on a given constraint. Assume you had a car you wanted to sell. If you listed your car for $2,500 and had 10 offers, you could choose with either method. With the rational method, you would determine which offer had the highest value in terms of conditions and price. With the satisficing model, you would accept the first offer that met your lowest acceptable price. Satisficing may lead to a reduced decision quality, but it saves time and effort. Satisficing is a dynamic construct: the aspiration levels of the manager and the number of alternatives determine what is a â€Å"feasible, good enough solution.† It has been pointed out that satisficing is an appropriate (i.e., rational) strategy when the cost of delaying a decision or searching for further alternatives is high in relation to the expected payoff of the supposedly superior alternative. When you take into consideration the costs related to extended search, it is questionable whether the optimum procedure is to search for the optimum value. When a decision has been reached and the solution to the problem implemented and found to be acceptable, then the organization institutionalizes the procedure used to solve the problem into astandard operating procedure (SOP). SOPs are rules, programs, and routines that are invoked by managers to gain time and to avoid the task of solving a problem from scratch each times it appears. Sometimes managers invoke those SOPs when the organization is facing a similar but not identical problem to the one that the SOP originally solved. Since SOPs are often processes that worked once but nobody is quite sure why or whether it was the best way to solve the original problem in the first place. SOPs are not always the time-savers they are supposed to be. Once implication of having rationally bounded decision makers in organizations is that organizations cannot be seen as single entities. Rather, problems are broken down and assigned to specialized units within the organization that develop their own priorities and goals. These goals, sometimes termed subgoals, may not agree with the organization’s overall goals. This phenomenon has been called local rationality.3 Using the perspective, organizations could be viewed as constellations of loosely allied units, each having a set of SOPs and programs to deal with its piece of the problem. As time passes, these units become more distinct and their subgoals more entrenched. These divergences are enhanced by increasingly distinct perceptions of priorities, information, and uncertainty; they are further reinforced by recruitment, rewards, and tenure. When these tendencies are very strong, the loose alliance of organization units breaks down into â€Å"organized anarchies.† In the extreme case, coalitions are created with conflicting interests. This leads us to the political model of rationality. You should note that the term political does not imply that this model is only relevant in the public  (government) sector; rather the term applies to a type of organization that may exist in any industry or industry sector. The Political Model. In contrast to the rational model, players in the political model (often referred to as incrementalists) do not focus on a single issue but on many intraorganizational problems that reflect their personal goals. In contrast to the administrative model, the political model does not assume that decisions result from applying existing standard operating procedures, programs, and routines. Decisions result from bargaining among coalitions. Unlike in the previous models, power is decentralized. This concept of decision making as a political process emphasizes the natural multiplicity of goals, values, and interests in a complex environment. The political model views decision making as a process of conflict resolution and consensus building and decisions as products of compromise. The old adage, â€Å"Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,† is the dominant decision-making strategy. When a problem requires a change n policy, the political model predicts that a manager will consider a few alternatives, all of them similar to existing policy. This perspective points out that decisions tend to be incremental— that managers make small changes in response to immediate pressures instead of working out a clear set of plans and a comprehensive program. This incrementalist approach can be seen as the simplest or most extreme form of satisficing. The incremental approach of the political model allows managers to reduce the time spent on the information search and problem definition stages. Incremental decision making is geared to address shortcomings in present policy rather than consider a superior, but novel, course of action. In the political model, the stakeholders have different perception, priorities, and solutions. Because stakeholders have the power to veto some proposals, no policy that harms a powerful stakeholder is likely to triumph even if it is objectively â€Å"optimal.† Our purpose in reviewing these models of organizational decision making is to highlight the realities of decision making that must be recognized when developing or acquiring information systems. If the designer of an I/S assumes that the rational model is a valid representation of the way a given organization is being managed when in fact the political model is a more valid description, s/he may encounter serious implementation  problems. For example, access to information can be very sensitive issue, since in politics, â€Å"information is power.† If managers discover that once a new information system is implemented they will no longer have access to certain data, it is quite possible they will resist the implementation effort. When we consider the issue of organizational decision making, it is important to recognize that the structure of the organization has a strong influence on how and when information is communicated and who gets involved in what decisions. We now turn our attention to the issue of organizational structure.

Civil Inattention essays

Civil Inattention essays Every time we enter a public place we engage in some sort of social interaction. This is a part of our everyday life. Certain public settings are even created for the sole purpose of social interaction. The Study Hall bar in Isla Vista is one such place. Most people go to this bar to get drunk, and to interact with friends or among the unacquainted. Throughout my many visits to the Study Hall, I observed multiple kinds of social transmissions. These interactions between bar patrons varied from positive to negative discussions and were influenced by not only gender but social status also. In the following pages to come I will discuss and analyze social interactions between certain individuals and analytically breakdown some of the conversations that were occurring during my visits. The following analysis will explain what sorts of interactions take place inside of a bar, and will examine the effects that alcohol has on a person engaging in conversation with the known and unkno wn. Many concepts will be used to explain and analyze the social transmissions at the Study Hall. After observing many different situations and interactions at the bar, I was able to apply concepts that were used in lecture and throughout the readings. I will begin by analyzing the forming of a relationship and work all the way into breaking down the actual conversation itself which all occurred at the Study Hall. The process begins with an initial interaction between two individuals who are meeting for the first time. Civil Inattention and Anonymous Relationships It begins with a young male coming to the bar to meet his friends to watch a game. As he enters, a female sitting at a table with two other women notices him. As he passed, he glanced at the table of girls at which time female #1 (the girl who first noticed him) happily made eye contact with him and gave a little smile. It would only be a matter of time before the two would en...

