Creative Failure Research Articles

Creative failure for learner’s intellectual growth

Creative failure for learner’s intellectual growth

To the History of Studying of Evolution of the Russian Poetic Translation of the 19th Century

In the article systematization of data on the scientific works of the last decade devoted to studying of unfairly forgotten Russian translators’ creative works of the 19th century, for example, E.I. Guber, N.V. Gerbel, D.E. Minh, D.L. Mikhalovsky, P.I. Veynberg, thanks to their activity many topmost achievements of the West European literature presented in Russian were for the first time carried out. Methodologically the research relies on fundamental works in the field of comparative and historical literary criticism, the Russian translated fiction, the Russian and West European literary and historical and cultural communications. In the article it is convincingly shown that in the history of the Russian translated literature of the 19th century there was a special hierarchy of literary names in which in the forefront in many respects there were authors who did not get popularity by their original creative works (in particular, N.V. Gerbel, D.L. Mikhalovsky) or not creating original works at all (D.E. Minh). The authors not only analyze the concrete translations executed in the second half of the 19th century but also prove the understanding of a role of this or that translator in promoting of works of the West European literature in Russia, note the most significant achievements, characterize the reasons of creative failures. Special attention is paid to prospects of studying of scientific problems, in particular, the need of emergence of the generalizing monographic and dissertation works about translation activity of D.D. Minayev, O.N. Chyumina, P.A. Kozlov, N.A. Holodkovsky, creation of the bibliographic editions containing data on publications of translated works in the Russian periodical press of the 19th century, preparation of anthologies of the chosen works of the leading Russian translators of that time is specified; the carried-out work will promote the creation of fundamental history of the Russian literary translation in future. Keywords: Art Detail, Communications, Comparative Study, Cross-Cultural Communication, Literary Criticism, Poetic Translation, Poetry, Reception, Russian and West European Literary, Tradition

To the History of Studying of Evolution of the Russian Poetic Translation of the 19th Century

In the article systematization of data on the scientific works of the last decade devoted to studying of unfairly forgotten Russian translators’ creative works of the 19th century, for example, E.I. Guber, N.V. Gerbel, D.E. Minh, D.L. Mikhalovsky, P.I. Veynberg, thanks to their activity many topmost achievements of the West European literature presented in Russian were for the first time carried out. Methodologically the research relies on fundamental works in the field of comparative and historical literary criticism, the Russian translated fiction, the Russian and West European literary and historical and cultural communications. In the article it is convincingly shown that in the history of the Russian translated literature of the 19th century there was a special hierarchy of literary names in which in the forefront in many respects there were authors who did not get popularity by their original creative works (in particular, N.V. Gerbel, D.L. Mikhalovsky) or not creating original works at all (D.E. Minh). The authors not only analyze the concrete translations executed in the second half of the 19th century but also prove the understanding of a role of this or that translator in promoting of works of the West European literature in Russia, note the most significant achievements, characterize the reasons of creative failures. Special attention is paid to prospects of studying of scientific problems, in particular, the need of emergence of the generalizing monographic and dissertation works about translation activity of D.D. Minayev, O.N. Chyumina, P.A. Kozlov, N.A. Holodkovsky, creation of the bibliographic editions containing data on publications of translated works in the Russian periodical press of the 19th century, preparation of anthologies of the chosen works of the leading Russian translators of that time is specified; the carried-out work will promote the creation of fundamental history of the Russian literary translation in future.

Sex Education: Obscenity, Romanticism, and Creativity in Flaubert’s letters from the Voyage en Égypte and L’Éducation sentimentale

This article re-examines the significance of the Orient in two texts by Flaubert, his letters from the Voyage en Égypte and the novel L’Éducation sentimentale . It argues that Flaubert’s confrontation with the Orient in his letters is structured by two intertwined preoccupations: sexual excess and creative failure. For Flaubert, the symbolic power that the Orient acquires over the course of his voyage lies in the pairing of these two preoccupations as they represent two possible principles of artistic production: obscenity and Romanticism. The Orient in turn becomes a privileged metaphorical space in L’Éducation sentimentale because the novel attempts to mediate the same tension between the creative potential of pornographic sexuality and the artistic disappointments of Romanticized sentiment, re-written on the historical scale of the Romantic generation. Reconsidered as an aesthetic principle in this way, the Orient offers us a new perspective on how Flaubert grappled with the nature of artistic inspiration and the artist’s relationship to society.

