Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Compare Organizations Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Compare Organizations - Research Paper Example Similarly, some of these organizations are formed to help its members acquire higher education, learn more about the profession and be well equipped to serve the people that need their services and products. Therefore, joining such professional organization is a prudent approach to professionals who want to attain more in their profession. To begin with, these organizations have some aspects which are common. First, they have a minimum limit of the number of people that should be members. For example the American Association of Heart Failure Nurses and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners have to adhere to this regulation so as to qualify to become an organization that will serve many people. This ensures that it is an organization that has a quorum and can discuss issues to greater lengths. If the number of people reach the required minimum, then the organization is likely to serve a large number of professionals in the world and in the stated region. Secondly, the organizati on must have a mission. A mission statement openly expresses the reason for formation of the organization and how it will help the members. An organization that has a strong mission is destined to serve its members without hesitation. As such, it will bank of fulfilling its mission while still maintaining high levels of service delivery. Thirdly, the professional organizations have to be open in case there is need to scrutinize the accounts, its performance and the way the internal environment in conducted. The organization is obligated to be open to its members since they have the right of association with the organization. Therefore, the members will want to know how the organization is run, its performance and any other issues that will affect the organization in the long run. As such, the members feel free to get any information that pertains to the organization. Therefore, the members are part of the scrutiny of the organization to note whether it is improving and making positi ve steps or if it is deteriorating in performance. The American Association of Heart Failure Nurses (AAHFN) is an organization that is specifically made to ensure its members are enhancing their education in nursing, getting more education in clinical practice, improving on their research and getting more information about how to improve heart failure outcomes in patients (American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, 2012). The organization has a mission to have special interests in heart failure and have a passion to treat such cases. Therefore, the organization is specialized in learning more about heart failures and how it can help heart failure patients when they are caught in such a position. In doing such, the organization has to ensure it connects with other nurses in other regions, which offers a pool of ideas. The exchange of ideas helps the organization treat these cases and contain any complexities that may arise. In so doing, the organization translates findings in research into practice, which helps find the best ways to cure any complexities that are found in heart failures. This organization welcomes all professionals who are specialized in caring for people with heart failure. As such, the organization values all the valuable professionals that could help improve care given to people who are having heart failure cases. The organization extends its services from clinics, hospitals and in many instances visit homes to

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Impact Of Variations On Project Performance

Impact Of Variations On Project Performance Given a well-structured schedule of works, the maximum project performance could be achieved if the work progress flows smoothly within the time frame and within the budget. However, it is rare that a project performs according as scheduled due to several reasons such as market conditions changes and Variations on the design drawings or contract. Therefore, the occurrence of Variations has negative impact on project performance. Thomas et al (2002:144) believe that variability generally impedes project performance. Ibbs (1997:308) concluded that Variations have tremendous effect on the project performance as the negatively affect the productivity and cost. Arain Pheng (2005:285) argued that Variations are unwanted but inevitable reality of any construction project. Hanna et al (2002:57) indicated that projects impacted by Variations causes the contractor to achieve lower productivity level than planned. There are 16 effects identified from the literature review, as shown in Figure 1 is discussed bellow. Delay in payment: Delay in payment occurred frequently due to Variations in construction projects (CII, 1990a). Variations may slow down the project progress, leading to delays in achieving the targeted dateline during construction (CII, 1995). Eventually, this may affect payment to the contractors. These delay may causes severe problems until it end up in delays in payment to the subcontractors; this is because the Contractors may not be able to pay the Sub-Contractors unless they get paid by the Employer first. Quality degradation: If occurrence of Variations is frequent, they may affect the quality of works. According to CII (1995), the quality of work was usually poor because of frequent variations because Contractors tended to compensate for the losses by doing short cut works. Productivity degradation: Interruption, delays and redirection of work that are associated with Variations have a negative impact on labour productivity. These in turn can be translated into labour cost or monetary value (Ibbs, 1997b). Hester et al. (1991) argued that the productivity of workers was expected to be greatly affected in cases where they were required to work overtime for prolonged periods to compensate for schedule delays. Thomas and Napolitan (1995) concluded that Variations normally led to disruptions and these disruptions were responsible for labour productivity degradation. The most significant types of disruptions were due to the lack of materials and information as well as the work out of sequence. Lack of material was reported as the most serious disruption, because labours could not continue their works and end up idling while waiting for the materials to be available. Hence, to manage Variations, one needed to manage these disruptions. However, the disruptive e ffects could not be avoided in many instances. Rework and demolition: Rework and demolition are frequent occurrences due to Variations in construction projects (Clough and Sears, 1994). Variations which are imposed when construction is underway or even completed, usually lead to reworks and delays in project completion (CII, 1990a). Rework and demolition are potential effects of Variations in construction, depending on the timing of the occurrence of the Variations. These effects are to be expected due to Variations during the construction phase. This is because the Variations during the design phase do not require any rework or demolition on construction sites. Logistics delays: Logistics delays may occur due to Variations requiring new materials and equipment (Fisk, 1997). Hester et al. (1991) observed that logistics delays were significant effects of Variations in construction projects. Logistics delays were experienced in construction projects where Variations in the construction phase required new materials, tools and equipments. Tarnish firms reputation: Variations are referred to as a major source of construction claims and disputes (Fisk, 1997; Kumaraswamy et al., 1998). The claims and disputes may affect the firms reputation negatively, due to unable to solve sever Variation cases. Variations also increase the possibility of professional disputes. Conventionally, Variations present problems to all the parties involved in the construction process. Poor safety conditions: Variations may affect the safety conditions in construction projects (OBrien, 1998) as changes in construction methods, materials and equipment may require, therefore additional safety measures are needed during carrying out the construction phase. Poor professional relations: A construction project is not a mere brick and mortar brought together. Rather, it creates professional relationships between parties to the contract. Each project successfully completed constitutes an added experience to participants and their reputation builds up. But disputes may arise between parties to the contract owing the occurrence of Variations. Misunderstanding may arise when the Contractor is not satisfied with the judgment of the consultant in terms of a fair valuation of a Variation. Bower (2000:264) argued that parties to a contract have been left to argue over the cost, time effects and due compensation of a Variations. Since the Contractors are pessimist of the outcome of the negotiations, they usually allow higher value than the real cost incurred. Bower (2000:264) opined that this causes the contention between parties as the Contractor continually push the client to settle the claim for additional costs while invariably feeling that the reimbursement has been insufficient. As a consequence, this can be very damaging to relationship between all parties representatives (Bower 2000:264). Charoenngam et al (2003:197) remarked that disputes between the Employer and the Contractor can occur if the Variations undertaking is not managed carefully. Harbans (2003:42) warned that unless a mutually acceptable solution is agreed by the parties, valuation of Variations would remain at the forefront of disputes and claims making their way ultimately to arbitral tribunals or the corridors of justice. Ssegawa (2002:92) revealed that more than one-third of disputes occurs pertain to how to ascertain losses arising from Variations. The excessive occurrence of Variations due to design errors or omission may undermine the professionalism of the designer. Furthermore, workers get demoralised when they demolish a portion of work that has already been done. Additional payments for contractor: Additional payments for the contractor can be a potential effect of Variations in construction projects. Variations are considered to be a common source of additional works for the Contractor (OBrien, 1998). Due to additional payments, the Contractor looks forward to Variations in the construction project because contractor benefits from the additional profit on Variations. Disputes among professionals: Like poor professional relations, disputes among professionals are also potential effects of frequent variations in construction projects. The disputes over Variations and claims are inevitable and the Variation clauses are often the source of project disputes (CII, 1986a). Clear procedures presented in the contract and fair allocation of risks can help in resolving disputes through negotiation rather than litigation (CII, 1986a). Frequent communication and strong coordination can assist in eliminating the disputes between professionals. Completion schedule delay: Various authors agree that Variations could be one of the reasons behind project time overruns or delays (Chan Yeong 1995:467, Mohamed 2001:1). It is said that a project that finished within the shortest time could, achieves some monetary savings. Unfortunately, each additional day due to occurrence of Variations on a project implies additional money. Variations issued during any various phases of construction gives negative affected to both projects completion time and cost increase (Koushki 2005:292). Hanna et al (2002:63) revealed that the more the Variations occurrence the more significant productivity losses. The productivity is the amount of output over a unit of time.

