Creative Genius Research Articles

Eminent Pittsburghers: Profiles of the City's Founding Industrialists

Eminent Pittsburghers: Profiles of the City's Founding Industrialists

Dragons in English: The Great Change of the Late Nineteenth Century

The impetus for the incredible variety found in the modern literary dragon is commonly seen to stem from the creative genius of either E. Nesbit or Kenneth Grahame. However, examination of dragon stories in the late nineteenth century shows that several different authors, on both sides of the Atlantic, were producing similar stories at about the same time, suggesting that the change was part of a general literary and cultural development rather than simply inspired storytelling. This study examines dragon stories of the late nineteenth century and argues that the rediscovery of the Scandinavian dragon, the discovery of the Chinese and Japanese dragons, and possibly the nineteenth-century publication of folktales parodying traditional dragon stories, gave authors new ways of looking at dragons. Traditional St George type dragon stories had already shifted into children’s literature, making books for children the natural environment for the development of the dragon, and it is argued that the combined pressures of the new ideas about dragons, the parody, and the enormous cultural changes of the late Victorian period, were sufficient to stimulate the great change in the literary dragon, which has continued and diversified ever since.

Honoring History and Heritage: Roots for New Heights

I am especially honored to present the Marian Chace Memorial Foundation Annual Lecture. Marian Chace was the first president of the ADTA, and I was fortunate to be trained by her and to work with her at Chestnut Lodge from 1957 to 1963. I was very lucky in my own lifetime to be privileged to know, to be taught by, and to work with a seminal thinker, an innovator, a creative genius, and a real person who impacted a burgeoning profession profoundly. Welcome to New Mexico—‘‘The Land Of Enchantment’’—celebrating 100 years of statehood. In 2012 our state capitol, Santa Fe, celebrated the 400th anniversary of its settlement, and Native American habitation of the region has been traced to 2000 BC. Many Pueblos continue to practice ancient healing rituals, such Judith Bunney, photo credit: Lisa Law Productions, Santa Fe, 2013

Editorial: Limb Preservation: Past and Present

The International Society of Limb Salvage (ISOLS) displayed the global perspective needed to bring advances in surgery, engineering, reconstruction, biology, and clinical care to the entire international community. The 16th meeting, held in 2011 in Beijing, China, marked the 30th anniversary of the organization. Starting from humble beginnings at the Mayo Clinic in 1981, Frank Sim and Ed Chao inaugurated the Society. It has grown from a meeting of 127 participants from 23 countries to 840 participants from 44 countries, reflecting the excitement of a burgeoning field and the enthusiasm that resonates among the practitioners of musculoskeletal oncology. The fundamental philosophy of the ISOLS is that all people in the world deserve to benefit from the advances in musculoskeletal cancer care achieved in the developed countries. Affording limb preservation to all seemed to be the goal. Specialty education and sharing of experience in this niche field was the method to achieve it. ISOLS pursued this egalitarian vision long before any other organization took up the mantra. It promulgated the use of standardized staging, functional outcome, and radiographic description systems. In what was perhaps an overly zealous effort, it even normalized the nonparametric functional outcome system of the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society and imposed a 100-point normative scale that encouraged researchers to present data as a percentage of normal. The result has been the relentless improvement in survival and the reduction in amputation rates around the world. ISOLS deserves a significant amount of the credit for these extraordinary advances. How did this happen? What contributed to its successes and failures? Any short answers to these questions inevitably will fail to capture the excitement of discovery or the satisfaction of sharing the hard-won knowledge. Major contributors to the effort are forgotten as new advances take priority. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the contributions that created the organization and how these have created the foundation for what we do in modern musculoskeletal oncology. It is also worth thinking of what we still have to accomplish, taking the generalized findings to the public in the individualized medicine of the future. The ISOLS organizers came together to share knowledge about clinical care and prosthetic reconstruction in the new era of limb preservation. The first meeting served to introduce titanium fiber-metal, among other advances. Major advances were presented in meetings in Kyoto such as the extracorporeal radiation and reimplantation of osseous tumors and gait analysis of periacetabular resections/reconstructions. These themes were supplemented by biological and genetic information presented in Singapore and tissue regeneration prospects in New York. We have seen how these advances are now commonplace in countries worldwide such as India. The Beijing meeting allowed Dr Sim, one of the original founders, to present an awesome display of surgical virtuosity in the resection and reconstruction of sacral tumors. Quality control strategies in these developing countries were especially impressive. The durability of the original work that spawned ISOLS was glorious to behold. It was equally inspiring to learn of the innovative ways that the information is being disseminated. The papers selected for this Symposium build on the hard work of our predecessors and the creative genius of multispecialty interaction. It is a celebration of what the field of orthopaedic oncology has to offer. At the same time, it exposes the limitations of what we do and the magnitude of what still needs to be accomplished to help our tumor patients. Fig. 1 Dr. John H. Healey is shown.