Back to the Archives: Elias Bickerman in the Fonds Louis Robert

This paper examines the letters of Elias Bickerman (1897-1981) to Louis Robert (1904-1985) found in the Fonds Louis Robert in Paris. It also considers comments by Henri Seyrig (1895-1973) writing to Robert concerning Bickerman in letters in that same collection. It argues that Bickerman’s agenda in Der Gott der Makkabaer was a matter of intense personal belief, in which history confirmed theology. This was opposed to the open attitude, in which conclusions were subject to revision, in Institutions des Seleucides. The paper utilizes that dogmatic setting to help explain why Der Gott der Makkabaer, while acknowledged as brilliant and original, convinced few other scholars. This conclusion is confirmed by comments concerning Bickerman in Seyrig’s letters to Robert. In the end, the article argues that while Der Gott der Makkabaer may have been a « failure » it should be compared to the failure of Columbus in reaching India, as a result of which Columbus discovered a new world. Few scholars ever achieve such important and creative failures as Bickerman did in Der Gott der Makkabaer.

Disability, Giftedness, and Race in Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman Novels

Disproportionate disability diagnosis has often served as a mechanism to continue racial segregation by tying it to the segregation of disability, but this issue is rarely reflected in children's novels. Children's literature can, however, offer analyses of deeply rooted pedagogical approaches that erase both racial difference and disability in the push for normative achievement. The article proposes that Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman series offers one example within children's literature of how racist and ableist pedagogies are connected, and suggests that the novels envision new models of learning communities that value coalition-building and ethical, creative failure.

Overcoming Creative Failure for Sustained Employee Creativity: The Relevance of Team Resources

Creative failure is inherent to the risky and uncertain nature of creative activity. This begs the question of how organizations may create a social environment that enables employees with failure ...

The Ends of the World

The Ends of the World Ameeth Vijay (bio) Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter. London: Verso, 2013. 358pages. $95.00 hardback, $29.95 paperback, $29.95 ebook. World literature is a field that seems to occasion the polemical attitude signaled by the title of Emily Apter’s new book: amid the defunding of language departments and the consumer-oriented concerns of the contemporary university, being against world literature lies somewhere on a scale between perfectly understandable and urgently necessary. Apter charts the rise of world literature as an academic field and takes up the many criticisms leveled against it: its orientation toward Western readers, its preference for translation in English, its minimization of cultural difference and historical context, and its ideological use in the corporate university. In doing so, she attempts, with nonpolemical nuance, to reconfigure the field around “untranslatability.” The “Untranslatable,” capitalized throughout this text, refers in fact to a nonidealized process of translation, particularly its continual “creative failure”: mistranslation, inaccuracy, and the polysemy of meanings “lost” in translation, persisting as trace or newly created in translation (20). Apter advocates and performs an engagement with linguistic knots that cannot be disentangled and instead constitute a poetics, philosophy, and politics of mistranslation and continual retranslation. [End Page 400] In “Oneworldliness,” the first of four parts, Apter analyzes different versions of world making and their problematic implications. In elaborating the importance of the untranslatable, she introduces what serves as an intertextual touchstone throughout the book, namely Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004). For Apter, Vocabulaire is a “translational approach to doing philosophy” that, at the same time, lends “itself to making of worldscapes contoured by mistranslation, neologism, and semantic dissonance. It gives rise to an idea of comparative literature as a discipline that derives its raison d’être from the constant updating and revision of vocabularies of cultural reference” (39). Apter leaves the distinction between comparative literature (her home department at New York University) and world literature unclear while implying that they share common theoretical concerns: a fundamental focus on translation, a derivation from Goethean Weltliteratur, and a relation to the problematics of postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, and Spivakian planetarity, for example (40–41). In this book, comparative literature often seems to be world literature at its “epistemologically self-reflexive” best, suturing, as it does in some formations, close reading and translation with philosophical scope and introspection (241). Otherwise, a central criticism of world literature is that it too easily replicates the hierarchies of global politics with a lack of critical awareness, both reifying area-studies parochialism and homogenizing cultural difference with a diction of easy translatability (especially into English) and fluid boundaries. As opposed to this, Apter, through a variety of engagements, seeks a literary criticism that abjures “traditional national spatial coordinates and periodizing structures on knowledge-fields” inherent in the institutional humanities while retaining the fact of difference (40). For example, she counters the “flaccidly appropriated metaphors of border-crossing” in translation studies through the figure of the checkpoint, which illustrates the contested, policed nature of borders. She is also skeptical of Franco Morretti’s fashionable, technophilic socio-lit-crit, whose systematization deals poorly with untranslatability (56). Her most substantive insight here, however, comes with her critique of “eurochronology and periodicity” in which non-Western literatures suffer at the hands of a progressive, historicist logic. Apter argues not only for new and different periodization but also for historical anachronisims. These would be, in fact, “discrepant temporal measures” that invoke a Nietzchean lineage of efforts to “untime academic history” and produce a “history off its hinges, one that could deprogram the future” and a “politics [that] is timed to undo the prevailing logics of history” (64). Apter [End Page 401] alights upon the Vocabulaire entry for Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetzeit, the “now-time” discontinuous with homogenous, linear chronology, and uses the term to give the untranslatable a discontinuous, messianic temporality that “messes” with and mistranslates European periodicity. The second part, “Doing Things with Untranslatables,” is organized as a series of case studies. Apter stages a series of translational debates in order to deconstructively tease out the philosophical stakes of...

