Factors That Influence Food Habits and Culture Essay

How do you choose your food? This is a very simple question for most people,but we may get a hundred of different answers. Therefore,What factors actually influence our food habit and culture ? During the long history of human, food habits and culture are influenced by many factors. I want to discuss how food habits and culture influenced by geographical factors, religions factors,social factors and economic factors. First of all, climate is a very important factor of geography that affects our eating habits. â€Å"Climate affect local food habits by determining how long a growing season is and how many growing seasons there are per year. â€Å"(lisabeth hughes, 2011) The different weather in different region make the produce different. In warm region, most produces are up to three to four crop cycles per year. But in some cold region, the growing season will be short and crop cultivation is limited to one cycle. Compare to food in cold region, food in temperate regions can be more various. At the same time, season also have effect on our eating habits and culture. People will choose different food between summer and winter. This may not so common in California, but it is a very common phenomenon in my hometown. Chinese people like to eat hot pot in winter, because hot pot can make us feel warm. However, less of Chinese will like hot pot in summer. In addition, the living position is also a main element that impact on our food habits and culture. People who live around sea would like to eat more seafood than people live in inland city. Like people live in California are easy to get fresh seafood than people live in Colorado. That’s why I believe geographical factors affecting food habits and culture. Secondly, religions factor influence our food habits and culture. Religious proscriptions range from a few to many, from relaxed to highly restrictive. This will affect a follow’s food choices and behaviors. Much of religions have their unique food habits and culture. Fro instance, Muslims and Jewish do not eat pork. They believe that Pork is not a clean food. Also, Within Christianity, the Seventy-day Adventists discourage â€Å"stimulating† beverages such as alcohol,which is not forbidden among Catholics. As religions are have big effect on people, the rule in religions for the food also influence our eating habits and culture. Thirdly, social factors which include family and peer pressure play a important role in our food habits and culture. In the article, Eating Habits, the author shows us that people in a social group will influence each other’s behaviors and values. They also share a common culture. A person’s membership in particular peer, work, or community group impacts food behaviors. For example, we live with our family since we born. It is easy for us to follow our family’s food habits and culture when we were small. So, it is difficult for us to change our habits even it is bad. That’s why our food habits and culture can not easily change. It’s a heritage we inherit from our ancestor. Finally, economic factors influence our food habits and culture as well. Population studies show that it is obviously to see the food difference in different social classes. Money,values, and consumer skills all affect what a person purchases. If we wish to choose some healthy food, we have to pay much than some unbalanced diets. For this reason, Low-income group have a greater tendency to consume unbalanced diets and have low intakes of fruit and vegetables. It is clearly to see how economic factors affect on food habits and culture in our daily life. To sum up, I hold the view that geographical factors, religions factors,social factors and economic factors are the most important factor influence our food habits and culture. Reference Hughes, L. (2011). Geographical factors affecting food habits. http://www. ehow. co. uk/info_8210829_geographical-factors-affecting-food-habits. html Yvonne,M. (2010). What influence the eating habits of the American people? http://voices. yahoo. com/what-influences-eating-habits-american-5588233. html? ca t=5 Food today(2004). Why we eat what we eat:social and economic determinants of food choice. http://www. eufic. org/article/en/health-and-lifestyle/food-choice/artid/social-economic-determinants-food-choice/.