Friday, October 25, 2019

Anselms Proslogium :: essays research papers

In this discourse, Anselm looks to discover God, and discover what makes God real. Anselm has many conflicts at first with himself, wondering if there is one true single argument as to prove the existence of God. Anselm puts all his thoughts together from first to last, those which made him almost give up wondering, and those thoughts that made him fully understand. Anselm also tries to answer the many questions as to why human’s sometimes doubt the existence of god, such as the fact God has left us, and since then man has digressed and lives in misery without God’s existence. He enlightens us on the fact yes, many of us truly do seek God, but we are oftentimes clouded by our own thoughts and desires. As soon as man begins to look for the truth and look for the good in God’s grace, we have ambitious intentions, such as to further our own wisdom. Is it truly an evil to further our own wisdom? This is one thing that comes to mind when dealing with this article for me. For every reason we seek god though, it in someway has a selfish reasoning behind it, even if not harmful intent. If one seeks God for calm and serenity, then he seeks to exclude himself from the rest of the world and not pay homage to God with his fellow friends. If one seeks God to further their own knowledge and become an expert, then he seeks God to become better then others in respect, and is thinking merely of himself. The main point being made here is God should just be felt, not understood. God created man in his own image so that man could understand and know that God has compassion and grace. It need not be felt or seen to be truly there, we should simply know and understand that God is there for us and helping us become better individuals.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  I think the second point being made from this paper is that many individuals have a â€Å"lust† for God. They want to believe so they have something to believe in, and want the Lord to be real. Anselm repeatedly discusses his â€Å"hunger† he had for God, where he continuously sought to learn more and extend his faith. This lust for God he finally resolves is something we should not feel. One should simply love God without question, because if seeking God, selfish purposes often arise.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Germans children Essay

The children of the Jewish Holocaust during the Nazi era were placed under very unjust, cruel, and exacting circumstances. Education, a basic right of children in developed nations of that era, was denied to Jews in areas of Europe where Hitler’s rule and influence were adopted. During the time of transition during which the exclusion of Jewish children from schools was being implemented, non-Jewish children were formally taught that their Jewish counterparts were inferior. In order to do this, Jewish youth were used to demonstrate the appearance of inferiority by placing them in front of the class and pointing out their characteristic phenotypes as being undesirable. Occurrences like this placed severe limitations on the ability of Jews to learn in these schools, as they were constantly mistreated, neglected, and abused because of their race. Growing restrictions were also placed upon these children’s accessibility to the resources within the schools, until finally they were prevented altogether from attending schools, which were open now only to Germans children (FCIT). Fred Spiegel describes his first weeks of school (shul) in Dinslaken, Germany, where he had to attend a Jewish shul, as the German schools were no longer open to Jewish children (Spiegel 27, 29). The alternative Jewish schools were understaffed and unsupported by the state. Spiegel himself recalls his school’s having only one teacher (29). Later, Arnold Blum recalls an even more frightening occurrence in which his school was being burned before his very eyes (Blum, 20). He immortalizes this event in his memoir â€Å"Kristallnacht† (20). More than just restricting these Jewish children’s ability to attend state schools, they were being stripped of their right to any education at all in the burning of their Jewish school. The parks were also an area in which Jewish children felt the abuse of Nazism. German children, who were armed with the idea that Jews were inferior, played in the parks and discriminated against the Jews they found there. The Jewish children were called names, spat upon, and otherwise abused by non-Jewish children. Spiegel also describes his time spent in the park behind his house in Dinslaken. The last time he remembers going there, he was cursed and called a â€Å"Dirty Jew† by the other children (Spiegel, 28). His grandfather too was cursed by his friends. Kristallnacht, which occurred on November 9-10, 1938, ushered in the destruction of all that was Jewish. Beyond the burning of schools came the burning and destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues (Blum, 20). Fred Spiegel recalls the night he was forced to leave his home and the abuses even he as a child faced. He was already emotionally crippled by the sight of his community being gutted by fires. He further recalls being cursed and spit upon by the non-Jews as he and his family were being forced from their homes. Some Jews were evicted to concentration camps and ghettos. Others were turned out of the country altogether. Spiegel writes about the events he witnessed upon entering his home, which had been destroyed, for the last time as a child: â€Å"My mother, sister, and my Aunt Klara were standing on the balcony crying. My grandfather had been arrested and taken away by two policemen. [†¦] Soon the two policemen returned. We were told we could not stay in our apartment and had to go with them. On the way out we passed by the downstairs apartment that was empty because the Abosch-family, a Jewish family who had rented it from my mother, had been expelled to Poland a few weeks earlier. Their apartment too was totally destroyed† (Spiegel, 30). Children were also abused through the mandate that they live in the ghettos. Because the ghettos were sequestered from the rest of the German civilization and restrictions were placed on items that could be brought into the area, children often suffered hunger. Many of them were reduced to smuggling food into the ghettos in order to aid in the support of their families. While these were very risky actions, some Jewish children were left even more vulnerable as their parents were killed or taken away to concentration camps. These orphaned children were left alone in the ghettos to make a living under doubly cruel circumstances.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Pure conversation movement in China Essay