A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer European Buddhists and Globalizing Asian Networks 1860–1960

Single-country approaches to the study of Buddhism miss the crucial significance of international networks in the making of modern Buddhism, in a period when the material basis for such networks had been transformed. Southeast Asia in particular acted as a dynamic crossroads in this period enabling the emergence of a ‘global Buddhism’ not controlled by any single sect, while India and Japan both played unexpectedly significant roles in this crossroads. A key element of this process was the encounter between Asian Buddhist networks and western would-be Buddhists. Those involved, however, were often marginal - ‘creative failures’ in many cases - whose stories enable us to think this history in a more diverse way than is often done. In other cases as isolated figures they could pave the way for the ‘mainstreaming’ of new forms of Buddhism by established actors in later decades. This article introduces the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and globalizing Asian networks 1860–1960’. The research described in this issue often raises other methodological questions of representativity and significance, while posing important challenges around collaborative research and the use of new technologies.

Феномен творческой неудачи / Под общ. ред. [и с предисл.] А.В. Подчиненова и Т.А. Снигиревой. Екатеринбург: Изд-во Урал. гос. ун-та, 2011. 424 с.

Феномен творческой неудачи / Под общ. ред. [и с предисл.] А.В. Подчиненова и Т.А. Снигиревой. Екатеринбург: Изд-во Урал. гос. ун-та, 2011. 424 с.

Philosophizing World Literature

Beginning with a reference to Barbara Cassin's “Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles” (2004) whose objective is summarized as a replacement of ontological nationalism with an approach that would emphasize how a language assumes a national silhouette or personality, this article examines how untranslatability plays a role determining the status of “world” in World Literature. Here the Untranslatable is perceived not as pure difference, or just another form of the romantic Absolute, or fetish of the Other, or myth of hermeneutic inaccessibility, but as a linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses. The article concludes by suggesting that it might be useful to rethink World Literature in terms of “planetary dysphoria”—an Untranslatable that doubles as a call to action.