Stylistics

STYLISTICS In Stylistics Richard Bradford provides a definitive introductory guide to modern critical ideas on literary style and stylistics. The book includes examples of poems, plays and novels from Shakespeare to the present day. This comprehensive and accessible guidebook for undergraduates explains the terminology of literary form, considers the role of stylistics in twentieth-century criticism, and shows, with worked examples, how literary style has evolved since the sixteenth century.This book falls into three sections: Part I follows the discipline of stylistics from classical rhetoric to poststructuralism; Part II looks at the relationship between literary style and its historical context; Part III considers the relationships between style and gender, and between style and evaluative judgement. Richard Bradford is Professor of English at the University of Ulster. He has written books on Kingsley Amis, Roman Jakobson, Milton, eighteenth-century criticism, visual poetry and li nguistics. THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOMSERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today’s critical terminology. Each book: †¢ provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term †¢ offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic †¢ relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation. With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies. See below for new books in this series. Gothic by Fred Botting Historicism by Paul Hamilton Ideology by David Hawkes Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum Romanticism by Aidan Day Stylistics by Richard Bradford Humanism by Tony Davies Sexuality by Joseph Bristow STYLISTICS Richard Bradford LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New F etter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. â€Å"To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www. Bookstore. tandf. co. uk. † Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001  © 1997 Richard Bradford All rights reserved. No part of this book my be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bradford, Richard Stylistics / Richard Bradford. p. cm. —(The new critical idiom) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Style, Literary. I. Title. II. Series. PN203. B68 1997 809–dc20 96–27990 CIP ISBN 0-203-99265-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-09768-1 (Print Edition) 0-415-09769-X (pbk) To Jennifer Ford CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE INTRODUCTION iii ix xi PART I A SHORT HISTORY OF STYLISTICS 1 2 3 4 5 Rhetoric Stylistics and modern criticism Textualism I: poetry Textualism II: the novel Contextualist stylistics 2 11 14 50 72 PART II STYLISTICS AND LITERARY HISTORY 6 7 8 9 10 11 Renaissance and Augustan poetry Literary style and literary history Shakespeare’s drama: two stylistic registers The eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury novel Romanticism Modernism and naturalization 98 110 117 126 143 151 PART III GENDER AND EVALUATION vii 12 13 Gender and genre Evaluative stylistics BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 67 183 201 206 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Faculty of Humanities and the School of English, University of Ulster, for providing me with the time to finish this book, and to John Drakakis, a scrupulous editor. The author and publisher are grateful for the permission to reproduce extracts from T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909– 1962, reprinted courtesy of Faber & Faber Ltd. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use copyright material in this book. Please contact the publisher if any omissions have inadvertently occurred.SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage. The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology.This in volves, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within the larger sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different cultures; and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies. It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and heterogenous one. The present need is for individual volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application.Each volume will contain as part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the definition of particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have been traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms within the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce examples from the x are a of film and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety of literary texts. INTRODUCTIONStylistics is an elusive and slippery topic. Every contribution to the vast and multifaceted discipline of literary studies will involve an engagement with style. To accept that the subject of our attention or our critical essay is a poem, a novel or a play involves an acceptance that literature is divided into three basic stylistic registers. Even a recognition of literary studies as a separate academic sphere is prefigured by a perceived distinction between literary and non-literary texts.Stylistics might thus seem to offer itself as an easily definable activity with specific functions and objectives: Stylistics enables us to identify and name the distinguishing features of literary texts, and to specify the generic and structural subdivisions of literature. But it is not as simple as this. When we use or respond to language in the real world our understanding of what the words mea n is supplemented by a vast number of contextual and situational issues: language is an enabling device; it allows us to articulate the sequence of choices, decisions, responses, acts and onsequences that make up our lives. Style will play some part in this, but its function is pragmatic and purposive: we might admire the lucid confidence of the car advertisement or the political broadcast, but in the end we will look beyond the words to the potential effect of their message upon our day to day activities. The style and language of poems, novels and plays will frequently involve these purposive functions, but when we look beyond their effect to their context we face a xii INTRODUCTION otentially disorientating relation between what happens in the text and what might happen outside it. Stylistics can tell us how to name the constituent parts of a literary text and enable us to document their operations, but in doing so it must draw upon the terminology and methodology of disciplines which focus upon language in the real world. The study of metre, narrative and dramatic dialogue is founded upon the fundamental units and principles of all linguistic usage: phonemes, rhythmic sequences, grammatical classes, forms of syntactic organization and so on.But these same fundamentals of communication also underpin the methodology of pure linguistics, structuralism and semiotics, discourse theory, sociolinguistics, gender studies, linguistic philosophy and a whole network of disciplines which involves the context and pragmatic purpose of communication. Consequently, modern stylistics is caught between two disciplinary imperatives. On the one hand it raises questions regarding the relation between the way that language is used and its apparent context and objective—language as an active element of the real world.On the other, it seeks to define the particular use of linguistic structures to create facsimiles, models or distortions of the real world—literary la nguage. This problematic relationship is the principal subject of this book. In Part I, I will consider the progress of modern stylistics from its origins in classical rhetoric to its function in modern literary studies. This will focus upon the tension between stylistics as a purely literary-critical discipline—its function in defining literature as an art form (which I call textualism)—and its operations within the broader field of structuralism and social studies (contextualism).Part II will re-examine this tension in relation to literary history: what is the relationship between literary style and historical context? Part III is a detailed study of two issues that feature in the margins of Parts I and II. ‘Gender and Evaluation’ will be concerned with the way in which the twin elements of feminist criticism and women writers relate to stylistics. INTRODUCTION xiii ‘Evaluative Stylistics’ will look at how the discipline of stylistics underp ins our subjective experience of reading. PART I A SHORT HISTORY OF STYLISTICS 1 RHETORIC The academic discipline of stylistics is a twentieth-century invention.It will be the purpose of this book to describe the aims and methods of stylistics, and we will begin by considering its relationship with its most notable predecessor —rhetoric. The term is derived from the Greek techne rhetorike, the art of speech, an art concerned with the use of public speaking as a means of persuasion. The inhabitants of Homer’s epics exploit and, more significantly, acknowledge the capacity of language to affect and determine nonlinguistic events, but it was not until the fifth century BC that the Greek settlers of Sicily began to study, document and teach rhetoric as a practical discipline.The best-known names are Corax and Tisias who found that, in an island beset with political and judicial disagreements over land and civil rights, the art of persuasion was a useful and profitable prof ession. Gorgias, one of their pupils, visited Athens as ambassador and he is generally regarded as the person responsible for piloting rhetoric beyond its judicial function into the spheres of philosophy and literary studies. Isocrates was the first to extend and promote the moral and ethical benefits of the art of speech, and one of Plato’s earliest Socratic dialogues bears the name Gorgias.It is with Plato that we encounter the most significant moment in the early history of rhetoric. In the Phaedrus Plato/Socrates states that unless a man pays due attention to philosophy ‘he will never RHETORIC 3 be able to speak properly about anything’ (261 A). ‘A real art of speaking†¦which does not seize hold of truth, does not exist and never will’ (260E). What concerned Plato was the fact that rhetoric was a device without moral or ethical subject matter.In the Gorgias he records an exchange between Socrates and Gorgias in which the former claims that p ersuasion is comparable with flattery, cooking and medicine: it meets bodily needs and satisfies physical and emotional desires. Rhetoric, he argues, is not an ‘art’ but a ‘routine’, and such a routine, if allowed to take hold of our primary communicative medium, will promote division, ambition and self-aggrandizement at the expense of collective truth and wisdom, the principal subjects of philosophy.Plato himself, particularly in the Phaedrus, does not go so far as to suggest the banning of rhetoric; rather he argues that it must be codified as subservient to the philosopher’s search for truth. Aristotle in his Rhetoric (c. 330 BC) produced the first counter-blast to Plato’s anti-rhetoric thesis. Rhetoric, argues Aristotle, is an art, a necessary condition of philosophical debate. To perceive the same fact or argument dressed in different linguistic forms is not immoral or dangerous.Such a recognition—that words can qualify or unsettle a single pre-linguistic truth—is part of our intellectual training, vital to any purposive reconciliation of appearance and reality. Aristotle meets the claim that rhetoric is socially and politically dangerous with the counterclaim that the persuasive power of speech is capable of pre-empting and superseding the violent physical manifestations of subjection and defence. The Plato-Aristotle exchange is not so much about rhetoric as an illustration of the divisive nature of rhetoric.It is replayed, with largely Aristotelian preferences, in the work of the two most prominent Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian; it emerges in the writings of St Augustine and in Peter Ramus’s Dialectique (1555), one of the founding moments in the revival of classical rhetoric during the European Renaissance. Most significantly, it operates as 4 RHETORIC the theoretical spine which links rhetoric with modern stylistics, and stylistics in turn with those other constituents of the cont emporary discipline of humanities: linguistics, structuralism and poststructuralism.Plato and Aristotle did not disagree on what rhetoric is; their conflicts originated in the problematical relationship between language and truth. Rhetoric, particularly in Rome and in post-Renaissance education, had been taught as a form of super-grammar. It provides us with names and practical explanations of the devices by which language enables us to perform the various tasks of persuading, convincing and arguing. In an ideal world (Aristotle’s thesis) these tasks will be conducive to the personal and the collective good.The rhetorician will know the truth, and his linguistic strategies will be employed as a means of disclosing the truth. In the real world (Plato’s thesis) rhetoric is a weapon used to bring the listener into line with the argument which happens to satisfy the interests or personal affiliations of the speaker, neither of which will necessarily correspond with the tru th. These two models of rhetorical usage are equally valid and finally irreconcilable. Lies, fabrications, exaggerations are facts of language, but they can only be cited when the fissure between language and truth is provable.For example, if I were to tell you that I am a personal friend of Aristotle, known facts will be sufficient to convince you (unless you are a spiritualist) that I am not telling the truth. However, a statement such as, Aristotle speaks to me of the general usefulness of rhetoric’ is acceptable because it involves the use of a familiar rhetorical device (generally termed catachresis, the misuse or mis-application of a term): Aristotle does not literally speak to me, but my use of the term to imply that his written words involve the sincerity or the immediate relevance of speech is sanctioned by rhetorical-stylistic convention.What I have done is to use a linguistic device to distort prelinguistic truth and to achieve an emotive effect at the same time. M y reason for doing so would be to give a RHETORIC 5 supplementary persuasive edge to the specifics of my argument about the validity of Aristotle’s thesis. Such devices are part of the fabric of everyday linguistic exchange and, assuming that the hearer is as conversant as the speaker with the conventions of this rhetorical game, they are not, in Plato’s terms, immoral or dishonest.But for Plato such innocuous examples were merely a symptom of the much more serious consequences of rhetorical infection. The fact that Aristotle lived more than two millennia before me cannot be disputed, but the fabric of intellectual activity and its linguistic manifestation is only partly comprised of concrete facts. Morality, the existence of God, the nature of justice: all of these