Mundane Events Research Articles

The Absurd in Literature by Neil Cornwell

MLR, 104.1, 2009 145 Nilges isather mostoriginal whendrawing ourattention totheseminalimportance ofAMidsummer Night's Dream fortheinception ofDieMeistersinger von Niirnberg. She reminds us thatthe Wieland translation ofShakespeare's playoriginally bore thetitle Ein St. Johannis Nachts-Traum, and immediately opens our eyes to the similarities between whathappensduringa certain nightinShakespeare's Athens andWagner'sNuremberg(Lysander's plea that Hermia should leaveher father's houseand flee withhim,and the projected elopement of WaltherandEva), also the similarity of images usedbyShakespeare and Wagnerand theimportance of moon, 'Wahn', andmidsummer madness.Thisexcellent bookendswitha lookat Wieland Wagner's almostElizabethanstageset inhisMeistersinger production(1963) and an assessment of Wagner's verytelling references toShakespeareas reported by Cosima.Wagnerians and Shakespearescholarsalikewill be deeply indebtedto Nilges for herperceptive anderuditestudy. STANDREWS R. S. FURNESS The Absurdin Literature. ByNEILCORNWELL. ManchesterandNewYork: Manches terUniversity Press. 2006. xiii+354 pp. ?17.99. ISBN 978-0-7190-7410-3. This isvery much a book focusing on a few'special authors', asNeil Cornwellputs it. Afteran impressive review of theoretical literature on thenatureof theabsurd and a quick lookat elements of Shakespeareand the more obviousSterneand Swift for antecedents tothetwentieth-century absurd, PartII moves rapidly through anoverview ofFernandoPessoa,Antonin Artaud, AlbertCamus,Eugene lonesco, HaroldPinter, and the OBERIU. PartIIIfocuses on four keyauthors: DaniilKharms, FranzKafka,SamuelBeckett, andFlannO'Brien. Both thereviewsectionat thebeginning and theauthorstudiesqualifyas ex tremely rich, andattimes exhaustively detailed, mixtures ofclosereading, commen tary on existing criticism, overview of context, cross-reference betweenauthors, and,most effectively, extensive and pithy directquotationfrom someof the most influential studies and thinkers on theabsurd. MartinEsslin'sseminal TheTheatre of the Absurd(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) loomslarge, but we arealso frequently inthecompany ofBakhtin, Eagleton, Eco,Adorno,Baudelaire, Benjamin, Bergson, and a host of other writers and thinkers. For me this is themajor strength of the book-its encyclopedic collection andexamination ofsecondary sources. Cornwell isnotafraidtoletothers' wordsexpressthe variety of thinking onwhatconstitutes the absurd, but is also able to give us glimpses ofwhat may link these rather dif ferent authors:'aconcern with the"ontological status of the'real""(p. 18,quoting SusanStewart, Nonsense: AspectsofIntertextuality inFolklore andLiterature (Balti more: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press,1989),p. 12); language used,paradoxically, toexpresstheinadequacy ofhumanexpression. The absurdfor Cornwellisborn ofnihilism and thecertainty ofdeath,suckled by theexistentialists' struggle with belief, non-belief, and rationalism; thefirst words itutters are thoseoften misas cribedtoTertullian:'credo quia absurdum':'Ibelievebecause itisabsurd'(p. lo). 146 Reviews (Tertullian actually wrote 'credibile est,quia ineptum est'(De carne Christi, v. 4: 'it isbelievable because itisabsurd').)Thisapophatictheology ledtoan awareness of thelimits ofhumanexpression of thedivine, and for Cornwellinforms the workof those preoccupied with theabsurdity of thehumancondition, from NikolaiGogol toFriedrich Nietzsche,Jonesco toTomStoppard. In themain sectionon specialauthors we are givena briefexamination of Kharms,anauthor onwhomCornwellcan rightly claimtobe theleading authority. 'Narration overepisode' (p. 163)-refusingplot-is takento a self-undermining excess inKharms in a degree not found in any other writer. Hence he is awriter of disconnected'incidents' and 'skeletal terseness' (p. 166).TheKharmsiannarrative includes elements offarce suchas theinfliction ofpain andbodilyindignity. Com mentingonNeil Carrick, Cornwellagreesthat Kharms'swork constitutes a form of 'negative ontology, butan absurdisttheology' (DaniilKharms:Theologian of the Absurd(Birmingham, DepartmentofRussianLanguageandLiterature, University ofBirmingham, 1998),p. 8o). The nextchapteropenswith an examination ofKafka'spossibleantecedents, including Dostoevsky(W J. Dodd, Kafta andDostoyevsky: TheShaping ofInfluence (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1992)), aswell as speculation as totheformer's influence onwriterssuchasVladimirNabokov andPinter. Kafka'scontribution to the'bu reaucratic tradition' isexamined before comparisons are madewithKharms's motifs and themes-contortionism, episodic mundane events. A further Kharmsiantrace (motifs offalling, rubbish, begging, andan interest inchildren and theold) isfound inBeckett, whose dramaandprose-especially Watt (1970)-is afforded the most sustained analysis of any of the authors in this study. In the final author study,Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1974) is given a thorough examination-in termsof structure and language-to arrive at a definition ofthis workasabsurd owingtoits'non-sense' circular narrative, and theforeground inginthe novel'sdifferent voicesof thecommunicative 'failure of language'. Some readers will find the structure and organizing principles of this study as episodic and disconnected as the authors itexamines. However, Cornwell does ma nage tokeep on track the central argument of theabsurd in literature as consistently informed by existentialist concerns. He is carefultoonot todiscounttheother approaches, especially the 'school category' as put forward by Esslin on theatre.A quotation from Ionesco from that study sums up a central concern ofmany of the writers examined here: 'toattack...

