Hall Case Research Articles

Field experiment of signs promoting hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. public was encouraged to practice good hand hygiene, such as hand washing or the use of hand sanitizer. Young adults reported lower levels of hand hygiene compared to adults of other ages. The aim of the current study was to test the effectiveness of different messages to promote hand sanitizer use among young adults. Over a 6-week period, we examined whether 3 brief messages (gain-frame, static descriptive norms, dynamic descriptive norms), placed next to sanitizer dispensers in university residence halls, predicted dispenser use in comparison to dispensers with no sign. Amount of sanitizer usage was measured 3 times per week via the weight of dispenser units. We tracked and controlled for the number of positive COVID-19 cases in residence halls because we expected it might influence sanitizer usage. Compared to no signage, dispensers with signs had 35% greater usage, with the static descriptive norms sign associated with greatest usage (46% compared to no sign), although differences did not reach conventional levels of significance. The strongest predictor of sanitizer use was a residence hall's degree of COVID-19 risk based on the hall's case positivity. Dispensers with signs had higher use than those without signs, but this difference was not statistically significant. We conclude that compared to prior research, "nudges" such as evidence-based messaging may have had less of an effect on health behavior engagement due to methodological differences across studies or characteristics of the COVID-19 context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" and Modernist Fictions of Identity

In 1928, as she was preparing to appear as a defense witness in the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) for obscenity, Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter: At this moment our thoughts center upon Sapphism--we have to uphold the morality of Well of all that's and and neither or the other; The Well of Loneliness. (Woolf 555; also qtd. in Cline 255) (1) Woolf's response to The Well--privately caustic, publicly supportive--prefigures the ambivalence the novel has famously continued to arouse among readers and critics. The Well appeared on the heels of the critical and popular acclaim accorded Hall's novel Adam's Breed (1926), recipient of the 1927 Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (which Woolf herself won the next year), and Hall's novels share certain concerns with Woolf's. Like Woolf, Hall created female protagonists who are artists (A Saturday Life) or writers (The Well of Loneliness), whose thwarted ambitions include an Oxbridge education (The Unlit Lamp), who may challenge conventional gender expectations (The Unlit Lamp, The Well of Loneliness), and whose lives are shaped by powerful (although in Hall's case almost entirely negative) mother figures who embody traditional feminine morality (The Unlit Lamp, The Well of Loneliness.) But Hall is not among the contemporary authors discussed in Woolf's literary journalism. Woolf's dismissal of Hall has traditionally been read as a marking of the boundary between modernist aesthetics and the traditions of Victorian and Edwardian realism from which modernism distinguished itself. As Joanne Winning writes, Woolf attempts to draw a line between [The Well of Loneliness] and other, more innovative literature being produced around (372)--including, presumably, Woolf's own covertly Sapphic Orlando, published shortly after The Well of Loneliness. (2) But the terms of Woolf's critique beg more questions about boundaries than they resolve: With respect to what counter-possibilities of motion and heat is the novel stagnant and lukewarm? What are the poles between which it falls, the one thing or it fails to be? According to what criteria, in other words, does Hall's novel exhibit the in-betweenness seems to be the source of Woolf's unease? If it is in-betweenness is at the root of negative responses to the novel, might it be possible to read in-betweenness differently, as a source of the novel's strength rather than its weakness? Finally, might Hall's depiction of an in-between identity illuminate the problems of grounding narratives of identity in modernist narrative and beyond? Certainly, Hall's curiously lukewarm stance toward her immediate literary context--the aesthetic context of high modernism and the intellectual context of Freudian theorizing--seems suggestivh278as a ground for Woolf's reaction. (3) Neither nor another accurately describes The Well's relationships to, on the hand, a Victorian narrative concern with the social and material milieus and, on the other hand, a modernist concern with interior consciousness. The Well's opening sentence--Not very far from Upton-on-Severn--between it, in fact, and the Malvern Hills--stands the of the Gordons of Bramley; well-timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered (11)--could not more firmly announce its nostalgia for agrarian, country-house society and, by extension, the traditional novel to which such a setting appertains. And yet Stephen Gordon's trajectory propels her firmly out of the milieu thus announced, into a future defined by exile. The country seat becomes a painful reminder, embodying that inherent respect of [sic] the normal which nothing had ever been able to destroy [in Stephen] ... an added burden it was, handed down by the silent but watchful founders of Morton [Hall] (430). Similarly, if the novel's plotting notably depends upon the conventions of the heterosexual romance, its climax, in which Stephen engineers her own romantic rejection and embraces authorship as a lonely, terrifying, but generative form of possession, makes clear Hall's belief she and her heroine were plotting an alternative, if not entirely new, fictional trajectory. …

Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising issue of lesbianism, since female (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed of gross indecency between men, ran aground in House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal (375). However, at least two other novels published in autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached same subject, yet escaped official censure. Hall's case aggravating factor seems to have been not subject but treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance. A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well some literary merit, and that such a book might even have a moral Biron declared: But in present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with horrible tendencies described was in least degree blameworthy. All characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. was even more serious was that certain acts were described in most alluring terms. order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a strong moral influence, at least not a bad one. The question of relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted some musings in diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, first day of Hall trial: What is obscenity? is literature? is difference between subject and treatment? (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf went to prepared to take witness stand and speak against obscenity charges. She was not quite as committed to cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.(1) Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist, finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before Woolf wrote: Most of our friends are trying to evade witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins (Letters 3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved task of defending Hall's novel in court by magistrate's decision that only he, and not defense's array of expert witnesses, could rule whether or not Well was obscene: In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, the bloody woman's trial went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563). Woolf's objections to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones. …

On the deification of Confucius

Abstract In contrast to Krishna, Gautama, and Jesus, who were deified early by their devotees, the elevation of Confucius came much later in the development of Confucianism. Even here, as Section I of the paper demonstrates, most Confucian philosophers saw him only as a great sage. In their recent book Thinking Through Confucius, Roger Ames and David Hall make the claim that tradition and specific texts demand that Confucius be considered a deity. The two texts, neither from Confucius himself, involve, as I show in Section II, a mistranslation in the first and a misreading of figurative language in the second. Ames and Hall's case is not only weak, but also puzzling, because they argue vigorously for a fully naturalised interpretation of T'ien that makes a traditional concept of God impossible. Section III contains a discussion of the Confucian triad of heaven, humans, and earth, in which humans are not deified and gods are not humanised. I contend that Christian and Indian incarnational theologies upset ...