Of Timescales, Animal Models, and Human Disease: The 50th Anniversary of C. elegans as a Biological Model

Of Timescales, Animal Models, and Human Disease: The 50th Anniversary of C. elegans as a Biological Model

Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies

This paper examines the representation of masculinity within the feminine genre of auto/biography through an analysis of biographical discourses used in the construction of star personas. Auto/biographies have the potential to reverse gender roles with male stars’ confessionals often discursively constructed as feminine, blurring gender distinctions within auto/biographical writing. The compulsion to confess has traditionally been seen as a feminine preoccupation but the intensification of celebrity culture would appear to have extended this compulsion to male stars. This paper examines two authorised biographies written about pop star Robbie Williams: Robbie Williams – Somebody Someday (McCrum, 2002) and Feel: Robbie Williams (Heath, 2005) and comedian and actor Russell Brand’s two autobiographies: My Booky Wook (2008) and My Booky Wook 2 – This Time It’s Personal (2010). The paper analyses how in these auto/biographical narratives male stars are represented as using masquerade and role-play, as well as descriptions of mental illness and addictions to construct masculine personas. Masculinity is asserted by representing male stars through the myth of the creative genius whose talents and artistic sensitivities make them vulnerable to mental illness. Part of the masculine persona is constructed through drug/alcohol addiction and re-asserts masculinity through descriptions of promiscuous sexual adventures. There is a tension between the feminine nature of celebrity discourse and the discursive construction of a masculine persona, which appears to blur any rigid or traditional gender boundaries in these biographical narratives, and in the process of doing so, to ‘prove’ the ‘authenticity’ of the star persona.

O Beethoven de DeNora: o contexto está no texto

Estudo sobre a repercussão do livro de DENORA (1995), e discussão sobre os conceitos que vêm à tona, a partir de uma abordagem sociológica do fenômeno do "gênio criador"; do surgimento do conceito de "música séria"¹ em oposição ao entretenimento; das estratégias de ocupação de um determinado campo cultural e suas aplicações em novos contextos. Todos os fatores que elegeram Beethoven são inoperantes num mundo em que novas regras se impõem na produção artística, tanto quanto na produção de mercadorias em geral: essa a principal contribuição do livro, que passou despercebida pela maioria das resenhas publicadas à época de sua publicação. Os esquissos do projeto da música dita "séria" são facilmente detectáveis na obra de Beethoven, em que sua busca de profundidade, em oposição à música leve, atinge novos patamares pari passu com sua posição social como compositor.

Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison (review)

Reviewed by: Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison Debra Shostak (bio) Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern, by Neil R. Davison. New York and London: Routledge Publishers, 2010. xi + 262 pp. $113.00 cloth. “‘What is a Jew in the first place?’” the protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife ponders: “the sound ‘Jew’ was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said ‘Djoo,’ pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning.”1 Roth’s Joycean “Djoo” suggests the questions that Neil R. Davison raises in his perceptive and stimulating Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. Taking the “Djoo” as the male Jew, Davison asks: who is the Jew as a historically constituted, objectified, and racialized subject making the transition into modernity? How does the hint of mockery in Roth’s phonetic spelling translate into a gendering of the Jew, whose internalized position departs from the hyper-masculine Euro-American ideal? Davison pursues these questions through the confluence of racial, gendered, and religious constructions of Jewish masculinity appearing in the work of male writers, both Jewish and gentile, from the modern to the postmodern eras. Chapters focused on George Du Maurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Roth probe how the discourses of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have feminized the male Jew, and, in turn, how this construction of the Jew’s racial and gendered subjectivity affects his encounter with the modern world in each writer’s political and ethical imaginations. Drawing on an impressive array of materials—from cultural history, psychoanalysis, Judaic sources, philosophy, journalism, and letters, and citing such scholars as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, David Biale, and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as influential turn-of-the-century work by Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger—Davison paints a complex portrait of fin de siècle, modern, and postmodern Jewish masculinity.2 To do so, he explores intersecting binaries—Rabbinic/Reform (Halachic/Haskalah) Judaism, as well as “authentic/inauthentic, racial difference/humanity, hyper-male/feminized-male, colonial/postcolonial, and Diaspora/Zionist” oppositions (2). Indeed, each chapter is built around a dense interweaving of sources and conceptions of Jewishness, so that my summaries below can scarcely capture the nuances of Davison’s analyses. On balance, however, he argues that “gentile and Jewish male writers renegotiated masculinity by engaging the feminized Jew in their [End Page 379] works” and finds that the culturally assimilated Jewish writers forged their identities “through a hybrid Jewish masculinity combining the essence of Rabbinic edelkayt [the gentle, bookish, Talmudic masculine ideal] with strains of the politically active, liberal or leftist Western male” (14, 19). Davison’s thesis is illuminating and affords some fascinating stories. Chapter 1 reads George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel of 1894, Trilby, alongside the Dreyfus Affair, which began the same year.3 The cultural anxieties stoked by the rhetoric of race and gender link Trilby’s depiction of the sinister Jew, Svengali, with the threat the French perceived in Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongfully convicted of spying for Germany. Davison names a new category for the Jew, the “homme/femme fatale,” who is “malignantly feminine in [his] perverse sexual powers and creative genius for disguise and imitation” (27). He attributes Svengali’s dirty, money-grubbing, sexually ambiguous, predatory depiction, like the Dreyfus Affair, to the developing hysterical belief that “degenerate” Jews were fostering a world conspiracy to feminize European culture. As a complementary narrative of fin de siècle Europe, chapter 2 explores the work of Herzl, who is credited with founding Zionism. Herzl, known largely for his nonliterary writing, enables Davison to stake out the polar terms of male Jewish representation. Although Herzl struggled with an internalized image of his own Jewish racial effeminacy, Davison finds that he also engaged with the role of the Judaic religious tradition in his vision for a re-masculinized Jew and a nationalist cause. Davison argues that Herzl’s messianic vision, derived from the Judaic doctrine guiding Jews to “help other nations toward a spiritual enlightenment” and a “rational reconciliation of humanity,” forecast a Jewish state to “replace racial, gendered, and other...