The frustrating case of incident-reporting systems

Even for those interested in patient safety and quality improvement, incident-reporting (IR) systems often represent a source of frustration, rather than a useful tool for capturing important patient-safety and quality-of-care...

The mundane, the existential, and the poetic

The author explores and advocates for a poetry of the mundane. This article includes an analysis of the developmental process by which a writer of “extraordinary” poetry becomes a poet concerned with enlivening the ordinary. Existential notions of nothingness, authenticity, and the “I-thou” relationship are explored as they pertain to a poetics of the mundane. Poetry is presented relating to mundane objects, mundane events, and mundane relationships. The author explores how paying attention to what is mundane can help lead the poet towards confronting existential truths.

Tough questions, even harder answers

Tough questions, even harder answers

Rubem Fonseca's Cold Case: The Ephemeral and the Historical in Agosto

THE word ephemeral, from the Greek ephemoros signifying a day's duration, connotes evanescence or transience. In ancient texts ephemoros also referred to events that were deemed insufficiently important to accord them a place of permanence in the collective memory (Eisenhauer 286). In this latter sense the ephemeral is the antithesis of historiography, whose purpose is to express meaning through the creation of enduring memories, particularly as they pertain to events in the public sphere. Through its fusion of police procedural and historical novel Rubem Fonseca's Agosto (1990) implicitly addresses this dichotomy of the ephemeral and the historical. Fonseca's narrative juxtaposes the activities of fictional homicide detective Alberto Mattos with those of a central figure of twentieth century Brazilian history, President Getulio Vargas (1882-1954). Agosto's chapters dedicated to the last three weeks of Vargas's life (August 1-24, 1954) eschew irony and mimic standard historical accounts of the period. However, the novel's interpolation of ephemeral events in the life of detective Mattos, coupled with the ultimate failure of the protagonist's investigative activity and the novel's anticlimactic conclusion, an underlying critique of official history's presumed authority. (1) Agosto's protagonist, Alberto Mattos, embodies the roman noir detective's hard-boiled uncertainty, characterized by a quest conducted on uncertain terrain, lacking confidence that the truth will ever be reveled (Chiappini 50). Unlike the nearly omniscient traditional detective or, for that matter, the official historian, roman noir investigators make no claim to authoritativeness. Although he is a public and not a private investigator, Mattos is no exception to this tradition. Like the noir detective Mattos's investigative activity is predominately a compendium of mistakes, spurious leads, and false conclusions. Matto's daily existence is also played out amidst the marginal realism of transient interactions with Rio de Janeiro's petty criminals, winos, prostitutes, gamblers, and anonymous homicide victims. (2) His personal narrative consists of fleeting, mundane events such as routine paperwork, doctor visits, and ephemeral relationships with women. It is particularly significant that Mattos's most recent lover, Salete Rodriguez, is a fashion model. Salete represents a profession and an industry that derives its meaning and revenue from the evanescence of tastes and preferences. (3) A fashion model's career itself is brief, limited in duration by the transience of youthful glamour. In Agosto's penultimate chapter Salete takes this focus on ephemeral physical grace to its logical conclusion. Just seconds after a hired assassin murders Mattos before her eyes, the killer compliments Salete on her beauty. Salete's reaction-even after witnessing the slaying of her paramour--is merely to seek reaffirmation of the killer's praise: Voce me acha bonita mesmo? Jura? (343). When the hit-man assures Salete that his bullet will spare her face she thanks him, then closes her eyes as she awaits the fatal shot (343). In this episode Salete's behavior approaches that of Frederic Jameson's postmodern schizophrenic, a subject given over to an undifferentiated vision of the world in the present (120). Salete represents the individual who is unable or unwilling to commit to a world view informed by a sense of temporal continuity. Since she has little or no awareness of a connection to the past, events become for her powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and 'material' (Jameson 120). For Salete notions of a coherent chronology or the existence of enduring memory, even when applied to her own recent biography, fail to find a place in her consciousness. Her denouement represents a total embrace of the ephemeral, expressed in her ultimate desire to look good for a fleeting moment, be it the duration of a photo-flash or a gun shot. …

Memories of uncertain origin: Dreamt or real?

The existence of a memory whose origin, real or dreamt, was uncertain was reported by just over half of an undergraduate sample of 358. Each respondent described one such memory if they had one. The memories were typically of mundane events, although 10 respondents described possible crimes. Respondents were often concerned to resolve the origin of these memories. Their plausibility, vividness, and how well the events fitted into one's life were often considered by the respondents, but where resolution occurred it was frequently based on evidence obtained from the physical or social environment. The reported qualities of the event did not correlate with whether the respondent thought it more likely to have been originally a dream or a real event.

Aspects of Aspects: On Harvey Sacks’s “Missing” Book, Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation (1970)

Conversation analysis (CA) is now what Kuhn once called a normal science. It has a discernible body of concepts, methods, and recognizable objects of analysis. More importantly, its considerable archive of accumulated findings has a very high degree of redundancy–in the positive sense that researchers have continually replicated the findings of their colleagues. It ought, then, in every respect, to be the envy of the social sciences generally and not easily dismissed as an abstruse and recondite branch of language studies or “discourse analysis” concerned with merely trivial fragments of recorded talk as such. To help CA be respecified in this way, the present paper unearths a relatively unknown part of its history in the partial book manuscript of Harvey Sacks’s Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation, circulated in mimeo to colleagues in 1970. There we find innumerable appeals to the now well-recognized fact that the practical actions of everyday talk have significant, culture-wide, formal structures that are the proper objects of the discipline. Or, in Sacks’s own terms, seemingly insignificant mundane events are generated by a powerful (if not always intuitively accessible) social “machinery.” The purpose of this paper is, then, to extract a sample of these aspects of Sacks’s Aspects in order to illustrate, sketch, or give a preliminary sense of just that point.

Food and Eating Practices During the Transition from Secondary School to New Social Contexts

This paper examines how the new social contexts experienced by young people after leaving school are related to everyday food practices and eating habits. Findings from in-depth interviews with 31 young people aged 16–24 years studying at a college of further education in South East England are used to explore the role of new social spaces and places and their impact on young people's eating habits and routines. Young people's changing peer groups were related to the re-negotiation of food and eating practices and young people often adopted particular habits when with particular groups of peers. The consumption of alcohol, and feelings about appetite, weight and appearance, were sources of anxiety for some young people, who often felt alone and different to their peers. Young people often voiced a desire to differentiate from the food ethos present in their family home and this was sometimes related to the adoption of a vegetarian diet; some young people, however, reported being nostalgic for the ‘family food’ they ate before making the transition from school. This study shows that food and eating practices are not ordinary, mundane events in young people's lives, but an important part of dealing with the transition to new social contexts.