The â€Å"Pure Conversation† (qingtan ) cultural movement emerged in the Wei-Jin period and is defined as not only the approach that scholars communicate with each other, sharing their thoughts, but also a form that shows the main stream of the philosophy thoughts of the society in the Wei-Jin period. (Tang 1991, pg. 18). :This essay will introduce the â€Å"Pure Conversation†(qingtan) movement by analyzing the reason that it emerged and the influences of it. In the first part, the origin of qingtan will be introduced. It is advocated by the historian that qingtan is an extension of qingyi in the late Han dynasty, which will be explained in details later. (Tang 1991, pg. 11)). While discussing the reasons of its origin, some points of view of scholars will be reviewed. Also, the argument that whether the â€Å"Pure Conversation† has negative or positive influences to the society will be discussed. Some scholars believed qingtan is the major reason that caused the fall of the dynasty. (Chan 1963: pg. 314). However, the positive influences of qingtan cannot be ignored. Since qingtan helped to develop Neo-Daoism, it is one side to judge qingtan as a completely negative thing. (Chan,1963:316). In the last part, a comprehensive conclusion will be given to conclude that in what extent qingtan has positive influences and negative influences to the society. :Yiming Tang in his dissertation proposed that the â€Å"Pure Conversation† (qingtan) cultural movement in Wei-Jin period refers to the conversation that conducted by educated elites to discuss about the events including human life, society and the universe. (Tang 1991, pg. 18). :He also pointed out that qingtan often took the form of debate to illustrate the ability of eloquence and rhetorical skills of the participants. (Tang 1991, pg. 18). :Miyazaki Ichisada, a Japanese historian argued that the origin of qingtan could date back to the Han dynasty. (Tang 1991, pg. 11. ). In his opinion, qingtan is an extension of qingyi in the late Han dynasty. (Tang 1991, pg. 11). Brackenridge Scot in his dissertation â€Å"The Character of Wei-Jin qingtan Reading Guo Xiang’s â€Å"Zhuang Zi†Ã¢â‚¬  pointed out that in the Han dynasty, qingyi literally means pure criticism, which is used by the eminent scholars to comment on politics and the talents that the government uses. (Scot 2010, pg. 33). Later, Neo-Taoism (xuanxue ? ? ) flourished in the  Wei-Jin period, the subject of qingyi changed to talking about xuan ?. (Scot 2010, pg. 29). Therefore, the term qingtan replaced qingyi and it was generally referred as xuanyan , tanxuan sometimes. (Scot 2010, pg. 33). ? ? ? ? ? ? ? : There are some reasons that proposed by scholars to analyze why the â€Å"Pure Conversation† (qingtan) cultural movement appeared in the Wei-Jin period. A historian of Chinese philosophy Chan Wing-tsit believed that after the collapse of the Han dynasty, the poor situation of the country did not improved under Wei’s dominant is an important reason. (Chan 1963: pg. 314). It is demonstrated that the continuous war and repeated floods and drought caused a largely decreased population and a poor living standard of people. (Chan 1963: pg. 314) However, the government of the Wei dynasty still repeated the ugly drama of the Han dynasty. (Chan 1963: pg. 314). The corrupt government directly leading to many scholars lost the confidence to the government, thus they refused to serve the government and escape from the reality in order to research the transcendental values using the form of qingtan. (Chan 1963: pg. 314). Further, another historian of Chinese philosophy Fung Yu-lan believed that  the appearance of the â€Å"Pure Conversation† cultural movement followed the trend of the philosophy ideology development in Chinese history. (Fung 1959: pg. 231). In the Han dynasty, thinking of Confucius was the dominated ideology in the society. (Chan 1963, pg. 315). Moreover, the government selected talents by the criteria that whether people can recite the classics of Confucius. (Chan 1963, pg. 316). Therefore, the thinking of Confucius was widely spread and well developed. However, after experienced the continuous war, many precious classical books of Confucius were damaged and destroyed. (Chan 1963: pg. 316). When the  Wei came to the central power, the numbers of the teacher that who teaching the rites and thoughts of Confucius was shapely decreased. (Chan 1963: pg. 316). Therefore, the Daoism with simplified thoughts and rites were widely spread due to this special historical context. Daoism significantly influenced people in the Wei-Jin period which leading to the approach that used to discuss the thinking of Taoism qingtan was very popular. (Fung 1959: pg. 231). As it mentioned before, qingtan often took the form of debate to display the ability of eloquence and rhetorical skills of the participants. The book Shishuo Xinyu complied by Liu Yi-qing , who is a princess of Liu-Song dynasty 420-429, records the activities of scholar officials and noble families from the end of the Han dynasty to the end of the Eastern Jin dynasty. (Tang 1991, pg. 15). This book is the only extant book from Wei-Jin period. (Tang 1991, pg. 15). Although it is traditionally classified as a novella (xiaoshuo ? ? ) and not a history in the strict sense, it is historical intent and can give an impression of the life and thought of the upper social class during Wei-Jin period as Tang argued. (Tang 1991, pg. 16). Professor Richard Mather’s English version of Shishuo Xinyu (Anew account of tales of the world) will be cited in this essay for discussing qingtan. A group of men of letters during the Wei-Jin period (mingshi , â€Å"famous scholars† or â€Å"famous gentlemen†) is noticed as the most famous representation of the activity of qingtan, which is known as the â€Å"Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove† ? ? ? ? (zhulinqixian). (Scot 2010, pg. 2). The â€Å"Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove† including Ji Kang , Ruan Ji ? ?, Shan Tao , Xiang Xiu , Liu Ling , Wang Rong and Ruan Xian . (Scot 2010, pg. 3). Shishuo Xinyu described them as â€Å"The seven used to gather beneath a bamboo grove, letting their fancy free in merry  revelry. † It is pointed out that their life style was opposed to orthodox values (i. e. , Confucian) and government service, and that instead they were devoted to wine, music, literature, and the art of conversation (qingtan). (Chan 1963, pg. 315). Also, they conducted qingtan is described as purely an escape from reality. (Chan 1963: pg. 314). As a representation of advocating qingtan, it can be seen that many educated elites in Wei-Jin period were acting just like the â€Å"Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove†; they did not care about national affairs but conducted qingtan for entertainment all day. Critics judged this type of  behavior as the most important reason for the fall of the dynasty. : Gu Yan-wu (1613-1682) who is a Chinese philologist in the late Ming dynasty and the early Qing dynasty (Bartlett 2009, pg. 185) used the activity of qingtan during the Wei-Jin period as an example to blame scholars in the later Ming dynasty for they do not have concerns about the society but advocate to empty talks, thus the Ming dynasty fell. (Bartlett 2009, pg. 185). In an essay of his work Rizhi lu (Record of Daily Learning), he proposed that: When (the barbarian chiefs) Liu (Yuan) and Shi (Le) invaded China (in  the early 4th century), the root cause was the widespread intellectual collapse due to (Neo-Daoist) qingtan thought; everyone knows that. †¦ They do not study the classical texts, and don’t investigate the records of the great rulers, they substitute empty phrase for the substantial learning of self-cultivation and governing others. (Bartlett 2009, pg. 189). Qingtan directly leading to the result that the regime collapsed is one criticism by scholars to the ethos of talking about xuanxue during the Wei-Jin period. Although it is partial to comment that the regime in Wei-Jin period fell because of qingtan, the truth that the Wei-Jin scholars  abandoned the real world affairs and concentrated on abstract and theoretical activities cannot be denied. No. 3 of Affairs of State from Shishuo Xinshuo demonstrated that: Wang Meng, Liu Tan and the monk Zhi Daolin came to visit general He. However, He was reading documents and letters and paid no attention to them. Wang said to him, â€Å"We’ve come today with Zhi Daolin for a visit, hoping you would lay aside ordinary duties and join us in some abstruse conversation. How does it happen that we find you just now with bowed head reading this stuff? † He replied, â€Å"If I didn’t read ‘this stuff’, how would you fellows manage  to survive? Everyone considered it as a fine answer. It is illustrated by Shishuo Xinshuo that people in Wei-Jin period were aware of the harmful effect of qingtan. Although the criticisms above about qingtan are reasonable, qingtan still have some positive aspects that should be noticed. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? : First of all, it is argued that the aesthetic values of qingtan couldn’t be ignored. Fung in his work Short history of Chinese philosophy pointed out that: The art of such conversation (qingtan) consisted in expressing the best thought, which was usually Daoistic, in the best language and tersest phraseology. (Fung 1959, pg. 231). As it mentioned before, qingtan has high requirement to the ability of eloquence and rhetorical skills of the participants. Tang concluded the critiques of a good qingtan as, first of all, the participants should be creative and not mimic other’s point of view; secondly, their argument should be soundly reasonable and convincing; thirdly, they have to be eloquent and rich in style. (Tang 1991, pg. 43). From the critiques of qingtan, it is demonstrated that qingtan is not only an approach to exchange the intellectual’s thinking but also a form of art to show the beauty of language. More importantly, Chan argued that the most significant influence of qingtan is that the Wei-Jin scholars developed new thinking that is Neo-Taoism (xuanxue) under the effects of the Daoism of the Laozi and Zhuangzi. (Chan,1963:316). The Wei-Jin scholars enjoyed debate with each other, and enjoyed ‘demolishing â€Å"objections†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢. (Chan,1963:316). However, they were not satisfied with the argumentation they developed in research of transcendental values, they further exploit the concepts of Taoism and the Neo-Taoism appeared. (Chan,1963:316). Qingtan as the form talking about xuanxue helped Neo-Taoism flourished in the Wei-Jin period. As mentioned, the object of qingtan is talking about xuan, which refers to the content of the three books Zhuangzi , Laozi and Zhouyi . (Scot 2010,pg. 1). However, the foundation of Neo-Daoism was laid by the work of Wei-Jin scholars including Wangbi’s Laozi Zhu (Commentary to Laozi), Guoxiang’s Zhuangzi Zhu (Commentary to Zhuangzi) and Xiangxiu’s Zhouyi Zhu (Commentary to Zhouyi). (Scot 2010,pg. 2). Some examples from Shishuo Xinyu will be present to illustrate how people using qingtan to discuss xuanxue. ? ? ? : No. 55 of Letters and Scholarship recorded that one day Zhidao Lin, Xu, Xie Shengde and others of outstanding virtues were gathered together at the home of Wang Meng. Xie proposed that everyone should all speak or intone poems to express their feelings to memorize the assembly. He then asked everyone present to make an exposition of the title of one of Zhuangzi’s chapter Yufu. Then everyone told him what in his mind and discuss about each other’s idea. This story illustrated that during the Wei-Jin period, it is very normal to see a group of the educated elite gathered together to talk about xuanxue. : â€Å"No. 29 of Letters and Scholarship mentioned that Huan Wen  was assembling the famous and outstanding men of the time for lectures on the Zhouyi and was planning to do one hexagram a day. Emperor Jian Wen heard this he turned back, saying, â€Å"Some of the interpretations will naturally be difficult and some easy. How can each lecture be limited to one hexagram? † From this excerpt it can be seen that talking about Zhouyi was very popular in that time. By conducting qingtan, scholars in the Wei-Jin period developed the concept of â€Å"non-being† of the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and pursued the reality beyond the space and time instead in research of the mutual  effect between the nature and the man that was the most popular approach in Han thought. (Chan 1963: pg. 317). ; In the Han dynasty, the teachings of Confucius were the dominated philosophy thought. However, the situation was not beneficial for the diversity of the development of culture. (Chan 1963, pg. 317). Therefore, qingtan also helped to improve this situation; people did not necessarily learn the doctrines of Confucius and can gradually develop the ability of independent thinking by practicing qingtan (Chan 1963, pg. 315). Also, it is pointed out that the movement of  qingtan had created a spirit of critical and independent thinking. (Chan 1963, 315). As people no longer view Confucius as ‘a throneless king whose subtle doctrines lay behind his written word’ but ‘an ancient teacher who transmitted the wisdom of the past’. (Chan 1963: pg. 315). In conclusion, this essay introduced the background of the origin of qingtan, meanwhile, the reasons of its emergence were discussed. It is believed that qingtan is an expansion of qingyi that can be date back to the late Han dynasty. However, the subject of qingyi, which is, talking about politics had changed to talk about human life, society and the  universe, thus qingtan emerged. Reasons of its emergence can be concluded as scholars in the Wei-Jin period were disappointed to the government thus they used qingtan as an approach to escape the reality; another reason is that the development of Chinese philosophy helped the emergence of qingtan, since people in that time were attracted to Laozi and Zhuangzi. Before discussing the influences of qingtan, Shishuo Xinyu, a book recorded qingtan from Wei-Jin period was introduced. By referencing some stories from Shishuo Xinyu, the positive influence and negative influence of qingtan were discussed in a comprehensive view. It is argued that qingtan is an approach that used by the elites to escape the reality which leading to that the elites does not care about the national affairs d resulted in that the dynasty collapsed. However, some different perspectives were proposed that qingtan can have some positive effects referring to its aesthetic value, also it helped the Neo-Daoism flourished in the Wei-Jin period and it was beneficial to the diversity of the development of culture. By judging by the appearance, qingtan had negative effects because it prevented the development of the Wei-Jing society. However,  the reason of the fall of the Wei dynasty can be complicated more than just one. It is one side to make the judgment that qingtan directly leading to the fall of the dynasty. Still, the positive aspects should be considered when discussing qingtan. For the most important reason, Neo-Daoism will not be flourished and spread in Wei-Jin period without qingtan. References: Bartlett, Thomas (2009). Phonology as Statecraft in Gu Yanwu’s Thought in Link, P. (ed. ), The Scholar’s Mind in Honor of Frederick W. Mote (pp. 181-206). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan, Wing-Tsit (1963). A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1953). A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. Bodde, Derk. (Ed. ). New York: The Macmillan Company. Liu Yi-qing, Shishuo Xinyu A New Account of Tales of the World, trans. Mather, Richard B, (2002). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan. Scot. J Brackenridge (2010). The Character of Wei-Jin qingtan Reading Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi commentary as an Expression of Political Practice. Received from ProQuest Digital Dissertations. (AAT 3448864). Tang, Yi-ming (1991). The voices of Wei-Jin scholars: A study of ‘qingtan’. Received from ProQuest Digital Dissertations. (AAT 9202757).