Social and Spatial Politics in the Construction of Regent Street

London’s Regent Street, constructed in the 1810s and 1820s, was at the center of the large-scale metropolitan improvements carried out by the Crown in the pre-Victorian era. But while the boulevard and its creative genius, John Nash, have been alternately celebrated and reviled, scholars have paid little attention to the actual building of the street and the fate of those whose property was compulsorily acquired by the Crown. This essay looks at the struggle between the Crown and its bureaucrats and the mostly plebeian residents of the neighborhoods around Swallow Street, Piccadilly, and St. James’s Market and examines how these Londoners thought about the relationship between space and status, about the political and social—as well as financial—value of property, and about the nature of London’s spaces. The Crown believed in the abstract, exchangeable, and easily valued character of its freehold property. But dispossessed tenants and leaseholders insisted that the valuation of their neighborhoods—carried out by bureaucrats, architects, solicitors, and in some cases, Westminster juries—also take into account the customary use of London’s streets, markets and alleys, and the inherent value that everyday use gave these spaces. Although Nash succeeded in building his boulevard, the great and unanticipated cost of the project suggests that inhabitants’ promotion of local knowledge and local geographies was not merely subversive but was given credence (and assigned material value) over and against the rational and bureaucratic vision of John Nash and Crown bureaucrats.

Patriarchal self-inflated pompous image deflated: A feminist reading of Swartbooi's UMandisa

The purpose of the article is to examine how a female author, Swartbooi (1934), uses her female protagonist, Mandisa, to confront the harrowing conditions of the male-dominated 19th century Xhosa society and to unravel the female attributes that enable her to shatter the bigoted male pompous ego. The radical anti-patriarchal feminist narrative modes Swartbooi exploits, in order to achieve her revolutionary feminist agenda aimed at exposing the shallowness of male self-importance, constitute part of the article's main preoccupation. This aspect of Swartbooi's visionary creative objective is aimed at presenting the view that women are a major component of humanity and that their relegation to the society's periphery undermine the societal well-being. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is how it ends. Mandisa's rejection of the institution of marriage at the end of her fictional odyssey amounts to the most radical and rebellious stance of a 19th century African female protagonist, and could be described as the forerunner to the 21st century female protagonists in African women's works. Swartbooi's creative genius, the article argues, partially emanates from her demolition of the patriarchal institution of marriage through her female protagonist's brazen rejection of marriage.

Creative Genius as a Personality Phenomenon: Definitions, Methods, Findings, and Issues

AbstractGenius first became the subject of scientific inquiry in the early 19th century, and it has continued to attract research interest to the present day. Although genius can be defined as either superlative intelligence or achieved eminence, this review is restricted to the latter definition, and is further confined to creative achievement. The article then describes the main methods for studying creative genius as a personality phenomenon. These methods entail three central dichotomous methodological decisions: single‐case versus multiple‐case samples, qualitative versus quantitative analyses, and direct versus indirect assessments. Next, the main empirical findings are presented with respect to both generic traits and domain‐contingent traits. There follows a brief discussion of three major issues: genetic and environmental influences, additive and multiplicative effects, and individual and situational factors. Given the intrinsic importance of the phenomenon and the many questions still unanswered, creative genius certainly deserves future treatment in personality psychology.

The link between dispositional pride and creative thinking depends on current mood

Pride has long been considered a characteristic of creative geniuses, but the link between pride and creative thinking has yet to be systematically examined. In Study 1, we found that authentic pride related positively, whereas hubristic pride related negatively to creative thinking, assessed using the Unusual Uses Task, a behavioral measure of creative thinking. In Study 2, we found that the relation between pride and creativity depends on current mood. Specifically, authentic pride was most strongly related to creativity in the happiness condition, whereas hubristic pride was most strongly related to creativity in the anger condition. We discuss implications for understanding the affective processes underlying creativity and the adaptive and maladaptive consequences of pride.

Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century

Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century

Wordsworth's Revisitings

Eclipsed by the celebrity of his youth, no poet has been more misrepresented than the ‘mature’ Wordsworth. Notorious for his ceaseless rehashing of former works, the poet of latter years is now revered as little more than a historical curiosity. In Wordsworth's Revisitings, Gill attempts to resurrect the creative genius of a poet supposedly past his prime. The result is a slick and wide-ranging argument impressively condensed into this tidy and seemingly humdrum package. On first inspection, it is difficult to fathom what this slim, albeit handsome volume could contribute to the surplus of Wordsworthian criticism. Stephen Gill is by no means the first to muse on the intriguing tenacity of Wordsworth's textual editing – not least in his attention to ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Prelude’ – and it is therefore with faint reservations that this book is first approached. Yet almost immediately into Gill's pithy introduction is the value of Wordsworth's Revisitings secured.