Disputed memories of twins: how ordinary are they?

AbstractTwo studies reported that twins may dispute ownership of autobiographical experiences. One observation made in both studies was that the events that were disputed by the twins were rather ordinary events. In the present study, we tested the idea that the disputed memories are such ordinary and mundane events. A brief narrative description of disputed and nondisputed events that were provided by participants in the Ikier, Tekcan, Gülgöz, and Küntay (2003) study was given to an independent sample of participants who were asked to rate (a) the ordinariness of the event, given the age and sex of the protagonist of the event and (b) the likelihood that the event would have happened to them. Results showed that disputed memories were rated as more mundane than nondisputed personal memories. Moreover, a substantial portion of the disputed memories from the Ikier et al. study were for events that our subjects reported to have also experienced. These findings are discussed in the context of cognitive processes contributing to formation of false memories. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Risk in the redwoods: contending for normalcy in timber country

This paper presents a case study of a landslide that devastated a small rural community in the redwoods of northern California. This seemingly mundane event is used to explore several insights offered by recent literature on environmental risk, and illustrate the extent to which our reliance on modern, technologically complex industrial systems as the basis for risk scholarship may limit our understanding of the role of environmental risk in society. This landslide, and the political upheaval that followed it, point to the need for more rigorous sociological analysis of how hazards , rather than risks, are legitimated in political discourse through a process called 'normalization'; and of the complex of organizational structures of causation that encourage the development of risky situations, not only in modern technological systems, but in systems of society-environment interaction with a much longer history, such as the extraction and management of timber.

What Children Say When They Talk About the Past

The study of children's spontaneous talk about the past is critical to understanding narrative and autobiographical memory development. Mothers of 59 New Zealand children recorded their spontaneous talk about past events. In Study 1, mothers recorded children's verbal memories at 25 and 32 months. Study 2 consisted of one child's verbal memories from 14.5 to 19.5 months of age. The results from both studies revealed that children progressed from talking about absent objects and locations to mentioning more complex aspects of events. At first, children's verbal memories were largely cued by the environment, but children were capable of internally cued memories from a very young age. Children's verbal memory development was not completely dependent on their language skill. Children's spontaneous memories focused on much more mundane events than those adults chose to discuss with their young children. The shift in what children find interesting to encode and discuss, along with their skill in narrating events to others, may contribute to the beginning of autobiographical memory.

Strategic interventions of management accountants: everyday practice of British and German brewers

A popular stereotype has it that German firms are somehow ‘long-term strategically oriented’ and British firms focus on short-term financial gain. Analysing ethnographic material from British and German brewers, this paper explores how management accountants in the two countries conceive of their relationship with processes of strategic formulation and how they seek to mobilize strategic arguments in their day-to-day contacts with operational management. The focus of this study is not on the strategy debates which one might expect among senior management, but on routine interaction between management accountants and managers in which the mundane events of organizational life are made to happen in the name of loftier ‘strategic’ priorities. From observations of such interaction and management accountants' reflections on them, contrasting ways of integrating management accounting expertise with operational knowledge of the firm are suggested for the British and German brewers studied. Those contrasts are developed by drawing on the relationship between time and the possibility for strategic intervention more generally.

That's a Good Story, But Is It Really Research?

This article chronicles the author's journey of writing short stories. Following an opening story, the author explains how she wrote short stories and field notes during her study of Head Start policy Initially, the stories captured the author's emotive and physical memories of mundane and extraordinary events. Later, with the help of Norman Denzin, the stories became part of a research text. Acknowledging that researchers are encouraged to write experimental texts, the author argues that there are few exemplars in educational research of such work. The author then describes and shows how she combined short stories with connecting text. The connecting text provides historical and cultural background on policies depicted in the story. The article concludes by raising questions about how short stories will be evaluated by qualitative methodologists and other researchers.