Intercultural Communication in Bend It Like Beckham essays

Intercultural Communication in Bend It Like Beckham essays Bend it Like Beckham is about a young Indian woman named Jessminder who struggles between being herself and doing what she loves and pleasing her family and their traditional values. Jesss parents want her to lead a traditional life and learn to cook, work on her education, and get married like her sister. They dont like her playing soccer, which Jess not only loves to do, but is also very talented at. When Jess is discovered by another local female soccer player, Jules, and asked to play on their local girls team, she knows her parents will never accept this as part of her life. However, Jess decides to lie to her parents and secretly join the team in order to pursue her love of soccer. The film is full of so many examples of intercultural communication; it was actually hard to focus on a specific area. However, one of the aspects in the film I found especially interesting was the culture clash between Jesss very traditional parents and extended family compared to the very modern London, England, where they lived. I realized later after studying the film in greater detail that several characters within the movie experience their own culture clash and adapt and change in their own ways. In the essay The Role of Family and Macrocultures in Intercultural Relationships by Carley H. Dodd and John R. Baldwin, the authors explain that it has traditionally been believed that a culture is made up of large groups of people that share the same way of life, such as a specific ethnic group or members of the same country. However, many scholars now believe that any size group can share a way of life, and for that group, this becomes a culture (Dodd and Baldwin, 335). This was evident to me as I witnessed not only Jesss family adapt to their changing environment, but Jess herself adapt and accept the soccer player way of life, and also Jules mother Paula as she...

Biodiversity Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Biodiversity - Research Paper Example On a more lofty plane of analysis, proponents of biotechnology, laud it as a triumph of human innovation, an example of humankind’s superior knowledge over other organisms in the eco-system. Some even argue that â€Å"sustainable agriculture is possible only with biotechnology and imaginative chemistry.† (Schneiderman and Carpenter, 1990). Environmental advocates, on the other hand, warn of the hazards of biotechnology on biodiversity and other life-forms. For example, environmentalists assert that the corn that is keeping pests away is also killing the Monarch butterfly. According to Wilson (1992), â€Å"the race is on to develop methods, to draw more income from the wildlands without killing them, and so to give the invisible hand of the free market a green thumb.† the central debate that underpins the biotechnology discourse: balancing the WTO principles on liberalization and the environmental concerns of biotechnology. To quote Herdegen (2010): Biotechnology on the international level, is covered by the said Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), which build their judicial content upon a precautionary approach. On the other hand, WTO trade law is deemed to focus on the abolition of trade barriers and the combating of protectionism and unjustified discrimination. Therefore there is a potential for conflict between trade law and MEAs, especially in the field of biotechnology. It is this conflict that has made the crafting of an international legal framework for biotechnology so fraught with tensions, and the road to Cartagena so bumpy. The proposal for the international regulation of biotechnology was spawned by a 1986 incident, wherein the United States tested a genetically-modified rabies vaccine in Argentina, without having informed, much less obtained consent, from the Argentine government. This raised fears that with without an international legal framework for biotechnology, developed countries would use developing countries as laboratories, thus putting citizens of the latter at great risk. (Gupta, 2000: 24). There was a pre-existing Convention on Biological Diversity that could be used to serve as a framework for the creation of a convention particularly and specifically addressing biotechnology concerns and issues. Article 8 of the CBD called on Parties to â€Å"establish or maintain means to regulate, manage or control the risks associated with the use and release of living modified organisms resulting from biotechnology which are likely to have adverse environmental impacts that could affect the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, taking also into account the risks to human health.† On the basis of Article 8, the parties to the Convention decided to form a working group to hammer out a protocol acceptable by all. Delegates from 170 nations locked heads in Cartagena to work through the contentious issues being raised and the various points of divergence between nations and stake holders. In a press release by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1999, Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the program, was quoted as saying: â€Å"we need a widely accepted protocol that protects the environment, strengthens the capacity of developing countries to ensure biosafety, complements existing national regulations, and promotes public confidence in biotechnology and all the benefits it can offer.† This, however, proved to be easier said than done. Countries from Europe and from the developing world found themselves forming an

Network Infrastructure Basics in the LAB Assignment

Network Infrastructure Basics in the LAB - Assignment Example The most important thing about this standard is that there is no backward compatibility it supports. I installed this card in the PCI slot of the motherboard of the PC and completed my LAB. In this LAB (6.2.4) requirement was to set up a wireless environment in by installing a high-speed wireless card in PC and a wireless access device in LAPTOP which is without a wireless built-in wireless adaptor (Habraken, 2003). Another thing to check here was to set up a device so that it can be accessed by any other wireless adaptor. So I used the following devices from the available ones according to the standards given in the LAB 6.2.2 (Wireless Standard Facts). After completing this LAB I have found that 802.11n standard is fastest amongst all the others (802.11a/b/g), with data rate up to 600 Mbps at 2.4 GHz frequency 802.11n promises significantly higher speed and range. It also includes backward compatibility with 802.11 a/b/g (Labsim). In this LAB (6.2.4) it was required to set up a high-speed wireless environment just to transfer files between LAPTOP and computer at very high speed and not to install an extra device. LAPTOP already has a built-in wireless network adaptor. After reviewing LAB 6.2.2 (Wireless Standard Facts) and amongst the given adaptors I choose 802.11b/g adapter. There were many other devices also available in this LAB including an access point. I installed the 802.11b/g wireless adapter on the computer. As per the Wireless Standards, Facts 802.11g operates at 2.4 GHz at speeds up to 54 Mbps. With just the wireless adapter installed, you can create an ad hoc wireless network and connect directly to the laptop to transfer files (Saha, Mukherjee, & Bandyopadhyay, 2003).