Sous Napoléon III: New Thoughts on Flaubert's 'Second Empire Novel'

This essay re-examines Flaubert's notes for Sous Napoléon III, the nevercompleted novel he planned during the last decade of his life. Although it has always been assumed that the novel was to have looked back at Second Empire France, a close reading of the manuscripts in conjunction with Flaubert's Correspondance indicates that its inspiration derived much more strongly from Flaubert's personal experience in the years that followed the Empire's collapse. Many of the people named in the plans became associated with Flaubert mainly or exclusively after 1870. The posthumous memory of Louis Bouilhet (who died in 1869) is also shown to have influenced the plot. Moreover, the main strands of the novel echo Flaubert's personal preoccupations and disappointments during the post-Empire period. The constantly shifting form of the plans suggests that Flaubert was trying to shape and contain immediate private concerns that had no place in Bouvard et Pécuchet or the Trois contes, with which these notes are concurrent. The article challenges Sartre's interpretation of Sous Napoléon III as a failed political statement, and argues instead that the notes provided a safety valve for Flaubert's personal demons. The unresolved difficulties of fitting all elements of the plans into a coherent plot should be seen less as a creative failure on Flaubert's part than as an intimate reflection on his fluctuating state of mind in his final decade.

The successful organisation: keeping the talent that drives your results

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the elements of a success culture that serves both people and the business.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores the style of cultural, management and personal development that supports successful people. The research is based on in‐depth interviews with serial achievers plus long‐term experience of working in successful and failing cultures.FindingsThe research finds the five fundamentals for success, plus the seven behaviours that drive people to achieve their desired outputs. Embedding these behaviours into a business culture supports exceptional achievement. Also, developing an understanding of what drives success will ensure that companies provide appropriate individual support to their high achievers.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research could look at the specific impact of building an inspirational manager community in a business workplace on levels of company and personal success.Practical implicationsFor companies to build a consistently successful business, they need to make the best of their high achievers. This requires a strong and constructive management community, made up of people who enjoy the challenge of developing talent and have adequate levels of emotional intelligence. It also demands leaders who role‐model the importance of the success behaviours and reward creative failure as well as obvious success.Originality/valueThe new findings relate to the five fundamentals and seven success behaviours as outlined in The Psychology of Success. This information provides a new approach to success and is highly relevant to twenty‐first century business.

“Gotta’ Sing! Gotta’ Diagnose!”

IMAGINE GOING TO THE THEATER TO SEE A MUSICAL PAGeant about a young physician’s professional trials and tribulations, a play that explores the decisions he makes about how he practices medicine and where; the meanings and obligations of the physician’s social contract; and even the risks of medical error. Let’s extend this fantasy by hiring a trendsetting team of producers, an equally accomplished choreographer and set designer, and an army of professionals to mount the production. And while we are at it, we should invite Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, one of the greatest writing duos in the history of musical theater, to write the words and music. As it happened, if you were a theater devotee almost exactly 60 years ago, all you had to do was walk over to the Majestic Theatre on Manhattan’s West 44th Street to see such a production. Opening night seats for Allegro, a now obscure medical musical, were the hottest tickets of the 1947 Broadway theatrical season. Heralded on the covers of Time and Life, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s creative success or failure was heatedly debated for weeks by a teeming ant farm of gossip columnists, critics, and show biz beat reporters across the nation. Featuring a cast of 78 and an orchestra of 35, Allegro was entirely moderne in concept, boasting a set consisting of multiple curtains, rotating flats, and lantern slides, a singing “Greek chorus,” and 4 integrated ballet scenes depicting and commenting on the life of Dr Joseph Taylor Jr, from his birth until age 35 years. The historian’s task of re-creating this version of “Everydoctor” is somewhat vexing. The first flop to flow from the golden pens of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Allegro ran on the Great White Way for only 9 months (314 performances), and its huge cast and staggering weekly budget precluded any profit. There is no film version of the play or even a complete cast recording (the extant version contains only 10 of Allegro’s songs and none of the choral narratives). Rarely performed today, the libretto and score are nevertheless easily acquired at any decent library, and the more scholarly will find a fairly evocative collection of photographs of the original production safely reposing at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. These documentary remnants, plus a modicum of dramatic imagination and, if you are fortunate, the talents of a friendly pianist, immediately demonstrate an insightful exploration of the difficult navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of demanding professional careers and personal choices. The play opens on the day of Joe’s birth and, soon enough, the audience is introduced to his father, a rural general practitioner struggling to build a modern hospital for his impoverished and underserved patients. As the father picks up his newborn son, he mellifluously declares the infant to be his clinical successor. In subsequent scenes, the audience is treated to lilting descriptions of Joe’s developmental milestones, from his first steps to matriculation into college. There are, however, foreboding hints of a series of increasingly wrong choices to come. These discordant tones begin to peal loudest during his courtship and marriage to a beautiful young woman, Jenny Baker, who derides Joe’s aspirations to become a country practitioner and pressures him into finding more lucrative ways to make a living. Indeed, Jenny exhibits a dedicated selfishness that literally induces a fatal myocardial infarction in Joe’s morally superior mother; all the while, Jenny seduces Joe into abandoning the family business of doing the most good where most needed. After several sexually charged ultimatums from Jenny, Joe leaves his father’s practice for the glittering lights of the big city. There, amidst the distracting whirl of parties, soliciting donors to fund new patient pavilions, ceremonial ribbon cuttings, and making a mint giving vitamin injections to the worried (and wealthy) well, Joe discovers that his bored and neglected wife is having an affair with the chairman of the hospital trustees. Disillusioned but undefeated, Joe, in true Broadway musical fashion, manages to resolve his ambivalences and stresses just before the fall of the closing curtain. Turning down a promotion to become the youngest ever physician-in-chief of his prestigious city hospital, Joe instead opts for what Rodgers and Hammerstein believed to be the purer life as lone practitioner in the small town where he was born. In the show’s final moment, Joe’s shocked employer plaintively asks what he should inform the newspapers regarding Joe’s inexplicable declension of the coveted position of physician-in-chief. One powerful hospital trustee suggests telling the press that Joe is “sick.” Joe tunefully counters them both, “Tell them I’m just getting well,” as the libretto’s stage

Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett

Using a model of literary tradition derived from T. S. Eliot and mediated by J. L. Borges, this paper proposes a tradition of creative failure which would enable the work of Beckett to be read that of S. T. Coleridge, and vice-versa. Two texts by Coleridge are briefly considered in this context, and the problematic of creative failure in which they are implicated is related to key claims in Beckett's . A concluding statement suggests the benefits of reading Coleridge and Beckett within the common perspective of a literary tradition, the perception of which the two writers both shape and are shaped by.

Making organizational learning happen: the value of “creative failures”

PurposeThe article seeks to highlight an unconventional way out of the “innovation dilemma”, relevant to many business organizations. Innovative management and risk friendliness are necessary, but the way in which failure is handled and the resulting fear of making mistakes block the (innovative) efforts of specialists and managers.Design/methodology/approachThe article draws on theoretical as well as empirical work. First, the seemingly crystal‐clear concept of “error” is elaborated and the rare category of “creative errors” is introduced. Second, illustrative findings from a case study in the automotive sector are reported.FindingsThe paper suggests that a culturally exacerbated antipathy towards errors ultimately leads to a situation of pronounced innovation incompetence in which creative behavior is avoided. The article points out that it is not an “absolution of mistakes” that is required, but a tolerance for legitimate errors which should only occur under exceptional circumstances. The authors underlines that fairness in dealing with errors is considerably more important than a misguided attempt to create or maintain harmony. In addition to the philosophy and potential of this unusual incentive system, possible practical implementation problems are considered.Research limitations/implicationsGeneralization is limited because the findings are based on only one case study. However, because of the vital importance of the so‐called “innovation dilemma”, the exploratory findings of the study may trigger further empirical research on “creative errors”.Practical implicationsAn initiative like the “Creative Error of the Month” may help to bring about cultural change towards a climate of trust and confidence in which innovative commitment is treated fairly even if it does not in fact succeed.Originality/valueCommon approaches to enhance organizational innovativeness reward “success stories” or praise “zero‐based cultures”. This case study suggests that a sophisticated initiative revolving around the “hidden” innovative potential of “creative errors” and “tragic failures” might prove to be a successful offbeat attempt at stimulating creativity and innovative behaviour in enterprises.

Why These Ideas Work, But Seem Weird

To innovate, organizations need to enhance variance, see old things in new ways, and break from the past. They need to do things that make money later rather than now and to be open to creative failure. Robert Sutton refers to this as “organizing for exploration,” and in this excerpt from a recent book, he posits 11½ “weird” ideas that nurture an innovative spirit—managerial toys that expand the frontiers and fuel the long‐term success of corporate activities.