Perceptions of speech events and nonverbal behavior in social and personal relationships

This study replicates and extends previous diary research on everyday interaction. It attempts to determine how conversational evaluation, nonverbal behavior evaluation, and gender relate to the speech event construct. The replication results partially confirm previous findings by Baxter and Goldsmith (1995). Few gender effects were found. Event clusters accounted for significant differences in both conversation and nonverbal behavior evaluation. Vocalic, kinesic and appearance cues were rated more positively during some informal, mundane speech events but not others. ‘Nonverbal behavior evaluation appeared to be linked more closely to conversations rated as “upbeat” rather than important.’

Epidemic Hysteria in Schools: an international and historical overview

Summary This study examines the characteristic features of epidemic hysteria reports in school settings, describing broad presentation patterns, and implications for management. Three distinct symptom patterns are evident based on the descriptive features of reports. The first type is ‘mass motor hysteria’ (n = 53) which predominates in non‐Western traditional cultures among students exposed to pre‐existing psychosocial stress, most frequently repressive academic and religious discipline, which precipitates dissociation, histrionics, and psychomotor alterations. A second pattern, ‘mass anxiety hysteria’ (n = 62), is typified by the sudden appearance of extreme anxiety following the redefinition of a mundane event such as illness in a fellow student or an unfamiliar odour, which is perceived as an immediate threat. A third pattern, ‘mass pseudo‐hysteria’ (n = 1) involves the relabelling of mundane symptoms by hypervigilant authorities. Epidemic hysteria in school settings manifests as variants of a unitary...

The Horoscope of Anu-Bēlšunu

Although only twenty-eight Babylonian horoscope texts are extant, and these few span a long period from Achaemenid to Arsacid times (late fifth century BC to the mid-first century BC), their form and content suggest a well-defined class of astronomical/astrological texts whose purpose it was to record a specific set of astronomical data relevant to the date of the birth of an individual. Although omens based on the date of a birth are known from the series Iqqur ipu1, celestial omens of Enama Anu Enlil predicted mundane events only for the king and the country. The horoscopes therefore represent the first application of celestial prognostication to the individual, and clearly bear close relation to nativity omens, also attested for the first time in late Babylonia.2 The appearance of horoscopes in Achaemenid Babylonia with their various innovative elements, primary among which are the introduction of the zodiac and the consideration of the situation of the heavens as a whole for predicting the life of an individual, signals as yet imperfectly understood changes in late Babylonian intellectual culture concerned with celestial inquiry, as well as with the relation of the individual to the cosmos. Because the number of extant exemplars of Babylonian horoscopes is small, each newly identified text has much to offer for our general understanding of the genre and of the nature of astrology in late Babylonia. During the 1960s, A. Sachs identified most of the extant horoscope texts in the British Museum, but these remained unpublished.3 The recent discovery of another horoscope in the Yale Babylonian Collection is of great interest both for a number of special features not attested in most other horoscopes and for its consistency with the genre as a whole. The new horoscope was identified in 1989 while cataloguing the Newell Collection of Babylonian tablets housed at Yale University.4 The tablet bears the museum number NCBT 1231 and is dated to the Seleucid period. The place of origin is in all probability Uruk since the name of the individual for whom the horoscope was drafted, Anubelunu, is characteristic of, if not exclusive to, the onomastics of that city. Additional internal criteria, derived from the content of the text and its presentation, argue convincingly for Uruk as provenance,5 making this document the sixth horoscope known from Uruk. All other examples of

Where is the fault in fault trees?