correspond with the verifiable specifics of human existence, but our opinions about them cannot be verified in direct relation to these specifics.The common medium shared by the abstract and the concrete di mensions of human experience is language and, as a consequence, language functions as the battleground for the tendentious activity of making the known correspond with the unknown, that speculative element of human existence that underpins all of our beliefs about the nature of truth, justice, politics and behaviour.Plato and Aristotle named the conditions of this conflict as dianoia and pragmata (thought and facts, otherwise known as res or content) and lexis and taxis (word choice and arrangement, otherwise known as verba or form), and the distinction raises two major problems that will occupy much of our attention throughout this book. First of all it can be argued that to make a distinction between language—in this instance the rhetorical organization of language—and the pre-linguistic continuum of thought, objects and events involves a fundamental error.Without language our experience of anything is almost exclusively internalized and private: we can, of course, m ake physical gestures, non-linguistic sounds or draw pictures, but these do not come close to the vast and complex network of signs and meanings shared by language users. The most important consequence of this condition of language 6 RHETORIC dependency is that we can never be certain whether the private world, the set of private experiences or beliefs, that language enables us to mediate is, as Plato and Aristotle argue, entirely independent of its medium.The governing precondition for any exchange of views about the nature of existence and truth—a process perfectly illustrated by Plato’s Socratic dialogues—is that language allows us to disclose the true nature of pre-linguistic fact. However, for such an exchange to take place at all each participant must submit to an impersonal system of rules and conventions. Before any disagreement regarding a fact or a principle can occur the combatants must first have agreed upon the relation between the fact/principle an d its linguistic enactment.An atheist and a Christian will have totally divergent perceptions of the nature of human existence, but both will know what the word ‘God’ means. The twentieth-century alternative to Aristotle’s and Plato’s distinction between dianoia/pragmata and lexis/taxis has been provided by Ferdinand de Saussure, a turn-of-thecentury linguist whose influence upon modern ideas about language and reality has become immeasurable.Saussure’s most quoted and influential propositions concern his distinction between the signified and the signifier and his pronouncement that ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms’. The signifier is the concrete linguistic sign, spoken or written, and the signified is the concept represented by the sign. A third element is the referent, the pre-linguistic object or condition that stands beyond the signifiersignified relationship. This tripartate function is, to say the lea st, unsteady.The atheist and the Christian will share a largely identical conception of the relation between ‘God’ (signifier) and ‘God’ (signified) but the atheist will regard this as a purely linguistic state, a fiction sustained by language, but without a referent. For such an individual the signifier God relates not to a specific signified and referent, but to other signifiers and signifieds— concepts of good and bad, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, the whole network of signs which enables RHETORIC 7 Christian belief to intersect with other elements of the human condition.In Saussure’s terms, the signified ‘God’ is sustained by the differential relationship between itself and other words and concepts, and this will override its correspondence with a ‘positive term’ (the referent). Plato and Aristotle shared the premise that it is dangerous and immoral to talk about something that does not exist, and that it is the duty of the philosopher to disclose such improper fissures between language and its referent. Saussure’s model of language poses a threat to this ideal by raising the possibility that facts and thoughts might, to an extent, be constructs of the system of language.The relation between classical philosophy/rhetoric and Saussurean linguistics is far more complicated than my brief comparison might suggest, but it is certain that Saussure makes explicit elements of the divisive issue of whether rhetoric is a potentially dangerous practice. And this leads us to a second problem: the relationship between language and literature. Plato in The Republic has much to say about literature—which at the time consisted of poetry in its dramatic or narrative forms.In Book 10 an exchange takes place regarding the nature of imitation and representation: the subject is ostensibly art, but the originary motive is as usual the determining of the nature of truth. By the end of the dialo gue Socrates has established a parallel hierarchy of media and physical activities. The carpenter makes the actual bed, but the idea or concept behind this act of creation is God’s. The painter is placed at the next stage down in this creative hierarchy: he can observe the carpenter making the bed and dutifully record this process.The poet, it seems, exists in a somewhat ambiguous relation to this column of originators, makers and imitators. Perhaps they [poets] may have come across imitators and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the 8 RHETORIC truth, because they are appearances only and not realities. (1888:312) In short, the poet is capable of unsettling the hierarchy which sustains the clear relation between appearance and reality.Poets, as Aristotle and Plato recognized, are pure rhetoricians: they work within a kind of metalanguage which draws continuously upon the devices of rhetoric but which is not primarily involved in the practical activities of argument and persuasion. As the above quote suggests, they move disconcertingly through the various levels of creation, imitation and deception, and as Plato made clear, such fickle mediators were not the most welcome inhabitants in a Republic founded upon a clear and unitary correspondence between appearance and reality.Plato’s designation of literature as a form which feeds upon the devices of more practical and purposive linguistic discourses, but whose function beyond a form of whimsical diversion is uncertain, has for two millenia been widely debated but has remained the dominant thesis. During the English Renaissance there was an outpouring of largely practical books on the proper use of rhetoric and rhetorical devices: for example R. Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), T. Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (15 53), R. Rainolde’s A Book Called the Foundation of Rhetorike (1563), H.Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577) and G. Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589). These were aimed at users of literary and non-literary language, but a distinction was frequently made between the literary and the non-literary function of rhetoric. In George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie we find that there are specific regulations regarding the correspondence between literary style and subject (derived chiefly from Cicero’s distinction between the grand style, the middle style and the low, plain or simple style).The crossing of recommended style-subject borders was regarded as bad writing, but a far more serious offence would be committed RHETORIC 9 if the most extravagant rhetorical, and by implication literary, devices were transplanted into the serious realms of non-literary exchange. Metaphors or ‘figures’ are, according to Puttenham, parti cularly dangerous. ‘For what else is your Metaphor but an inversion of sense by transport; your allegorie by a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation under covert and darke intendments’ (1589:158).Judges, for example, forbid such extravagances because they distort the truth: This no doubt is true and was by then gravely considered; but in this case, because our maker or Poet is appointed not for a judge, but rather for a pleader, and that of pleasant and lovely causes and nothing perillous, such as be for the triall of life, limme, or livelihood†¦they [extravagant metaphors] are not in truth to be accompted vices but for vertues in the poetical science very commendable. (ibid. : 161)Poetry does of course involve ‘perillous’ matters, but what Puttenham means is that the poetic function is not instrumental in activities concerned with actual ‘life, limme, or livelihood’. As a spokesman for the Renaissance consensus Puttenham shows that the P lato/Aristotle debate regarding the dangers of rhetoric, especially in its literary manifestation, has been shelved rather than resolved: in short, Puttenham argues that in literature it is permissible to distort reality because literature is safely detached from the type of discourse that might have some purposive effect upon the real conditions of its participants.What Puttenham said in 1589 remains true today: literary and non-literary texts might share a number of stylistic features but literary texts do not belong in the same category of functional, purposive language as the judicial ruling or the theological tract. This begs a question which modern stylistics, far more than rhetoric, has sought to address. How do we judge the difference between literary and non-literary discourses? We 10 RHETORIC ave not finished with rhetoric, but in order to properly consider the two issues raised by it—the relation between language and non-linguistic reality and the difference betwee n literary and non-literary texts—we should now begin to examine its far more slippery and eclectic modern counterpart. 2 STYLISTICS AND MODERN CRITICISM Two groups of critics have had a major influence on the identity and direction of twentieth-century English studies: the Russian and central European Formalists and the more disparate collection of British and American teachers and writers whose academic careers began during the 1920s and 1930s.The term New Criticism is often applied to the latter group. The objectives of the majority of individuals in each group were the same: to define literature as a discourse and art form and to establish its function as something that can be properly studied. Until the late 1950s the work of these groups remained within mutually exclusive geographical and academic contexts: the New Critics in Britain and America and the Formalists in Europe. During the 1960s New Criticism and Formalism began to recognize similarities and overlaps in the ir goals and methods.Since the 1960s their academic predominance has been unsettled by a much broader network of interdisciplinary practices: structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism and new historicism, are all significant elements of contemporary literary studies, and each draws its methodologies and expectations from intellectual fields beyond the traditional, enclosed realms of rhetoric and aesthetics. This, I concede, is a simplified history of twentiethcentury criticism, but it provides us with a framework for an understanding of how rhetoric has been variously transformed into modern stylistics.The New Critics and the Formalists are the most obvious inheritors of the disciplines 12 STYLISTICS AND MODERN CRITICISM of rhetoric, in the sense that they have maintained a belief in the empirical difference between literature and other types of language and have attempted to specify this difference in terms of style and effect. Structuralism at once extended and questioned these p ractices by concentrating on the similarities, rather than the differences, between literature and other discourses.Poststructuralism took this a stage further by introducing the reader into the relation between literary and non-literary style, and posing the question of whether the expectations of the perceiver can determine, rather than simply disclose, stylistic effects and meanings. Feminist critics have examined style less as an enclosed characteristic of a particular text and more as a reflection of the sociocultural hierarchies—predominantly male—which control stylistic habits and methods of interpretation.Similarly, Marxists and new historicists concern themselves with style as an element of the more important agenda of cultural and ideological change and mutation. For the sake of convenience I shall divide these different approaches to stylistics into two basic categories: textualist and contextualist. The Formalists and New Critics are mainly textualists in t hat they regard the stylistic features of a particular literary text as productive of an empirical unity and completeness. They do not perceive literary style as entirely exclusive to literature—rhythm is an element of all spoken language, and narrative features in ordinary onversation—but when these stylistic features are combined so as to dominate the fabric of a text, that text is regarded as literature. Contextualism involves a far more loose and disparate collection of methods. Its unifying characteristic is its concentration on the relation between text and context. Some structuralists argue that the stylistic features of poetry draw upon the same structural frameworks that enable us to distinguish between modes of dress or such social rituals as eating.Some feminists regard literary style as a means of securing attitudes and hierarchies that, in the broader context, maintain the difference between male and female roles. STYLISTICS AND MODERN CRITICISM 13 The rem ainder of this Part is divided into three chapters. The first two will examine in basic terms how modern criticism has employed stylistics to evolve theories of poetry and fiction: these chapters will be concerned predominantly with textualist method and practice. Chapter 5 is more concerned with contextualism and will consider the ways in which the interface between text and context can unsettle textualist assumptions. TEXTUALISM I: POETRY The first part of this chapter will give brief definitions, with examples, of the devices and linguistic elements that constitute the stylistic character of post-medieval English poetry: prosody and poetic form; metre; rhyme and the stanza; the sonnet; the ode; blank verse; free verse; metaphor; syntax, diction and vocabulary. Following this is a section on critical methods, which will include examples of how the listed devices and linguistic elements are deployed by critics in their attempts to show how poetic style creates particular meanings a nd effects.PROSODY AND POETIC FORM The most basic and enduring definition of poetry is that the poem, unlike any other assembly of words, supplements the use of grammar and syntax with another system of organization: the poetic line. The poetic line draws upon the same linguistic raw material as the sentence but deploys and uses this