Rational Language and Print Design in Communication Management

When you boil things down in business, wrote Beatrice Warde of British Monotype Corporation nearly fifty years ago, good management is no or less than the art and science of getting things done efficiently, ultimate profit of all concerned. I For Warde, and for sculptor and typographer, Eric Gill; along with other industrial designers prominent during Anglo-American printing renaissance of thirties; what considerably muddied waters was making case for rationalism in language designed for mass market. Motivated by an idealistic belief about power of aesthetics in print communication design shape public culture, professional designers scrutinized every detail of letter shape and language used advertise printed products; including typography, news and fiction. Along with Eric Gill, Stanley Morrison and other printers and typographers prominent in movement for good design in Anglo-American commercial printing during 1920s and 1930s, Beatrice Warde asserted that they intended debunk commonly held concept that an artist took on commercial work he was really a creative failure.2 When notion of scientific management was still in its infancy (1910-1930), creative artist who engaged in commercial work struck many as anachronistic because artists were perceived as taking too long make too few things which appealed only idiosyncratic tastes of those who cared about mass-produced designer goods bearing a signature. Warde predicted in early thirties that modern management principles would grow include idea of integrated communication management in production, product design and marketing; and that rational design would become more important than self-expression of any single artist, or wonders of new machinery.3 Two instruments of production defined modernism in factory: machine and its operator. Considered diametrically opposed in decades of arts and crafts movement, John Ruskin once worried about what he called modern Michael Angelos forced pour their best talents into commercial ephemera. He also asked about how business might identify those with special genius, and how a company could preserve and disseminate such work to best national advantage.4 William Morris; who reacted against visual depravity of Industrial Revolution by promoting arts and crafts movement and its 1 Beatrice Warde, Design and Management (Lecture given London Centre of Printers' Managers

Tempo 180: a Correction

Owing to editorial oversight, Malcolm Hayes's review of Pierre Boulez's Stocktaking from an Apprenticeship (Tempo 180, pp. 29–30) was printed with the paragraphs in the wrong order. The paragraph ending ‘… Young Boulez Rampant’ (p. 29) should be followed by the two on p.30 beginning “This edition follows …’ and ending ‘… and that's that’. The text then proceeds as on p.29 (‘Virtually everything else …’) to p.30 (’… inevitable creative failure’), and continues from ‘Well, each to his or her own view’ to the end. Our apologies to Mr. Hayes, and to our patient readers. (Ed.)

The path to the conception of the junction transistor

The failure in 1945 of experiments proposed by Shockley, on what today would be called thin-film field-effect transistors, was a creative failure that stimulated Bardeen in early 1946 to propose that a surface-state shield blocked the field from the semiconductor's interior. Bell Laboratories' "transistor group to be" for the next eighteen months focused, not on practical, but on scientific aspects of the failure. Focus on the practical resumed (with a step-function increase, lasting several months, in "the will to think" about new concepts of semiconductor amplifiers, as measured by the rate of filling of laboratory notebook pages by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley) on 17 November 1947, when in his surface-state research, Brattain penetrated the shield by applying the field through an electrolyte. Within six days, patentable field-effect transistor inventions were conceived. Although useless as devices, these inventions were creative failures used by Bardeen and Brattain to discover the point-contact transistor three weeks later. Five weeks after this discovery, Shockley conceived the junction transistor while designing "imref" experiments on the point-contact transistor's inversion layer so that in 1951, the point-contact transistor in its turn became a creative failure when replaced by the junction transistor whose conception it had aided. But the path of thought to the conception of the junction transistor and the subsequent path to its practical realization are proven to be highly indirect by historical research on laboratory notebook entries. Specifically, Shockley's conception of the junction transistor was delayed by at least four months because he missed opportunities, obvious by hindsight, to recognize the possibility of minority carrier injection. The author hopes that the presentation of details of his limitations in making this important invention may help readers to accept their own limitations and, thereby, to become more persistent and, hence, creative.