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Medical Coding Essays

Medical Coding Essays Medical Coding Essay Medical Coding Essay Abdominal aortogram. The right groin was prepped and draped in the usual fashion. Seldinger technique was used to enter the femoral artery. A 6-French sheath was placed. A pigtail catheter was introduced in the upper abdominal aorta, and an AP aortogram was done using the DSA cut film technique using 20 cc of Omnipaque. Results: The abdominal aorta appears mildly irregular above and below the renal arteries, with no significant stenosis. (Separate the codes with a comma in your response as follows: YOOO (X.) CPT codes: (surgery code) 36200, (Radiology code) 75625-26 The physician repairs a large laceration of the diaphragm that occurred during a car accident from the seat belt the patient was wearing through a transabdominal approach. code: 39501 Mr. OBrien presents to his cardiologists office complaining of chest pain. Dr. McCoy, the cardiologist, decides to obtain a cardiovascular stress test. Because Dr. McCoys office does not have the proper equipment to perform this test, he sends Mr. OBrien stress test as well as provides his interpretation and written report. Report Dr. McCoys service. Separate the codes with a comma in your response as follows: XXXXX, XXXXX.) CPT codes: 93016, 93018 Right and left heart catheterization, selective coronary angiography, and left ventriculogram. The patient was prepped and draped in the usual sterile fashion and sedation was administered for a total of fentanyl, 25 mcg V, and Versed, 0. 5 mg V. One percent lidocaine was infused in the right groin and a 7-French sheath was inserted in the right femoral arter y. A 7-French Swan-Ganz catheter was advanced through the right heart chambers and into the pulmonary artery. After pulmonary capillary wedge pressure and pulmonary artery pressures were obtained, hermodilution cardiac outputs were measured. The Swan-Ganz catheter was then pulled back to the right heart chambers prior to removal. Selective coronary angiography was then performed. A 6-French JL4 catheter was used for selective angiography of the left coronary artery and right coronary artery. A 6-French pigtail catheter was used for RAO left ventriculogram using a hand injection. Following the procedure, the sheaths were removed and hemostasis was achieved using VasoSeal. The patient tolerated the procedure well without complications.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Predicate Grammar Glossary for Spanish and English

Predicate Grammar Glossary for Spanish and English A predicate  is  the part of the sentence that complements the subject by indicating either a state of being or an action. Generally speaking, a complete sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject typically is a noun or pronoun (in Spanish, the subject doesnt have to be explicitly stated) that either performs some action or is described after the verb. In a sentence such as The woman is reading the book (La mujer lee el libro), the subject of the sentence is the woman (la mujer) and the predicate is is reading the book (lee el libro). Predicates can be classified as either verbal or nominal. A verbal predicate indicates some sort of action. In the sample sentence, reads the book is a verbal predicate. A nominal predicate uses a copulative verb (most commonly a form of to be in English, ser or estar in Spanish) to identify or describe the subject. In the sentence The woman is happy, the nominal predicate is is happy (est feliz). Also Known As Predicado in Spanish. Examples In the sentence I would like a cup of coffee, (Yo quisiera una taza de cafà ©) the predicate is would like a cup of coffee (quisiera una taza de cafà ©). In the sentence Estn mas fuertes que nunca (They are stronger than ever), the entire sentence in Spanish is the predicate because the subject is not stated. (In the English translation, the predicate is are stronger than ever).