in a different way. Our awareness of the grammatical rules which govern the way that words are formed into larger units of meaning is based on our ability to recognize the difference between individual words.Words are made up of sound and stress, identified respectively by the phoneme and the syllable. The function of sound and stress in non-poetic language is functional and utilitarian: before we understand the operative relation between nouns, verbs, adjectives and TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 15 connectives we need to be able to relate the sound and structure of a word to its meaning. Traditional poetry uses stress and sound not only as markers and indicator s of meaning but also as a way of measuring and foregrounding the principal structural characteristic of the poem: the line.In most poems written before the twentieth-century the line is constructed from a combination of two or more of the following elements: †¢ A specified and predictable number of syllables. The most commonly used example of this is the ten-syllable line, the pentameter. †¢ A metrical pattern consisting of the relation between the stress or emphasis of adjacent syllables. The most frequently used metrical pattern in English involves the use of the iambic foot, where an emphatic syllable follows a less emphatic one, with occasional variations, or ‘stress reversals’. †¢ Rhyme.The repetition of the phonemic sound of a single syllable at the end of a line. †¢ Assonance and alliteration. The repetition of clusters of similar vowel or consonant sounds within individual lines and across sequences of lines. The persistent and predictable d eployment of two or more of these features is what allows us to recognize the traditional line as an organizing feature of most pre-twentieth-century poems. METRE The iambic pentameter, consisting of ten syllables with the even syllables stressed more emphatically than the odd, is the most frequently used line in English poetry.It is the governing principle of Shakespeare’s blank verse; of nondramatic blank verse poems, including John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and William Wordsworth’s Prelude, and of the heroic couplet, the structural centrepiece of most 16 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY (from Milton’s Paradise Lost) (from Swift’s ‘Cassinus and Peter’) of the poems of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Examples of its shorter version, the octosyllabic line or tetrameter can be found in many of the couplet poems of Swift, in Matthew Arnolds ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’ (1885), and in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850).The iambic pentameter consists of five iambic feet, its tetrameter counterpart of four. The following are examples of these, with ‘indicating the most emphatic and—the less emphatic syllables. These are examples of stress-syllabic metre, in which a consistent balance is maintained between the number of syllables of a line and its stress pattern. Alternative stresssyllabic lines include seven-syllable tetrameters (see William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’), which are comprised of three iambic feet and a single stressed syllable,Lines such as this, with an odd number of syllables, can also be scanned as trochaic The trochaic foot more frequently features as a substitute or variation in a line of iambic feet. This occurs in the first foot of Shakespeare’s line: Stress-syllabic lines consisting of three-syllable feet are generally associated with comic poetry and song. The threesyllable foot creates a rhythmic pattern that deviates from the modulati on of ordinary speech far more than its twosyllable counterpart; as in Oliver Goldsmith’s couplet, consisting of anapestic (––/)feet. TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 17Some poems vary the syllabic length of a line, while maintaining the same number of emphatic or stressed syllables in each. This is called pure stress metre. An early example of pure stress metre is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (1816) and a more recent one occurs in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930), in which the differing length of each line is anchored to a repeated pattern of two major stresses. Lady of si ences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory The internal structure of the poetic line is only one element of its function as the organizing principle of poetry.RHYME AND THE STANZA Rhyme binds lines together into larger structural units. The smallest of these is the couplet, rhyming aa bb cc (as in the majority of poems by Dryden, Pop e and Jonathan Swift). More complex rhyme schemes enable the poet to create stanzas, the simplest of these being the quatrain, rhyming ab ab. (The octosyllabic quatrain is used by John Donne in ‘The Ecstasy and its pentameter counter-part in Thomas Grays ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’(1751). The stanza can play a number of roles in the broader structure of the poem.Narrative poems, which tell a story, often use the stanza as a way of emphasizing a particular event or observation while tying this into the broader narrative (as in Edmund Spenser’s long The Faerie Queene, John Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes and Lord Byron’s Don 18 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY Juan). Tennyson’s In Memoriam uses the socalled ‘envelope stanza (a b b a). This couplet within a couplet provides a formal counterpoint to the tragic or emotional focus of each stanza. Shorter, lyric poems which focus on a specific sensation, feeling or single event often use the stanza as a counterpoint to improvisation and spontaneity.Donne’s ‘The Relic’ consists of three very complicated stanzas. 8 8 8 8 6 10 7 10 10 10 10 syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables When my grave is broke up again Some second guest to entertain, (For graves have learned that woman-head To be to more than one a bed) And he that digs it spies A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, Will he not let us alone And think that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their souls, at the last busy day Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?On the one hand the complex permutations of line length and rhyme scheme create the impression of flexibility and improvisation, as if the metrical structure of the poem is responding to and following the varied emphases of speech. But this stanzaic structure is repeated, with admirable precision, three times; an d as we read the poem in its entirety we find that the flexibility of the syntax is matched by the insistent inflexibility of the stanza. THE SONNET The sonnet resembles the stanza in that it consists of an ntegrated unit of metre and rhyme: the Shakespearian sonnet consisting of three iambic pentameter quatrains followed by an iambic pentameter couplet, its Petrarchan counterpart rhyming abba abba cdc dcd. It differs from the stanza in that TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 19 the sonnet is a complete poem. Most sonnets will emphasize a particular event or theme and tie this into the symmetries, repetitions and parallels of its metrical and rhyming structure. THE ODE The most flexible and variable stanzaic form will be found in the ode. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’ consists of eleven sections.Each of these has a pattern of metre and rhyme just as complex and varied as Donne’s stanza in ‘The Relic’, except that in the ‘Immortality Ode’ the same pattern is never repeated. The open, flexible structure of the ode is well suited to its use, especially by the Romantic poets, as a medium for personal reflection; it rarely tells a particular story, and it eschews logical and systematic argument in favour of an apparently random sequence of questions, hypotheses and comparisons. BLANK VERSE A form which offers a similar degree of freedom from formal regularity is blank verse, consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameters.Prior to Milton’s Paradise Lost blank verse was regarded as a mixture of poetry and prose. It was thought appropriate only for drama, in which language could be recognizably poetic (i. e. metrical) while maintaining realistic elements of dialogue and ordinary speech (without rhyme). Paradise Lost offered blank verse as an alternative to the use of the stanza or the couplet in longer narrative or descriptive poems. Milton’s blank verse creates a subtle tension between the iambic patt ern of each line and the broader flow across lines of descriptive or impassioned speech (see below, pp. 28–9, for an example).A similar balance between discursive or reflective language and the metrical undertow of the blank verse line is found in the eighteenth-century tradition of landscape poems (see James Thomson’s The Seasons and 20 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY William Cowper’s The Task) and in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude. The most flexible examples of blank verse, where it becomes difficult to distinguish between prose rhythm and metre, are found in the poems of Robert Browning, particularly The Ring and the Book (1868– 9): So Did I stand question and make answer, still With the same result of smiling disbelief, Polite impossibility of faith.FREE VERSE Before the twentieth-century, poems which involved neither rhyme nor the metrical pattern of blank verse were rare. Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (1756) and Wal t Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) replaced traditional metre with patterns redolent of biblical phrasing and intonation, and Blake in his later visionary poems (1789– 1815) devised a very individual form of free verse. It was not until this century that free verse became an established part of the formal repertoire of English poetry. Free verse (from the French vers libre) is only free in the sense that it does not conform to traditional patterns of metre and rhyme.The poetic line is maintained as a structural counterpoint to syntax, but is not definable in abstract metrical terms. Free verse can be divided into three basic categories: 1. Poetry which continues and extends the least restrictive elements of traditional poetry, particularly those of the ode and blank verse. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917) is a monologue with an unpredictable rhyme scheme and a rhythmic structure that invokes traditional metre but refuses to maintain a regular beat or pattern. A similar effect is achieved in TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 21 W. H. Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’.In The Four Quartets (1935–42) Eliot often uses an unrhymed form that resembles blank verse, of which the following, from the beginning of ‘Little Gidding’, is an example: M dwinter spr ng is its o n season Sempiternal though sodden towards s ndown, Suspended in ti e, between pole and tropic. The lines of the poem vary between 9 and 13 syllables. Regular metre is replaced by the distribution of three to five major stresses across each line. Although the lines cannot be scanned according to expectations of regularity they do create the impression that Eliot is giving special attention to rhythmic structure. . Poems in which the line structure reflects the apparent spontaneity of ordinary speech, where, unlike in ‘Little Gidding’, no concessions are made to a metrical undertow. Line divisions will often b e used as an imitation of the process through which we transform thoughts, impressions and experiences into language. Easthope (1983) calls this form ‘intonational metre’. A typical example of this is D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’. A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. 3.Poems in which the unmetrical line variously obstructs, deviates from or interferes with the movement of syntax. In Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ the two lines function as an alternative to the continuities of grammar. The apparition of those faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough. 22 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY The space between the lines could be filled by a variety of imagined connecting phrases: ‘are like’, ‘are unlike’, ‘remind me of’, ‘are as lonely as’. Individual lines offer specific images or impressions: the reader makes connections betw een them.In William Carlos Williams’s ‘Spring and All’ the line structure orchestrates the syntax and creates a complex network of hesitations and progressions, and for an example of this turn to pp. 154–7. The most extreme example of how the free verse line can appropriate and disrupt the structural functions of syntax will be found in the poems of e. e. cummings, where the linear movement of language is effectively broken down into visual units. The best, brief guide to the mechanics of prosody and metre is Hobsbaum’s Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (1996).A more methodical survey of linguistics and poetic form is Bradford’s A Linguistic History of English Poetry (1993). T. V. F. Brogan’s English Versification 1570–1980 (1981) provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography of works on all types of metre and verse form. METAPHOR Metaphor is derived from the Greek verb that means ‘to carry over’. When words are used m etaphorically, one field of reference is carried over or transferred into another. Wordsworth (in ‘Resolution and Independence’) states that ‘The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth. ’ He carries over two ery human attributes to the non-human phenomena of the sky and the morning: the ability to rejoice and to give birth. I. A. Richards (1936) devised a formula that enables us to specify the process of carrying over. The ‘tenor’ of the metaphor is its principal subject, the topic addressed: in Wordsworth’s line the tenor is the speaker’s perception of the sky and the morning. The ‘vehicle’ is the analogue or the subject carried over from another field of reference to that of TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 23 the subject: in Wordsworth’s line the activities of rejoicing and giving birth.Metaphor is often referred to as a poetic device but it is not exclusive to poetry. Metaphors will be found in newspaper articles o n economics: ‘The war [vehicle] against inflation [tenor]’; in ordinary conversation: ‘At yesterdays meeting [tenor] I broke the ice [vehicle]’; in novels: ‘He cowered in the shadow [vehicle] of the thought [tenor]’ (James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); and in advertisements: ‘This car is as good on paper [vehicle] as it is on the road [tenor]’. The principal difference between Wordsworth’s metaphor and its non-poetic counterparts is its integration with the iambic pentameter.We could retain the metaphor and lose the metre; turn it into the kind of unmetrical sentence that might open a short story or a novel: ‘I watched the sky rejoice in