Groundwaters: a century of art by self-taught and outsider artists

Visionary art, art brut, art of the insane, naive art, vernacular art, raw visionA what do all these and many other categories describe? An art made outside the boundaries of official culture, first recognized more than a century ago by German psychiatrists who appreciated the profound artistic expression in the work of institutionalized patients. Promoted by brilliant museum curators like Alfred Barr and artists like Jean Dubuffet, such work became a wellspring of modern and contemporary art. This volume brings together works by twelve of the most influential self-taught artists to emerge during the past century. Each represents a facet of the outsider art phenomenon, from mental patients like Adolf Wolfli and Martin Ramirez, through vernacular masters like Bill Traylor and Thornton Dial, to artists who seem to be in touch with other worlds, such as Madge Gill and Henry Darger. Related artists are featured along with each key figure, allowing a fuller picture to emerge. This book presents a narrative of the history of outsider art, clarifies predominant theoretical issues, and draws comparisons with the modernist tradition. It brings into focus the enormous contributions self-taught artists have made to our understanding of creative genius and presents them in a book that will enthral anyone interested in Outsider Art.

A proximidade entre gênio e loucura: um estudo sobre a estética de Schopenhauer

O tratamento da estética de Schopenhauer forma um dos aspectos centrais de sua extensa visão filosófica de mundo. Apesar do tratamento ser perspicaz e sensível, a análise do gênio criativo conecta-se com o mais periférico exame da loucura no sentido em que ameaça solapar a concepção de Schopenhauer do eu. A loucura é caracterizada pela descontinuidade do self do indivíduo, que convida a uma comparação com a transição para a pura subjetividade da empírica subjetividade cotidiana durante a contemplação estética. Uma comparação com a loucura é até mais relevante para o gênio cuja exposição aos elementos sublimes da natureza está em paralelo com a exposição ao horrível que o louco é exposto. Ao comparar o princípio da loucura com o do estado estético, pode ser colocado em questão o que preserva a nossa identidade em toda a nossa mudança na subjetividade. Como Schopenhauer argumenta nosso conhecimento sobre a vontade é insuficiente, um apelo a isto como a fonte de continuidade é insatisfatório

Geoffrey O. Hartzler, MD

On Saturday, March 10, 2012, cardiology sadly lost one of its brightest stars. Geoffrey O. Hartzler died suddenly at his home at the Lake of the Ozarks; he was 65 years old. Geoff was a very special individual, intellectually brilliant, intense, energetic, and controversial. He was born in 1946 in Goshen, IN, the second of 3 brothers, the youngest of whom died tragically of a berry aneurysm as a teenager. His father was a Mennonite minister who in a later career was instrumental in establishing the first outpatient community mental health center in the United States. His mother contracted polio when Geoff was 4 years old and survived in an iron lung. She remained the focus of the family's energy for nearly 4 decades. Pictured from left to right, Dr Andreas Gruentzig (AG), Dr Geoffrey O. Hartzler (GOH), and Dr Barry D. Rutherford (BDR) at Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute catheterization laboratory in 1984. He entered medical school at Indiana University. While a freshman, he worked 10-hour shifts watching a telemetry monitor and responding to cardiac arrests. At that time, he developed a keen interest in acute care medicine. He won an essay contest sponsored by the Mayo Clinic and spent a 3-month summer externship at Mayo. During that externship, he met and worked with another student clerk, David R. Holmes, Jr. Both went on to complete internal medicine and cardiology training at the Mayo Clinic and became Mayo faculty members in 1977. I (B.D.R.) first encountered Geoff Hartzler in the early 1970s when he was a cardiology fellow at the Mayo Clinic. At that time, I was a young consultant working in the Coronary Care Unit at St. Mary's Hospital. We were floating polyethylene catheters at the bedside to the pulmonary artery in patients with acute myocardial infarction. …

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Great expectations

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth, I am struck by his creative genius and by the parallel between the intellectual development of his protagonists and the evolution of peer review. Like many of his novels and serial writings, the story of the history of peer review is a bildungsroman, one that has followed a process of growing up, sought answers through a journey marked by achievement and disappointment, and ultimately matured to be accepted by a community.

Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft. Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II." (review)

Reviewed by: Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft. Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II." Victor Fusilero Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft. Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II." By Christian Sbrilli. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Pp. 326. Paper €48.00. ISBN 978-3826043727. Christian Sbrilli's Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft: Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II" examines how Goethe's view of the artist changed from that presented in his earlier works to that in Faust II. Sbrilli reads Faust II not only as a dramatized conversation between Goethe and his younger self, but also as a record of his own artistic development and his earlier attempts to overcome bouts of hypochondria through the recuperative power of aesthetic creativity. Finally, Sbrilli reads the figure of Faust against those of Prometheus and Wilhelm Meister. Sbrilli begins by noting that the figure of the subject who achieves self-emancipation vis-à-vis objective reality is an important theme in the works of Goethe and his contemporaries. Possessed by the desire to dramatize reality, writers fixated on representing the sovereignty of the subject over and against external reality were in danger of falling victim to the boundlessness of their own subjective thoughts and, consequently, to melancholy and hypochondria. In a conversation with Friedrich Riemer (May 3, 1814), Goethe defines hypochondria as a "sinking into one's own subjectivity" and, indeed, as "the universal sickness of the present time" (conversation with Eckermann, Jan. 28, 1826). Goethe's letters during his work on Die Leiden des jungen Werthers show the young author conversing with the silhouettes on the walls of his Frankfurt apartment and how his later engagement with the epistolary novel form grew out of this solitary predisposition and the desire to fashion a conversational partner and an idealized self. In this regard, Prometheus figures in Goethe's early works as an important example of the power of creative genius and art. If literature is a means of coping with life (Lebensbewältigung), then the roles of the imagination and the beautiful that come into play can serve as a therapeutic against hypochondria. [End Page 159] In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe describes how his arrival in Leipzig was marked by bouts of hypochondria, a tendency that had begun during childhood. According to Christian Wilhelm Hufeland—a Kant specialist as well as Goethe's family doctor—hypochondria arises when the individual subjectifies all things. Consequently, Hufeland believed that the best cure for this condition was the objectification of oneself, and it is through art, especially literature, that the individual can best achieve this. With the revaluation of sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) in the eighteenth century, the aesthetic came to be recognized as being equally as important as the religious or the spiritual, and literature and poetry rose in stature as a mediator of the divine. Both Goethe and Faust find a solution to their existential suffering in the sensual beauty of artistic creation. It is through Mephisto—the possessor of alchemical, religious, and aesthetic knowledge—that Faust comes into contact with sensuality. But in Sbrilli's interpretation, Faust represents an earlier faith that Goethe had in the power of art and the artist. In contrast to Faust, the figure of Wilhelm Meister—the aspiring dramatist who gives up his dream profession in favor of becoming a surgeon—represents the older writer's abandonment of this belief in the recuperative power of the aesthetic. Sbrilli puts forward an interesting reading of Goethe's theory of the creative genius and of the power of the beautiful and their roots in Goethe's own biography. Although Sbrilli places too much emphasis on the biographical origin of Goethe's aesthetic theories, his connections are nevertheless intriguing and thought-provoking. By presenting a strong knowledge of the secondary literature, of eighteenth-century discussions surrounding hypochondria, and of the critical debate on the organizational structure (or lack thereof) in Faust II, Sbrilli weaves a compelling argument for a more nuanced interpretation of Faust II and how Wilhelm Meister—and not Faust—represented Goethe's view of art and the artist in his final years. Victor Fusilero Los Angeles...