Sunday, October 20, 2019

What Is Transcendentalism Understanding the Movement

What Is Transcendentalism Understanding the Movement SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Confused about transcendentalism? You’re not alone! Transcendentalism is a movement that many people developed over a long period of time, and as a result, its complexity can make it hard to understand. That’s where we come in. Read this article to learn a simple but complete transcendentalism definition, key transcendentalist beliefs, an overview of the movement's history, key players, and examples of transcendentalist works. By the end, you’ll have all the information you need to write about or discuss the transcendentalist movement. What Is Transcendentalism? It’s all about spirituality. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It centers around the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition. In other words, transcendentalists believe spirituality isn’t something you can explain; it’s something you feel. A transcendentalist would argue that going for a walk in a beautiful place would be a much more spiritual experience than reading a religious text. The transcendentalism movement arose as a resultof a reaction to Unitarianism as well as the Age of Reason. Both centered on reason as the main source of knowledge, but transcendentalists rejected that notion. Some of the transcendentalist beliefs are: Humans are inherently good Society and its institutions such as organized religion and politics are corrupting. Instead of being part of them, humans should strive to be independent and self-reliant Spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion Insight and experience are more important than logic Nature is beautiful, should be deeply appreciated, and shouldn’t be altered by humans Major Transcendentalist Values The transcendentalist movement encompassed many beliefs, but these all fit into their three main values of individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature. Individualism Perhaps the most important transcendentalist value was the importance of the individual. They saw the individual as pure, and they believed that society and its institutions corrupted this purity. Transcendentalists highly valued the concept of thinking for oneself and believed people were best when they were independent and could think for themselves. Only then could individuals come together and form ideal communities. Idealism The focus on idealism comes from Romanticism, a slightly earlier movement. Instead of valuing logic and learned knowledge as many educated people at the time did, transcendentalists placed great importance on imagination, intuition and creativity. They saw the values of the Age of Reason as controlling and confining, and they wanted to bring back a more â€Å"ideal† and enjoyable way of living. Divinity of Nature Transcendentalists didn’t believe in organized religion, but they were very spiritual. Instead of believing in the divinity of religious figures, they saw nature as sacred and divine. They believed it was crucial for humans to have a close relationship with nature, the same way religious leaders preach about the importance of having a close relationship with God. Transcendentalists saw nature as perfect as it was; humans shouldn’t try to change or improve it. History of the Transcendentalist Movement What’s the history of transcendentalism? Here’s an overview of the movement, covering its beginning, height, and eventual decline. Origins While people had begun discussing ideas related to transcendentalism since the early 1800s, the movement itself has its origins in 1830s New England, specifically Massachusetts. Unitarianism was the major religion in the area, and it emphasized spirituality and enlightenment through logic, knowledge, and rationality. Young men studying Unitarianism who disagreed with these beliefs began to meet informally. Unitarianism was a particularly large part of life at Harvard University, where many of the first transcendentalists attended school. In September 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson organized the first meeting of what would later be called the Transcendental Club. Together the group discussed frustrations of Unitarianism and their main beliefs, drawing on ideas from Romanticism, German philosophers, and the Hindu spiritual texts the Upanishads. The transcendentalists begin to publish writings on their beliefs, beginning with Emerson’s essay â€Å"Nature.† Height The Transcendental Club continued to meet regularly, drawing in new members, and key figures, particularly Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, published numerous essays to further spread transcendentalist beliefs. In 1840, the journal The Dial was created for transcendentalists to publish their works. Utopia communities, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands attempted to make transcendentalism a complete lifestyle. Decline By the end of the 1840s, many key transcendentalists had begun to move onto other pursuits, and the movement declined. This decline was further hastened by the untimely death of Margaret Fuller, one of the leading transcendentalists and cofounder of The Dial. While there was a smaller second wave of transcendentalism during this time, the brief resurgence couldn’t bring back the popularity the movement had enjoyed the previous decade, and transcendentalism gradually faded from public discourse, although people still certainly share the movement’s beliefs. Even recently, movies such as The Dead Poets Society and The Lion King express transcendentalist beliefs such as the importance of independent thinking, self-reliance, and enjoying the moment. Key Figures in the Transcendentalist Movement At its height, many people supported the beliefs of transcendentalism, and numerous well-known names from the 19th century have been associated with the movement. Below are five key transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson Emerson is the key figure in transcendentalism. He brought together many of the original transcendentalists, and his writings form the foundation of many of the movement’s beliefs. The day before he published his essay â€Å"Nature† he invited a group of his friends to join the â€Å"Transcendental Club† a meeting of like-minded individuals to discuss their beliefs. He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches to promote transcendentalism. Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include â€Å"The Over-Soul,† â€Å"Self-Reliance,† â€Å"The American Scholar† and â€Å"Divinity School Address.† Henry David Thoreau The second-most important transcendentalist, Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s who is best known for his book Walden. Walden is focused on the benefits of individualism, simple living and close contact with and observation of nature. Thoreau also frequently opposed the government and its actions, most notably in his essay â€Å"Civil Disobedience.† Margaret Fuller Margaret Fuller was perhaps the leading female transcendentalist. A well-known journalist and ardent supporter of women’s rights, she helped cofound The Dial, the key transcendentalist journal, with Emerson, which helped cement her place in the movement and spread the ideas of transcendentalism to a wider audience. An essay she wrote for the journal was later published as the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, one of the earliest feminist works in the United States. She believed in the importance of the individual, but often felt that other transcendentalists, namely Emerson, focused too much on individualism at the expense of social reform. Amos Bronson Alcott A friend of Emerson’s, Alcott (father of Little Women’s Louisa May Alcott), was an educator known for his innovative ways of teaching and correcting students. He wrote numerous pieces on transcendentalism, but the quality of his writing was such that most were unpublishable. A noted abolitionist, he refused to pay his poll tax to protest President Tyler’s annexation of Texas as a slave territory. This incident inspired Thoreau to do a similar protest, which led to him writing the essay â€Å"Civil Disobedience.† Frederic Henry Hedge Frederic Henry Hedge met Emerson when both were students at Harvard Divinity School. Hedge was studying to become a Unitarian minister, and he had already spent several years studying music and literature in Germany. Emerson invited him to join the first meeting of the Transcendental Club (originally called Hedge’s Club, after him), and he attended meetings for several years. He wrote some of the earliest pieces later categorized as Transcendentalist works, but he later became somewhat alienated from the group and refused to write pieces for The Dial. George Ripley Like Hedge, Ripley was also a Unitarian minister and founding member of the Transcendental Club. He founded the Utopian community Brook Farm based on major Transcendentalist beliefs. Brook Farm residents would work the farm (whichever jobs they found most appealing) and use their leisure time to pursue activities they enjoyed, such as dancing, music, games, and reading. However, the farm was never able to do well financially, and the experiment ended after just a few years. Criticisms of Transcendentalism From its start, transcendentalism attracted numerous critics for its nontraditional, and sometimes outright alien, ideas. Many transcendentalists were seen as outcasts, and many journals refused to publish works written by them. Below are some of the most common criticisms. Spirituality Over Organized Religion For most people, the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism was that it promoted individual spirituality over churches and other aspects of organized religion. Religion was the cornerstone of many people’s lives at this time, and any movement that told them it was corrupting and to give it up would have been unfathomable to many. Over-Reliance on Independence Many people, even some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, felt that transcendentalism at times ignored the importance of community bonds and over-emphasized the need to rely on no one but one’s self, to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness. Some people believe that Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick was written as a critique of complete reliance on independence. In the novel, the character Ahab eschews nearly all bonds of camaraderie and is focused solely on his goal of destroying the white whale. This eventually leads to his death. Margaret Fuller also felt that transcendentalism could be more supportive of community initiatives to better the lives of others, such as by advocating for women’s and children’s rights. Abstract Values Have a hard time understanding what transcendentalists really wanted? So did a lot of people, and it made them view the movement as nothing more than a bunch of dreamers who enjoyed criticizing traditional values but weren’t sure what they themselves wanted. Edgar Allen Poe accused the movement of promoting â€Å"obscurity for obscurity's sake.† Unrealistic Utopian Ideals Some people viewed the transcendentalists’ focus on enjoying life and maximizing their leisure time as hopelessly naive and idealistic. Criticism frequently focused on the Utopian communities some transcendentalists created to promote communal living and the balance of work and labor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stayed at the Brook Farm communal living experiment, disliked his experience so much that he wrote an entire novel, The Blithedale Romance, criticizing the concept and transcendentalist beliefs in general. Major Transcendentalist Works Many transcendentalists were prolific writers, and examples abound of transcendentalism quotes, essays, books, and more. Below are four examples of transcendentalist works, as well as which of the transcendentalist beliefs they support. â€Å"Self-Reliance† by Ralph Waldo Emerson Emerson wrote this essay in 1841 to share his views on the issue of, you guessed it, self-reliance. Throughout the essay he discusses the importance of individuality and how people must avoid the temptation to conform to society at the expense of their true selves. It also contains the excellent line â€Å"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.† There are three main ways Emerson says people should practice self-reliance is through non-conformity (â€Å"A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of conformity†), solitude over society (â€Å"the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude†), and spirituality that is found in one’s own self (â€Å"The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps†). Self-reliance and an emphasis on the individual over community is a core belief of transcendentalism, and this essay was key in developing that view. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Published in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass included 12 untitled poems. Whitman was a fan of Emerson’s and was thrilled when the latter highly praised his work. The poems contain many transcendentalism beliefs, including an appreciation of nature, individualism, and spirituality. A key example is the poem later titled â€Å"Song of Myself† which begins with the line â€Å"I celebrate myself† and goes on to extoll the benefits of the individual â€Å"Welcome is every organ and attribute of me†, the enjoyment of nature (â€Å"The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn†), the goodness of humans (â€Å"You shall possess the good of the earth and sun†), and the connections all humans share (â€Å"For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you†). â€Å"The Summer Rain† by Henry David Thoreau This transcendentalism poem, like many of Thoreau’s works, focuses on the beauty and simplicity of nature. Published in 1849, the poem describes the narrator’s delight at being in a meadow during a rainstorm. The poem frequently mentions the enjoyment that observing nature can bring, and there are many descriptions of the meadow such as, â€Å"A clover tuft is pillow for my head/And violets quite overtop my shoes.†But Thoreau also makes a point to show that he believes nature is more enjoyable and a better place to learn from than intellectual pursuits like reading and studying. He begins the poem with this verse: â€Å"My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read/'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large/Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,/And will not mind to hit their proper targe† and continues later on with â€Å"Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,/What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,/If juster battles are enacted now/Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?† He makes clear that he is comparing works of Shakespeare and Homer to the joys of nature, and he finds nature the better and more enjoyable way to learn. This is in line with Transcendentalist beliefs that insight and experience are more rewarding than book learning. â€Å"What Is Beauty?† by Lydia Maria Child Lydia Maria Child, a women’s rights activist and abolitionist, wrote this essay, which was published in The Dial in 1843. The essay discusses what constitutes beauty and how we can appreciate beauty. It frequently references the transcendentalist theme that intuition and insight are more important than knowledge for understanding when something is beautiful, such as in the line â€Å"Beauty is felt, not seen by the understanding.† All the knowledge in the world can’t explain why we see certain things as beautiful; we simply know that they are. Summary: Transcendentalism Definition What’s a good transcendentalism definition? Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement centered around spirituality that was popular in the mid-19th century. Key transcendentalism beliefs were that humans are inherently good but can be corrupted by society and institutions, insight and experience and more important than logic, spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion, and nature is beautiful and should be respected. The transcendentalist movement reached its height in the 1830s and 1840s and included many well-known people, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalists wrote widely, and by reading their works you can get a better sense of the movement and its core beliefs. What's Next? Taking the AP Literature exam? Check out our ultimate guide to the AP English Literature testandour list of AP Literature practice tests. No matter what you're reading, it's important to understand literary devices. Here are 31 literary devices you should know. There's a lot of imagery in transcendentalism poems and other writings. Learn everything you need to know about imagery by reading our guide.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Innovation of crowdfunding Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Innovation of crowdfunding - Essay Example Crowdfunding, as a process, has a series of unique features. For this reason, the specific process is considered to meet the requirements of innovation. However, a carefully review of the characteristics of this process reveals similarities to an existing framework/ idea: the crowdsourcing, a term denoting ‘the use of crowd to obtain ideas, feedback and solutions in regard to corporate activities’ (Danmayr, 2013, p.4). In addition, before crowdfunding creative projects were funded using ‘traditional funding methods, such as self-financing or bank-financing’ (Metzler, 2011, p.4). In this context it could be supported that crowdfunding is a process that has replaced traditional financing schemes, especially in regard to projects of the creative sector. As of the innovative character of crowdfunding reference should be made to the following fact: crowdfunding seems to meet all the criteria used for defining a process as innovative. However, problem could possibly appear when trying to categorise crowdfunding as innovation. Initially, crowdfunding could be possibly considered to be a radical innovation, as this type of innovation is explained further in the next sections. A series of studies in the literature seem to promote this view; the studies of Castaldo (2013) and Deffains-Crapsky and Sudolska (2014), as analyzed below, are examples of this approach. However, most academic studies lead to another view: crowdfunding is rather an incremental innovation, i.e. an innovation based on existing technology. This study refers to crowdfunding as an incremental innovation. Relevant literature is presented in the Literature Review section for supporting the specific approach. In crowdfunding three types of participants can be identified: ‘the creators, the funders and the online platform’ (Danmayr, 2013, p.18). Crowdfunding involves in two, key,