the birth of the morning. ’ One thing lost is the way in which the pentameter organizes and emphasizes the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor—sky r joic s and mor ing’s bi th. In order to properly consider differences between poetic and no n-poetic uses of metaphor we should add a third element to tenor and vehicle: the ground of the metaphor (see Leech, 1969:151).The ground is essentially the context and motivation of the metaphor. For the journalist the ground of the metaphor is the general topic of economics and inflation and the particular point that he/she is attempting to make about these issues. For the conversationalist the ground is the awareness, shared with the addressee, of yesterday’s meeting and his/her role in it. For the advertiser the ground involves the rest of the advertisement, giving details of the make, price and performance of the car, and the general context in which cars are discussed and sold.In non-poetic uses of metaphor the ground or context stabilizes the relation between tenor and vehicle. The metaphor will involve a self-conscious 24 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY departure from the routine and familiar relationship between language and reality. It would be regarded as bizarre and mildly d isturbing if the conversationalist were to allow the original metaphor to dominate the rest of his/her discourse: ‘I sank through the broken ice into the cold water of the boardroom. There we all were: fishes swimming through a dark hostile world†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢.In poems, however, this relation between ground, tenor and vehicle is often reversed. It is the language of the poem, as much as the reader’s a priori knowledge, which creates its perceived situation and context. It constructs its own ground, and metaphor becomes less a departure from contextual terms and conditions and more a device which appropriates and even establishes them. In John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ the tenor is the insect itself and the bite it has inflicted on the male speaker and the female listener.The speaker carries over this tenor into such an enormous diversity of vehicles that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the ground outside the words of the text and the ground whi ch the text appropriates and continually transforms. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed and marriage temple is. We know that ‘this flea is the tenor, but the relation between tenor and ground becomes less certain with ‘is you and I’. On the one hand it is literally part of them since it has sucked and mixed their blood.On the other the speaker has already incorporated this image of physical unity into a vehicle involving their emotional and sexual lives. He builds on this with the vehicle of the ‘marriage bed’ and extends it into an image of spiritual, external unity in the ‘marriage temple’. Throughout the poem the flea and the bite become gradually detached from their actual context and threaded into a chain of speculative and fantastic associations. In ordinary language metaphor usually stands out from the rest of the discursive or factual nature of the statement. In TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 25 oetry a particular use of meta phor will often underpin and influence the major themes of the entire text. Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’ opens with a simile (the bank ‘is like’ a pillow, rather than ‘is’ a pillow) but thereafter maintains a close, metaphoric, relation between tenor and vehicle, Where, like a pillow on a bed, A pregnant bank swelled up to rest The violet’s reclining head Sat we two, one another’s best; The tenor is the garden in which ‘we two’ are situated; the vehicle is a combination of images denoting intimacy and sexuality: pillow, bed, pregnant, swelled up, the violets (flower, denoting female) reclining head.This opening instance of the carrying over of rural horticultural images into the sphere of human sexuality becomes the predominant theme of the entire poem, underpinning more adventurous speculations on the nature of the soul. Again the dynamics of contrasting and associating verbal images has unsettled the stabilizing fun ction of ground or context.Donne is one of the so-called metaphysical school of poetic writers whose taste for extended metaphor is a principal characteristic of their verse, but the practice of creating tensions and associations between the words and images of the poem at the expense of an external context transcends schools, fashions and historical groupings. In Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the image of the real bird becomes a springboard for a complex sequence of associations and resonances: song, poetry, immortality, age, youth, death.The sense of there being a specific place and time in which Keats saw the bird and heard its song is gradually replaced by the dynamics of Keats’s associative faculties: the relation between the vehicles unsettles the relation between vehicle and tenor. The following is from the beginning of stanza 3: 26 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weari ness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; The principal vehicle is Keats’s transformation of the bird into an apparently ratiocinative, cognitive addressee, who understands his words.This at the same time is unsettled by his constant return to the commonsense tenor of a bird without human faculties. The dynamic tension here becomes evident in Keats’s contradictory request that the nightingale should ‘forget’ those human qualities or frailties which, as he concedes in the next line, it had never and could never have known. A classic case of vehicle undermining tenor occurs in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (lines 15–22).This begins with the tenor (the city fog) being carried over into the vehicle of an unspecified animal which ‘rubs its back upon the window-panes’, ‘rubs its muzzle on the window-panes’, ‘Licked its tongue into the corners of the eveni ng’. By the end of the passage the actual vision of city streets which inspired the comparison has been overtaken by the physical presence of this strange beast, which ‘seeing that it was a soft October night,/Curled once about the house, and fell asleep’. Metaphor is the most economical, adventurous and concentrated example of the general principle of ‘carrying over’.Samuel Johnson defined metaphor in his Dictionary (1755) as ‘a simile compressed in a word’. Donne’s metaphor (from ‘The Relic’), ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’, would, as a simile, be something like: ‘the brightness of the hair about the bone reminds me of the difference between life and death’. Simile postulates the comparison: X is like Y. Metaphor synthesizes the comparison: X is Y. Metonymy is logical metaphor, in which the comparison is founded upon an actual, verifiable relation between objects or impressions: ‘crown is used instead of TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 27 ‘king’, ‘queen’ or ‘royalty’.Allegory involves an extended parallel between a narrative and a subtext which mirrors the relation between the text and reality. Spenser’s The Faerie Queen (1590–6) is a medieval fantasy with allegorical parallels in the real world of the Elizabethan court. Simile, metonymy and allegory establish a balanced relationship between the use of language and conventional perceptions of reality, and occur as frequently in non-poetic discourse as in poetry. Metaphor involves language in an unbalancing of perceptions of reality and is more closely allied to the experimental character of poetry.SYNTAX, DICTION AND VOCABULARY The terms ‘poetic diction’ and ‘poetic syntax’ should be treated with caution. Any word, clause, phrase, grammatical habit or locution used in non-poetic language can be used in poetry. But their presence with in the poem will subtly alter their familiar non-poetic function. For example, in Donne’s ‘The Flea’ the speaker reflects upon the likely objections to his proposal to the woman: Though parents grudge, and you, we are met And cloistered in these living walls of jet. We might explain the use of the phrase ‘and you’ as a result of hurried and improvised speech. ‘Though you and your parents grudge’ would be a more correct form. ) But the fact that the placing of the phrase maintains the movement of the iambic metre and the symmetry of the two lines of the couplet shows us that the speech is anything but improvised. The metrical structure of a poem can accommodate the apparent hesitations and spontaneities of ordinary speech, but at the same time fix them as parts of a carefully structured artefact. Consider what happens when syntax crosses the space between two poetic lines, an effect known 28 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY s enjambment. A classic ex ample of this occurs in the opening lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste The implied pause at the line ending might suggest, on Milton’s part, a slight moment of indecision: is he thinking of the figurative ‘fruit’ (that is, the result and consequences) of man’s disobedience, or the literal fruit of the act of disobedience? He chooses the latter. The placing of the word might also be interpreted as the complete opposite of fleeting indecision.The tension between the actuality of the fruit and the uncertain consequences of eating it is a fundamental theme of the poem, and Milton encodes this tension within the form of the poem even before its narrative begins. In non-poetic language the progress of syntax can be influenced by a number of external factors: an act or verbal interruption by someone else, the uncertainty of the speaker or the fraught circumstances of the speech act: known in stylistics as the pragmatic or functional registers of language.For example, conversations often consist of broken, incomplete syntactic units because both speakers are contributing to the same discourse, which will also involve a shared non-verbal frame of reference: ‘Look at this, its†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ ‘Well, it’s big enough’, ‘Whoa, sorry. ’ ‘It’s OK, it’ll clean up. ’ In poetry apparent hesitations or disturbances of syntax are a function of the carefully planned, integrated structure of the text. The ability of poetry to absorb and recontextualize the devices and registers of non-poetic language is evident also in its use of diction, vocabulary, and phrasing.The social or local associations of particular words or locutionary habits TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 29 can be carried into a poem but their familiar context will be transformed by their new structural framework. In Tony Harrison’s V ( 1985) the poet converses in a Leeds cemetery with an imagined skinhead whose hobbies include the spraying of graffiti on to gravestones: ‘Listen cunt! ’ I said, ‘Before you start your jeering The reason why I want this in a book ’s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing! ’ A book, yer stupid cunts not worth a fuck.The diction and idiom of both speakers is working class and Northern, but this specific, locative resonance is itself contained within a separate language, with its own conventions: each regional idiomatic flourish is confidently, almost elegantly, reconciled to the demands of the iambic pentameter and the quatrain. The realistic crudity of the language is juxtaposed with the controlled irony of Harrison’s formal design: the skinhead’s real presence is appropriated to the unreal structure of the poem, involving the internal and external rhymes, ‘book’ and ‘fuck’.In a broader context, the language of working-class Leeds is integrated with the same stanzaic structure used by Gray in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, in which the poet similarly appropriates the voice of a ‘hoary-headed swain’. Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, ‘Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.Gray’s and Harrison’s language and experience are centuries and worlds apart—the diction of the hoary-headed individual is rather more delicate than that of his skinheaded counterpart—but their differences are counterpointed against their enclosure within the same ahistorical stanzaic framework. 30 TEXTUALISM I: POETRY This tendency for poetry to represent and at the same time colonize the habits of non-poetic discourse is a paradox that has taxed poets and critics—most famously in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798).Wordsworth rails agai nst the stultifying poeticization of ordinary language, of how the conventions and style of eighteenth-century verse had dispossessed poetry of the ‘real language of men’. But while he advocates a new kind of poetic writing he concedes that poetry must announce its difference in a way that will ‘entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life’. In short, although poetry should be about ‘ordinary life’ it must by its very nature be separate from it. D. H.Lawrence’s poems in the Nottinghamshire dialect, Robert Burns’s and Hugh MacDiarmid’s use of Scots idiom, grammar and diction emphasize region and very often class, but no matter where the words come from or what social or political affiliations they carry, they are always appropriated and acted upon by the internal structures of poetry. Wordsworth’s desire to separate poetry from the Vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life’ s ounds suspiciously elitist and exclusive, and there is evidence of this in the work of a number of our most celebrated poets.In Part II of The Waste Land (1922) Eliot represents the speech patterns and, so he assumes, the concerns of working-class women: Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. We will be expected to note the difference between this passage and the sophisticated command of metre and multicultural references of the poem’s principal male voice, Tiresias. With whom would we associate T. S. Eliot? Tiresias or the women?The sense of poetry as carrying social and political allegiances (principally male, white, English, middle class, TEXTUALISM I: POETRY 31 educated) has prompted acts of stylistic revolution. William Carlos Williams in the free verse of Spring and All and Paterson (1946–58) effectively discards those conventions of rhyme and metr e that restrict his use of ordinary American phrasing and vocabulary (see pp. 154–7 for examples). Linton Kwesi Johnson makes the structure of his poems respond to the character of his language. But love is just a word; give it MEAN IN thruHACKSHAN. ‘MEANIN’ and ‘HACKSHAN’ are words appropriated from ‘standard’ English by West Indians, and the fact that Johnson has used poetry to emphasize their ownership is significant. The unusual concentrations and foregroundings of poetry can unsettle just as much as they can underpin the allegiances and ideologies of diction and vocabulary. CRITICAL METHODS So far I have considered three principal characteristics of poetry and the