When branches of a fault tree are pruned, their probabilities are not fully transferred to the all other branch. We test 3 explanations for this underestimation of the all other probability: availability, ambiguity, and credibility. In an experiment, we varied the credibility of a cover story and separately observed the generation of a fault's causes to isolate availability, and the categorization of causes to assess ambiguity. The results identify biased availability as a broad threat to the validity of likelihood estimates. Ambiguity adds to the problem whenever tree designers are unable to eliminate it from causes or categories. Finally, though subjects had clear expectations for what constitutes a credible fault tree, none of the all other underestimation could be traced to credibility factors. The discussion covers both underlying mechanisms and corrective techniques. A fault tree is a schematic, hierarchical representation of the possible causes of some undesired event. It represents accumulated, often collective, expert knowledge in an accessible format. Fault trees are used both retrospectively to diagnose the cause of a particular occurrence of the fault and prospectively to devise plans for preventing it. These models of the many parallel and sequential causes of a fault were developed in the aerospace industry of the 1960s (Barlow & Lambert, 1975; Vesely, Goldberg, Roberts, & Haash, 1981). They remain best suited to the physical systems that typically concern engineers and are most commonly constructed when failure entails high cost. Examples of systems to which fault trees have been applied are chemical (explosion, fire, or release of toxic material), electrical (failure of a motor to start or switch to close), mechanical (rupture of a pressure tank or no spray from an automatic sprinkler system), and nuclear (fire in the reactor building or excessive leakage from a reactor containment system). However, fault trees can also be used to explain more mundane events, such as why a car might not start or why a restaurant might fail. An example of a fault tree, for causes of death in the United States, is displayed in Figure 1. Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1978) demonstrated a serious problem with fault trees that are incomplete. Using a fault tree for a car's failure to start, they compared a full tree, consisting of six labeled branches and a seventh catchall branch (All Other Problems) to a pruned version of the same tree. The pruned tree omitted three of the six labeled branches, leaving three labeled branches and the catch-all category. Subjects estimated the probabilities of each branch, either the seven branches of the full tree or the four branches of a pruned tree. The only legitimate difference between the branch probabilities of the full and pruned trees is that the

Early Grade School Children's Liking of Script and Suspense Story Structures

The structural-affect theory of stories was used to predict that young grade school children prefer narratives that involve suspense to those that fail to stimulate a pleasant affective response. Suspense stories, scripts (narratives that described a mundane event sequence), and scripts with added excitement (scripts with nonintegrated exciting events) were read to children of three ages: kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Children indicated their liking of the stories in three ways: (a) a 7-point rating scale, (b) a ranking of the three types from most liked to least liked, and (c) choosing one of the three as the story they would most prefer to hear read to them at a later date. The prediction that suspense stories would be best liked was confirmed. For the rating scale measure, only second graders reliably liked suspense stories more than plain scripts. For the ranking measure, both first and second graders reliably liked suspense stories best. Finally, for the preference measure, all three age groups reliably liked the suspense stories best. These results support the structural-affect theory's contention that young children's story schemas begin to include the dimension of suspensefulness in story narratives.

Laurie Salitan: Human Rights and the Republics

The human rights situation has continued to improve as glasnost matures and as Gorbachev's plan to establish a law-based society unfolds. The loosening of restraints, which has been linked to the process of democratization, has had a dramatic impact on human rights. At the same time, the nature of the human rights issue in the Soviet Union has shifted from what it was even last year. Large-scale demonstrations are now mundane events, as is the right to speak one's thoughts freely or to go to church. What has changed is that the process of enforcing or guaranteeing rights is now being generated from below, whereas in the beginning this process started from above. The reform process now has a life of its own among the people, who are demanding all sorts of things.

Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LII. Decreased Geomagnetic Activity and Spontaneous Telepathic Experiences from the Sidgwick Collection

All cases ( n = 93) of putative subjective psi experiences that contained the day, month, and year of occurrence were determined from the 1922 Sidgwick collection. Multivariate analysis of variance for telepathic experiences concerning death and crisis ( n = 43), telepathic experiences concerning more mundane events ( n = 28) and experiences (case controls) involved with temporal discrepancies ( n = 22) showed that only telepathic experiences concerning death and crisis occurred on days when the geomagnetic activity was significantly less than the 3 days before or the 3 days after the experiences. The other two classes of cases did not demonstrate this effect. The V-shaped pattern in geomagnetic activity was similar to that found in the Gurney-Podmore-Myers collection (1868 through 1886) and the Fate collection (1920 through 1980) as well as the strongest Maimonides experimental dream telepathy cases.