Friday, October 18, 2019

Exegesis Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Exegesis Paper - Essay Example When it was written? The answer to this question is not quite as completely uncertain as that relating to authorship. There is also uncertainty as to the exact date of the writing of Hebrews. Numerous references to the temple of Jerusalem seem to place the date of writing prior to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, (Heb. 10:11; 13:10-11). So around A.D. 66 seems the most satisfactory date. The actual place of writing is unclear. The only clue we have for an answer to this question is found in Hebrew 13:24 – â€Å"They of Italy salute you.† The Greek word translated â€Å"of† is â€Å"apo†, which means â€Å"from†. So the reference could mean either that the writer was in Italy or that he was sending greeting back to Italy from some Italians who were with him. Structure and parallelism The book of Hebrews occupies a very important place in the Scriptures. It is the Spirit’s commentary on the Pentateuch, especially the book of Leviticus. The wri ter uses the Old Testament Scriptures throughout, making at least eighty-six direct references, traceable to at least one hundred Old Testament passages. Hebrews explains the meaning and significance of the whole Jewish ritual. It makes clear that all the ceremonial laws given in the Old Testament, such as the offerings of sacrifices and the ministrations of the priests were but types pointing forward to Christ, the great sacrifice for sin, the true Priest the one Mediator between God and man.   Literary Criticism Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism The topic which is discussed at the greatest length in the Epistle to the Hebrews is that of Christ as High Priest. The next six chapters (5 – 10) are saturated with the idea. The passage before leads up to chapter four and coincides with for it does not affect the passage. The literary form of Hebrews is Hebrews has traditionally been described as an epistle or letter. It appears in the New Testament in the middle of the col lection of letters. It functions as a hinge connecting the 13 Pauline letters and the 7 general or Catholic Epistles. However, Hebrews lacks the basic ingredients that identified ancient letters. There is no mention of author, no mention of addressees, no greeting, no thanksgiving section and no prayer for the readers in the opening lines. The closing verses of Hebrews 13 do reflect the traditional way in which a letter should close. Hebrews is often compared with Romans. Hebrews presents the Person of salvation; Romans presents the way of salvation. The book of Hebrews focuses on the ceremonial law of the Old Testament; and compares to Romans, on the moral law of time. â€Å"Romans moves from law to grace, and Hebrews, from shadow to substance. The redaction criticism of this passage shows that in regards to the Old Testament Leviticus is the book of the covenant of the Law and Romans which is parallel to Hebrews shows us Gods grace and mercy. Contents The key word of this Epistle is â€Å"better†. It occurs thirteen times in the thirteen chapters. Christ is shown as better than angels (cc1-2), better than Moses (c.3), better than Joshua (c.4), better than Aaron (cc.5-10).Christianity is declared to be a better covenant (c.8) It offers a better rest, an better priesthood, a better altar, a better sacrifice. The theme of the book is the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. In every way it is a better religion. The meaning of the word â€Å"

History of Washington State Wine industry and it's global future Research Paper

History of Washington State Wine industry and it's global future - Research Paper Example This will be followed by the global future of the industry. The Washington wine is produced from grapes grown in the Washington region and this industry ranks second in the overall production of wine, falling only second to California. The industry has seen immense growth and development and the number of vineyards has grown to over 30,000, which cater to the export needs to almost forty different countries from around the world. The main production of wine takes place in the eastern half of the state, and this half is desert like in nature. Irrigation and water rights are a major interest to the industry and this is solely due to the rain shadow of the Cascade regions (Matthews). Also the Viticulture of the state is also a result of the high levels of sunlight that the area receives. The wine industry was started way back in 1825, when the first wine grapes were planted by Hudson’s Bay Company at the Ford Vancouver. As time passed by 1910, the state saw a high level of increase in the growing of grapes across the state (Gregutt). The credits for pioneers of the plantations however go to the French, Italians and Germans. There were number of efforts for the Wine Projects from wine experts and historians like Ron Irvine and Dr. Walter Clore. These experts were the ones to start the early planting at Fort Vancouver. The year 1854 saw the hybrid varieties of grapes and these were got to the Puget Sound region. As time passed by 1860, wine grapes were being started to plant in the region of the Walla Walla valley. The early 1900s specifically around 1903, found a large number of irrigation projects that were developed. During this time there was a large melt down of the Cascade Mountains and this was a huge opportunity for the people as the soil in these areas was rich volcanic and the weather here was sunny and arid. It was now that the Yakima and Columbia regions also saw the plantations of Italian and German varieties. As time passed by this

Analysis of Information Asymmetry Literature review

Analysis of Information Asymmetry - Literature review Example Owners of the corporations called shareholders, therefore, remain separate from the active management of the organization and managers manage the organization as custodian of the shareholders. However, this creates an issue of agency wherein though managers act as the agents of shareholders, they pursue their own interests. (Sau,2003) The actions of managers, therefore, are assumed to be in direct conflict with the interests of the shareholders. One of the key reasons for this conflict of interest is the availability of and access to information. Since managers are actively involved in the management of any firm, therefore, they possess relatively superior information as compared to outsiders. This, however, can also create corporate failures as shareholders may not be fully aware of the actions of the managers. One way through which both financial and non-financial disclosures can be improved is the effective regulations to make things more transparent. ( Baek, Kim, & Kim, 2008) Inf ormation asymmetry As discussed above, information asymmetry arises when one party to the transaction has superior or more information as compared to other parties to the transaction.  Ã‚   In adverse selection models, it is assumed that one party lacks the understanding and information about a transaction whereas, in moral hazards model, the ignorant party lacks the information about the performance of a transaction. (Chen, Berger, & Li, 2006). Moral Hazards and Agency Problems Information asymmetry becomes important within organizational context due to the agent-principal relationship between the shareholders and managers of the firm. One of the key reasons as to why moral hazards can arise is based upon the notion that if all the actions of employees are not monitored, there are chances that moral hazards may arise. This peculiar situation, therefore, outlines that shareholders may inherently be in a disadvantageous position because of their inability to monitor the actions of managers in an effective and comprehensive manner. (Heath, and Norman, 2004)  Ã‚  