Amadeus Essay

Amadeus Is a affectionately account of the relationship between Mozart and Sellers. Mozart Is shown as an exceptional musicals considered today by some to be the greatest of all geniuses in his field having knocked out compositions for assorted solo instruments, opera and symphonic orchestras by the time he was thirty-five years old. Saltier was a talented composer and, had Mozart never lived, he albums might have been available for sale today. . The film Amadeus is fairly accurate although it exaggerates and oversimplifies and appears to take greatest arrant In the area which Is central to the film, the relationship between Mozart and Saltier. II. The relationships of both Mozart and Saltier to life, music and creativity shed some light on the questions raised with respect to the relationship between God and man, although at times that light is confusing and contradictory.Amadeus: Mozart and Salaries The genius Mozart and the frustrated Saltier and their turbulent relationship are the centerpieces of the film, but the setting of Vienna Itself at the hectic end of the eighteenth century Is also a character. It Is an era of great creative turbulence but nee which nevertheless did not take easily to Mozart brilliant compositions. The talented but conventional and limited Saltier, on the other hand, was favored by those with the power to elevate artists to heights of fame.The film delves into this struggle of Mozart for recognition in an allegedly Enlightenment-oriented Viennese society, and In doing so Is certainly not far from accurate. Mozart and his family were needy due to absurdly low fees for his teaching, the neglectful public who did not understand or appreciate his operas, the businessmen who cheated him. The film s not truly biographical with respect to either man. While Saltier, the narrator, does straightforwardly cover the early life of his rival, that period is far less crucial than the final ten years of Mozart life which the film focuses on.That early life depicts Mozart as a musical prodigy, touring with his father Leopold (a great influence in his life) and sister through Europe, his ample and liberal education, and his first serious compositional operatic effort In music. In keeping with M ozart commitment to individuality (one aspect of the Enlightenment he began to show more independence from his fathers influence later in life. For example, Mozart married a woman in defiance of his fathers wishes in Vienna.More importantly than choice in women to Mozart, however, was his artistic and creative freedom. In a letter to his father from Vienna, at roughly the beginning of the ten year period covered in the film, Mozart expresses bitter disappointment at his fathers protest against his sons angry denunciation of the Archbishop (l hate the Archbishop to madness! ) and his All of these basic facts of Mozart life are roughly accurate resignation at Vienna. Is the portrayal of Saltier as a man who is generally more favored by the Viennese, especially the elites. The greater favor Saltier receives does not gratify him, however, because he knows Mozart is the better composer. The film begins to stray into exaggeration when it zeroes In on its true concernthe last decade of Mozart life In Vienna and his relationship with Saltier. Although the film portrays the two as recognize a rivalry but mention Saltier only a few t imes and then with digressiveness. He greatest inaccuracy seems to be in the most compelling and important part of he film in which Mozart dies from Galleries hand after dictating his final work to his rival. In reality, it appears that this murder, in effect, is a storytelling fantasy for dramatic purposes. Davenport states that the murder was a vicious rumor which, unlike what we see in the film, Saltier vociferously denied: No human hand had poisoned Wolfgang, but in his desperate hours [Mozart] wove the idea out of his harried brain. Saltier was horrified when the ghoulish tale reached him. Davenport also notes that Galleries bitter Jealousy of Mozart softened as he aged and in the end e expressed admiration for his dead rival (Davenport Mozart shared the liberalism of the Enlightenment artist in terms of his innovative and revolutionary artistry, but Saltier was far more the rationalist, another essential aspect of the Enlightenment. The difficulty in applying Enlightenment standards to Mozart in particular is that he was far more the genius/artist than he was a philosopher, or scientist, or rationalist, and those concerns were paramount in the Enlightenment.Certainly his music was guided and shaped by an order which Mozart genius Imposed, but what makes Mozart music and personality extraordinary is that they Newer marked by that genius which suggests a more intimate relationship between and him than most human beings ever experience. There is the sense in a prodigy that the raw and brilliant stuff of life is exposed in all its wildness, despite the fact that Mozart labored and studied with great dedication and energy to produce his musical works. Saltier, on the other hand, was far more the controlled man, the man whose passions did not carry him away as they did Mozart.Perhaps it Mould be fairer to see Mozart as the Romantic Genius and Saltier as the Enlightenment Thinker. The latter contrast between Saltier and Mozart makes up the heart and soul of the film. For example, except for the final scene in which Saltier Norms with Mozart and we see the process of the genius of Mozart in its full expression, the film seems to suggest that creating incredible music came easy to Mozart. However, the composer himself declared, People make a mistake who think my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as l. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over (Secure). The creative, artistic character, especially in its extraordinary or genius form, is complex and contradictory. In order to create a more dramatic and perhaps more simple story, author Peter Shaffer and director Mills Forman chose to emphasize the wilder aspects of Mozart and the more controlled aspects of Saltier. Rhea complexities of both men, apparent in more historically-based accounts, are forfeited to the drama of this exaggerated and simplified contrast.The choice reduced an exciting and popular film (which is amazing itself for the life of two classical composers dead two hundred years), but an inaccurate historical portrait of those men. The films portrayal of the two composers as being so completely foreign to one another is to fail to see that there is indeed in every artist both an active heart and mind. One dominates, but the other must be engaged. The heart must inspire the mind, but the mind must channel the heart. Mozart was no more all heart than Saltier was all mind, but that is the extreme contrast the film tries to portray.Both the Enlightenment. Certainly Mozart sought liberation from religious, social or any other restriction in terms of creative expression, while Saltier, especially as portrayed in the film, was indeed inhibited by many such considerations of conformity and the need for acceptance. On the other hand, Mozart expressed obedience to Gods will, if not to religion. The Requiem sequence in the film is crucial to an understanding of both Galleries and Mozart world views (their perspective on what art is, what their relationship with God is, where they fit into the world, etc.While watching the opera Don Giovanni, Saltier realizes a terrible way that he can triumph over God. It is both a triumph over Mozart as well as God, however that Saltier seeks. In fact, it seems that Saltier himself feels so separate from God, so unappreciated and unrewarded by God, in comparison to Mozart (who appears so close to God in his genius and the sublime music he creates), Saltier feels he must defeat God rather than love or be loved by Him.He madly equates God with the brilliant Mozart, and believes that stealing the life and the music from Mozart will give him a victory over ND Mozart. He disguises himself in the same outfit worn previously by Mozart father Leopold and tricks Mozart into writing a requiem mass. This terrible scene leads eventually to the death of Mozart, directly or indirectly caused by the Jealous and maddened Saltier, but before the end, Saltier enters for the first time (along with the audience) into the thrilling process of Mozart genius in the act of creating.Saltier was talented but unable to create such astounding music himself. At least he has seen what it is like to be near genius in action as Mozart on his deathbed estates his last piece, the Confutation, to the enthralled Saltier. Saltier lived a much more controlled and controlling life than the passionate Mozart, and this is reflected in the film, with, again, the writer and director choosing to emphasize the differences between the two men and excise any signs of similarity in terms of personality.For the sake of film storytelling, the greater the contrast in the two leading characters, the better the drama. The films creators in the most inaccurate part of the film have simply stuck together separate facts which are in evidence (the viably, the creation of the Requiem, the death of Mozart, Mozart deathbed paranoia caused by not only his dying but a life of struggle and lack of appropriate recognition) and produced an imaginary set of scenes in which Saltier played a far more central role than he did in fact play.Certainly, as the sources unanimously state, Saltier in life and history did not take credit for killing Mozart, or even for wishing him dead. To the contrary, he was by all accounts horrified and haunted that anybody would think he would do so. In the film, however, the desire for Mozart death at Galleries hand is expressed explicitly by Saltier: Echo mi. [Behold me. ] Antonio Saltier. Ten years of my hate have poisoned you to death. Mozart cries for God and Saltier responds {in the atheistic position associated with the Enlightenment), God?!God will not help HOLD! God does not Help! God does not love you, Amadeus! God does not love! He can only use! He cares nothing for whom he uses: nothing for whom he denies! The Norms are entirely invented, but they are likely indicative of the true view of Saltier: that his virtuous and hard work was not properly rewarded by God, while Mozart Unawareness and easy genius were flooded with rewards. The latter assumption, of course, is preposterous, for Mozart died in poverty.

Employment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Employment - Essay Example This is considered to be undesirable as the company will have to incur high training costs and will be left with inexperienced employees. In order to avoid this, the company should keep their employees motivated and give them additional benefits like bonuses, holidays etc. staff turnover is calculated by dividing the number of employees leaving the company by the current employees and then multiplying by hundred. Different types of staff turnover include internal, external, voluntary and involuntary. 2. Turnover can be internal or external. Internal turnover is when employees leave their current jobs to take over new positions in the same company. This can be a due to a number of positive and negative reasons. The employees might like the way the management treats its employees and therefore, they want to work in the same organization. Internal turnover is as important for the company as an external one. External turnover happens when the employees leave their jobs to work in other c ompanies or organizations. The employees might be unhappy with the way the employees are treated or the environment of the organization. The management should consider both these turnovers because a high staff turnover is not healthy for any organization. 3. The hospitality industry includes jobs in hotels, resorts etc. where the employees have to make the guests feel at home. This industry has a high turnover because of a number of reasons. One reason is its nature of seasonality. It is hard for the employees in off-the-peak season and therefore, the turnover is high. Also the work environment of this industry might not be good and the employees might not be treated in a good way. Another main factor is that dealing with customers is also not an easy task. Pay rates are often really low and along with less benefits, employees working in this industry get de-motivated. Therefore, the staff turnover of this industry is really high. 4. The costs of high turnover can have negative effe cts on the financial statements of a company. There are a number of techniques or tools which they can use in order to reduce their turnover rate. One tool is to provide a better working environment for the employees and to treat them well. To make their organization an employee oriented one which would keep the employees motivated. Another technique is to hire the right people suitable for the organization and provide them with adequate training facilities. Building loyal relationships with employees is also another tool which the organization can use. The organization can provide positive reinforcement to the employees by giving them incentives such as compensation, bonus, non-cash rewards and other benefits as well 5. Employee retention is extremely important for the success of an organization. High turnover rates are very costly for the company and therefore, they need to find ways to retain as many employees as possible. The costs of high turnover rates include training costs, recruiting costs and can have a negative affect on the financial position of an organization. The management needs to keep their employees motivated in order to have a high retention rate. Also that with high retention rates, experienced workers remains with the organization and continue to provide their advice so that the goals of the company are met. An effective employee retention program can help the reputation of the company and also improves employee morale. It also makes sure that the productivity and performance of the employees are maintained. 6. A high turnover rate can prove to be costly for the company. The costs are both direct and indirect. The direct costs include recruitment cost, the cost the company incurs when an employee leaves

How can we make the roads safer for those who share the road with Thesis

How can we make the roads safer for those who share the road with bicyclists - Thesis Example Bicycle is emerging as a popular mode of transport and it gives its hundred percent to the owner. The question can be answered by addressing the psychology of the road users of different types of vehicles and better traffic education by the controlling authorities. The roads must be safer for all those who share them with bicyclists. Every life is precious, that of the rider on the bicycle or the gentleman driving the car. An accident is an accident and we know that it is an accident only when it happens! Deaths and injuries from car-bike collisions are common. It’s a human problem: The blame game-the motorists claiming the exclusive rights on the road, and the cyclists demanding equal rights-- is no solution to the issue. For road fatalities, cyclists are not alone responsible. The reasons are varied. Carelessness of the adventurous rider, mechanical problems, and bad road conditions are some of them. The cyclists demand their right on the road along with safety. An individua l must first live to exercise the right! It is not a posthumous award! The argument that if there is no bicycle lane, the road should be out of bound for the cyclists, may be technically correct, but it defies solution. The motorists need to give up the How can we make the roads safer for bicyclists AND those who share the road with bicyclists? stand that they are born to race the car at 100-120 km per hour, from the moment it is out of the garage till the final destination, is a greedy and one-sided approach. Limit the speed and accommodate the bicycle riders, instead of going ballistic over them. While tendering the advice I would address the session for the bicyclists first and urge them to follow the rules scrupulously. It is not a circus performance. Never zigzag to challenge the oncoming cars. Self-discipline is the life-saver. Cyclists demand rights on a city road, and that underlines perfect regard for the traffic rules. The end-results should be a win-win situation for all. The argument of the motorists that they have the exclusive rights to use the roads, for which they pay tax in dollars, is not perfect. Cyclists too have paid taxes at the time of purchasing the bicycle (though indirectly) and they are citizens of the country subject to all other tax laws and rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Motorists have not been conferred with special rights. Not legal arguments, it’s the question of smooth flow of traffic No traffic law can be applied strictly under all circumstances. The question needs to be addressed prudently from the point of view of flow of traffic in a particular area/city. For example, the traffic rules for the cyclists in the heart of the New York City and its distant suburbs needs to be different. The traffic police, with their expertise and experience, frames well-meaning rules for motorists and cyclists and it is in the interest of both to follow the rules. How can we make the roads safer for bicyclists AND those who s hare the road with bicyclists? Saving precious lives is more important than winning legal points in arguments. The one, who travels on bicycle, does so, not necessarily on account of non-affordability of a motor vehicle due to economic considerations, but may be due to the reality one has to face about the traffic congestion on city streets. Cycling the distance has turned out to be an alternative mode of transport, and the issue has to be understood in that perspective. It is in the best

The evolution of the oil and gas technology policy Research Paper

The evolution of the oil and gas technology policy - Research Paper Example Canada is one such country, which has an immense endowment of oil as well as natural gas resources, and by extracting, refining and also transporting these resources, it is not only providing high number jobs to its citizens but also strongly contributing to its economy as well as trade balance. Although, these oil and gas deposits have naturally developed more than a billion years ago, it is due to the expertise as well as technology adoption of the Canadians, they are able to effectively extract it, process it, transport it and achieve success. From finding the first deposits in 1850s to the current optimum expansion throughout Canada, oil and gas companies with the support of the government are carrying out extensive operations, both onshore as well as offshore. The support of the government is critical because with all the oil and gas resources belonging to the Federal government, their laws and policies plays a key role in the tapping of these oil and gas resources, particularly in the usage of technology. With government policies and use of technology being interrelated, the focus will be on how the evolution of the Canadian oil and gas sector and the resultant formulation of policies have impacted and still impacting the evolution of the oil and gas technology polici es as well. The Canadian crude oil and gas industry had its origins in 1850, when James Miller Williams, a carriage maker from Hamilton, Ontario, â€Å"dug and drilled the first commercial oil wells in southwestern Ontario and established North America’s first integrated oil company.† (Bott & Carson, 2012).The other key fuel of the petroleum era, natural gas, was first discovered in New Brunswick in 1859, with Eugene Coste, an entrepreneur, being the first Canadian to find and develop natural gas resources on a large scale, first in Ontario and later in Alberta. (Bott & Carson, 2012). From those humble beginnings, Canada has

International business news Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 2

International business news - Article Example Low economic growth in US will affect interest rates and exports earnings (CBC 2012). On the other hand, the problem of the emerging markets like china is inflation. Canada should therefore review its policies and increase its trading with the emerging markets to record stable performance and fiscal performance. The article also further explains the impact of fiscal slippage on interests rates. Canada must thus ensure that it shields its financial market from the risk of recording increasing interest rates as this would reduce rate of investment and reduce economic performance. The lack of fiscal stability in the developed nations would affect other economies. The final section of the article contains the how Canada should enter into trading partnership with the growing economies. Canada’s share of exports to these emerging markets has reduced by 50% and this calls for urgent need to increase its exports to exploit the growing demand (CBC 2012). The article recommends that Canada require concerted efforts to develop trade with the emerging economies to maintain its fiscal stability and earnings from efforts. Canada business should also improve on the competitiveness; look for new suppliers in order to maintain stability in the volatile economy. In summary, the article raises concern over the increasing fiscal instability of the leading economies on Canada economic stability and recommends increased trading with the emerging markets. High global debt will impact Canada: Carney - Business - CBC News. (n.d.). CBC.ca - Canadian News Sports Entertainment Kids Docs Radio TV. Retrieved March 21, 2012, from

Pre-colombian america Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Pre-colombian america - Essay Example Incan empire was also a Pre-Columbian empire of America mainly concentrated in the South America. The main difference between the Aztec and the Incan empires is that the Incan empire acted like a large unified integrated empire where as the Aztec empire was considered to be a bigger city controlling a group of smaller cities. At the same time, Incan empire was larger than the Aztec empire and in fact it was the largest empire of the Pre-Columbian America during that period. Incan empire had its capital located in Cuzco. Its main concentration was in South America unlike the concentration of the Aztec empire in Central America. The origin of Incan empire was considered to be highlands of Peru during 1197. The Inca Empire was ruled by the Inca with an administrative units called dominions. Interestingly, the strength of this kingdom lied in its nature of economy in the form of the collective property of the land. They followed an aggressive policy after 1430s and concentrated much on e xpansion of kingdom especially in Western South America nearer to the Andes which comprises of present day countries like Peru, Argentina and Chile. However, during 1533 their last emperor Atahualpa, was killed due to Spanish attack under Francisco Pizarro. Hence the fall of both Aztec and Inca kingdoms was resulted due to attack from Spanish rulers. The main factor responsible for the decline of the Aztec kingdom was the human sacrifice conducted by them irrespective of social and political consequences. In other words, the blind faith in their religious and cultural feelings especially in human sacrifice gave the scope for outside rulers like the Spanish kings to attack and defeat them with a small number of soldiers. The fall of Incan empire was also due to religious factors like their illogical faith in superstitions. The very foundation of Incan empire on mythical thought, conceptualizing the

Important aspects in the development of any construction Essay

Important aspects in the development of any construction - Essay Example Important aspects in the development of any construction Designing, planning and constructions are important aspects in the development of any building, highways, airports, dams and railroads. Therefore, it is significant to first of all, clearly design, plan and construct what needs to be achieved and accomplished and then start working on the construction. If the designing and planning phase are not managed appropriately, then it could significantly hurt and damage the outcomes of the project. Moreover, such situations could also increase the cost, outcome and time of the project (Chan, Scott, & Chan, 2004). This has been one of the reasons why the project managers emphasize a lot on the initial designing and planning stage before moving to the actual construction phase of the project. This report presents the case of a client that owns a two-storey building. The client wants to increase the available area of the building and therefore, he wants to add three more storeys to the same building. For this purpose, this report presents the conceptual design of adding three more storeys to the building. At the time of planning, designing and construction, there are some considerations that have been kept in mind. For instance, one of the major considerations is that the site is suited in open countryside and as a result, there will be high wind as well with an approximate speed of 1 kN/m2.

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

Terrorism - Research Paper Example Terrorist attacks bring mass casualties, have a strong psychological pressure on the great mass of people, involve the destruction of material and spiritual values that are beyond recovery times, sow out a discord among nations, provoking a war, mistrust and hatred between social and national groups, which are sometimes impossible to overcome during the whole generation. According to Ronczkowski â€Å"The Department of Defense defines terrorism as â€Å"†¦the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.†2 To better examine the question we should speak a little about the history of terrorism. Over its long history, terrorism appeared as a variety of guises, terrorism and terrorists have been existing for more than fifteen hundred years - in many countries there were St. Bartholomew’s Nights and Sicilian Suppers, enemies - real or perceived - were destroyed by the Roman emperors, the Ottoman sultans, the Russian Tsars, as well as by many other, and each country has at least one ‘hero’. Terrorists always existed. ... A combination of religious fanaticism and political terrorism can be traced in the actions of sicarius: they saw something joyful in martyrdom, and believed that the Lord will come to his people and save them from the torments and sufferings after the overthrow of a hated regime.3 The representatives of the Muslim sect who killed caliphs, prefects, governors and even the rulers also adhered to the same ideology: they were destroyed by the King of Jerusalem Conrad of Montferrat.4 The murder was a ritual for sectarians; they welcomed martyrdom and death for the sake of ideas and firmly believed in the advent of a new world order. It is important to continue that terrorism as a massive and politically significant phenomenon is a result of rampant ‘deideologization’, when certain groups begin to question the legitimacy and rights of the state in society, and this justifies their transition to terror to achieve their own goals. According to Lawless we see that â€Å"terroris m is an international crime and as such requires the international community to act in the prevention of terrorism and the sanction of individuals perpetrating acts of terrorism†.5 Various criminal groups commit terrorist acts to intimidate and destroy rivals to influence political powers in order to achieve the best possible environment for their criminal activities. Everyone may become a victim of a terrorist act - even the one who does not have the slightest relation to a conflict that spawned a terrorist act. The level of terrorism and specific forms of its manifestations are, on the one hand, the measure of public morality, and on the other hand – the measure of effectiveness of state and society to address the most pressing issues, in particular for the prevention and suppression

Qualitative Article Review Essay Example for Free

Qualitative Article Review Essay Purpose The purpose of this article is to show that there is a correlation between dropout rates and teen pregnancy, and to discuss ways to prevent teen pregnancy. The American Promise Alliance evaluated data on school districts that struggle with both poor school completion and high numbers of teen births. They identified 25 schools with the highest dropout and teen pregnancy rates. And they also evaluated school districts with high school completion rates and innovative pregnancy prevention programs to help students avoid early pregnancy and parenthood. The 25 persistently low achieving school districts account for twenty percent of all high school dropouts in the USA. Thirty percent of all teen girls that drop out of school cite pregnancy or parenthood as the reason. Thirty four percent young women who were teen mothers did not earn a diploma or GED. Less than two percent of teen mothers attained a college degree by age 30. School districts with higher school completion rates recognized the correlation between teen pregnancy and school dropout; they initiated programs to address these two high priorities. School districts collaborated with organizations receiving federally funded teen pregnancy prevention grants, such as US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Adolescent Health’s (OAH), and evidenced based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program(TPP). Through their collaboration, grantees could use the funds in a variety of evidenced based models to meet the needs of their school, community and the age of the students being served. Description of Participants/Sample The participants in this study were all the teenagers in the USA. All USA students that attended public schools were a part of the data collection. School completion, pregnancy rate and dropout rate data was gathered from every public school in all the US school districts. Research Design/Data Analysis America’s Promise Alliance analyzed data from four reputable sources on teen pregnancy and dropout rates, and identified the school districts with the highest dropout rates. They also analyzed the data on teen birth rates or teen pregnancy rates from these school districts with high dropout rates. Method Diplomas Count 2011, Common Core of Data (CCD), VitalStats and Child Trend were the four sources of data information that was used to examine the number of dropouts and teen births within the 25 persistently lowest achieving school districts. Diplomas Count is a national report from Education Week and Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center, which provides graduation rates and graduation trends for all the public schools in the USA. Diplomas Count then identifies the 25 persistently lowest achieving school. Data on total school enrollment and enrollment by grade level was extracted from CCD. VitalStats and Child Trends provided data on teen birth rates and numbers. Results The data draws a parallel between high school dropouts and teen births. The data shows the school districts that struggle with poor school completion and high numbers of teen births and how various school districts are tackling these issues. Opportunities for Further Research The America’s Promise Alliance needs to collect more data for evidence that teen pregnancy caused dropouts, rather than just being correlated with dropout rate. After the 25 identified school districts with the high dropout and teen pregnancy rate implemented pregnancy prevention, the Alliance could check back in a year with these school districts to see if the dropout rate changed. Threats to Validity The four sources cited in this study are all very reputable sources that are cited often in the field of education. But although the America’s Promise Alliance spent a lot of discussion regarding the link between dropout rates and teen pregnancy, and suggesting that combating teen pregnancy could lower dropout rates, they ended the article by saying â€Å"readers should note that this data is meant only to draw a parallel between high school dropouts and teen births. No quantitative analysis to examine the statistical significance of the association between these two issues was performed and, therefore, causality should not be inferred.† They spent most of the article talking about things (teen pregnancy and dropout rates) that only made sense if there was causation, and then at the end of the article they retracted this conclusion from the readers. Insight and Criticism Teens getting pregnant while still in school are more likely to drop out of school, but the data in this article does not prove this, but I think it made a strange correlation between the two. There may be other factors that make pregnancy and dropping out more likely. Implications of Findings Thirty percent of teen girls who drop out of school cite pregnancy or parenthood as their reason. The connection between teen pregnancy or teen parenthood and educational attainment is strong. All interested parties in the prospect of these teen parents and their children need to collaborate and develop strategies to reduce the risk of them dropping out of school. References Shuger, L. (2012). Teen pregnancy and High School Dropout: What Communities are Doing to Address These Issues. Washington, DC: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned pregnancy and America’s Promise Alliance. Retrieved November 2012, from www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources//teen-preg-hs-dropout.pdf