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Child WelfareTrends in the Educational Setting Essay

Child WelfareTrends in the Educational Setting - Essay Example These are provisions established mainly for the children in the minorities, immigrants and poor groups in society. Additionally, many people at the time stigmatized these child welfare provisions as being charitable and custodial. This pattern created a weak foundation for establishing better social services in the twentieth century. However, as the Progressive Era picked in the twentieth century, the reform efforts of women picked also, paving the way for the reforming and modernization of the childcare services. To draw attention and demonstrate the need for approved methods of nurturing children from infancy, Josephine Dodge led a group of New York philanthropists to establish a Model Day Nursery in 2893, and exhibited it at the Worlds Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. After the exhibition, hey worked forward, founding the National Federation of Day Nursery (NFDN) the first nationwide organization designated to handle the child welfare issue. The establishment of these Day Nurseries created a dilemma for poor mothers as it compelled them to seek employment to support the children. Activist, Jane Addams established that children suffered inadequate attention and care from mothers as they sought employment, hence established the basis for mothers’ pensions. Thu, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop and the Hull Hou se colleagues would rise to become the leaders of the U.S. Children Bureau, founded in 1912 (In Isenberg, In Jalongo, & Bredekamp, 2008). The pattern of development continued in the 1920s with the U.S. Children Bureau established a series of studies on maternal and child labor issues in the agricultural and mining industries, in the country. The investigators found serious instances of injuries, illness and fatalities resulting from the children, left alone at home, or brought into hazardous workplaces and even working in such dangerous places. The Children Bureau continued to support

Visual Arts of Japan-Shinto Art Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Visual Arts of Japan-Shinto Art - Term Paper Example The shrines that the Shinto use for worship sites and many other areas of worship are marked by gates, also called torii in Japanese, and they are used to indicate the entrance to the area where the Shinto believe their Kamis reside. The sacred areas are also indicated by the use of ropes from rice straws that are wrapped, for example, on a sacred tree trunk. The Japanese imperial family is a vital player in the Shinto religion and rituals and the Shinto believe that the sun goddess, the Amaterasu was the imperial line’s first ancestor. For this reason, she is one of the most significant artistic representation in Shinto art, represented even on the Japanese flag. Shinto religion has no founder; neither does it possess any sacred scriptures like western religions, for example, the Bible or the Sutra, with preaching and propaganda not as common because of the deep roots that the Shinto have in the traditions of the Japanese people. Because of this, the most enduring aspects of the religion are preserved by the art practiced by the Shinto. The sun goddess, Amaterasu is the most important Kami in Shinto Japan and, as such, is the most represented. The goddess’ mirror is found in the island of Honshu’s Ise shrine and is one of three regalia used by the imperial line along with the jewel and the sword. It is believed that Amaterasu endowed these objects to Ningi, her grandson, when the goddess sent him, to rule over the islands of Japan (Boscaro 17). Sussano, her brother is depicted as the god of the sea in Shinto art with a temperamental and difficult character. While visiting Amaterasu one day, he released colts all over her rice field and destroyed her crops. He went ahead to desecrate her home via smashing a hole into her sewing room’s roof and throwing in a colt’s skin. Amaterasu became furious and retreated into a cave, blocking its entrance with a rock, which caused the entire world to plunge into darkness. Desperate to restore sunlight to earth, the

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Child WelfareTrends in the Educational Setting Essay

Child WelfareTrends in the Educational Setting - Essay Example These are provisions established mainly for the children in the minorities, immigrants and poor groups in society. Additionally, many people at the time stigmatized these child welfare provisions as being charitable and custodial. This pattern created a weak foundation for establishing better social services in the twentieth century. However, as the Progressive Era picked in the twentieth century, the reform efforts of women picked also, paving the way for the reforming and modernization of the childcare services. To draw attention and demonstrate the need for approved methods of nurturing children from infancy, Josephine Dodge led a group of New York philanthropists to establish a Model Day Nursery in 2893, and exhibited it at the Worlds Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. After the exhibition, hey worked forward, founding the National Federation of Day Nursery (NFDN) the first nationwide organization designated to handle the child welfare issue. The establishment of these Day Nurseries created a dilemma for poor mothers as it compelled them to seek employment to support the children. Activist, Jane Addams established that children suffered inadequate attention and care from mothers as they sought employment, hence established the basis for mothers’ pensions. Thu, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop and the Hull Hou se colleagues would rise to become the leaders of the U.S. Children Bureau, founded in 1912 (In Isenberg, In Jalongo, & Bredekamp, 2008). The pattern of development continued in the 1920s with the U.S. Children Bureau established a series of studies on maternal and child labor issues in the agricultural and mining industries, in the country. The investigators found serious instances of injuries, illness and fatalities resulting from the children, left alone at home, or brought into hazardous workplaces and even working in such dangerous places. The Children Bureau continued to support

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Where Does the Customer Fit in Innovation Strategy Assignment

Where Does the Customer Fit in Innovation Strategy - Assignment Example se a panel data constructed from numerous organizational surveys conducted over a nine-year period to prove the very importance of customer-input as a way of responding to rapid market changes; â€Å"market orientation† is, thus, a critical factor both for the success of a new product released into the market as well as that of the firm in general. Investigating the very same topic but in a different dimension in a study titled â€Å"Integrating Customers in Product Innovation: Lessons from Industrial Development Contractors and In-House Contractors in Rapidly Changing Customer Markets,† Sandmeier, Morrison and Gassmann (2010) concurs with above scholars noting that the modern customer is an active co-designer in the creation of value, injecting their specialized knowledge of needs into the mainstream production away from the traditional, passive recipient. Dell’s ‘IdeaStorm,’ one of the most successful crowd sourcing forums ever invented in history, serves as a perfect example of how the ideas generated by the customers can be efficiently incorporated into the innovation process. Through IdeaStorm alongside organized events, customer panels, partnerships among other avenues, the company gathers product requirements directly from tens of thousands of daily customer-interactions with a complete view of the industry’s landscape (Rohrbeck, Steinhoff, & Perder, 2008). Dell started out as a direct seller from its very inception—beginning with a mail order way before the use of the internet to drive sales. The deletion of the traditional middlemen distribution process allowed the company to generate own corrective market data tailored towards customer needs. In its quest to deliver value to customers, the company has pursued virtual integration, developing effective partnerships with manufacturers [suppliers] that enabled â€Å"just-in-time† delivery with significant cost and product pricing advantages compared to the competitors’ in-house operations. Most

Monday, October 14, 2019

Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature

Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee