Notion Of Character Research Articles

Character Education for Children in the Perspective of Hadith

Character education constitutes putting essential values on students through a set of learning and valuable assistance in such a way that students are able to understand, experience, and integrate core values into their personality. At the same time, such education also embeds a character and promote values to preserve the distinct character when living the daily lives. Applying a model or notion of character does not guarantee that the students would be more creative immediately. However, actually they really need a fundamental concept for building of considerable character. To deal with it, Prophet Muhammad basically has developed a model of good character education in a hadith. This study is a library research with qualitative method. Data were collected by identifying related problems from books or articles through three steps: (1) data recording, (2) data combining, and (3) data analyzing to get the point and then converted into narratives in terms of character education according to the perspective of hadith. This educational model hopefully can change students’ behavior, attitude, and culture to create a civilized community.

Reception by Ika Willis

MLR, .,   become recognizable as different but interchangeable expressions of the same basic ‘character’. Kunin’s overall argument is easy to follow and to agree with, although it is a shame that he never explains precisely what makes them interchangeable. Rather, he merely invites—or even asserts—our assent: as he puts it a little later, ‘Strange as it may sound, you already agree with me’ (p. ). Elsewhere he turns his attention away from ‘what readers do with characters’ and towards ‘what other characters do with them’ (p. ), or ‘ways in which characters are meaningful to other characters’ (p. ). Indeed, some of Kunin’s most interesting reflections centre on how notions of character (and other ideas that supposedly belong only to literary-critical metadiscourses) appear and circulate within fictional worlds: how Bridget Jones fails to recognize herself as an avatar of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, for example, or how Wilde’s characters explicitly relate their own lives to generic terms such as comedy and (especially) tragedy. at said, the ease with which he slips between discussing the ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ worlds can wrong-foot the reader—for example, when he uses himself as evidence to support his (rather debatable) claim that, within Aristotle’s poetic theory, ‘a person is never a unity’ (p. ). is book will not be for everyone, but its ability to combine moments of thoughtful close reading with a vast and eclectic corpus is impressive; perhaps its most useful and intriguing contribution is the notion that ideas of ‘character’ not only permeate and shape our engagement with fictional people but also underpin their engagements with each other. R H, U  L J H Reception. By I W. Abingdon: Routledge. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book, published in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, convincingly argues that all studies of literary—or even more broadly, cultural—texts need to be informed by the perspective of reception. In this way, Ika Willis presents reception as an essential ingredient of every interpretation, rather than a separate field of enquiry. For her, reception is coterminous with reading: indeed, she uses the terms ‘reception’ and ‘reading’ almost interchangeably, and ultimately prefers the former because it is more capacious and does not privilege literature over other branches of art. e main strength of Willis’s study lies in her powerful demonstration that reading and readers have been investigated for decades in various quarters of literary studies and related disciplines, even if few connections have so far been made between these different branches of scholarship, ranging from biblical studies and classics to cultural studies and book history. Willis—a professor of English in Australia , who first studied classics in Britain and is also well versed in cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies—is the first scholar to capture clearly and systematically the complex, multifarious field of academic engagement with reading, and show how all the available approaches to it are deeply interrelated . Another welcome consequence of the author’s interdisciplinary expertise is that she effortlessly employs a pleasingly diverse range of examples and case studies  Reviews to support her argument, from Seneca to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Montaigne to Aboriginal writing, and more. Willis’s starting point is the observation that reception is usually studied only in part, but that we will not be able to understand the activity of reading fully unless we relate all these disparate parts to each other. With this goal in mind, she ‘reorganize[s] the field [of reception] around its central problems and questions’ (p. ), which she groups under four categories: ‘meaning’, ‘reading’, ‘readers’, and ‘rewriting’. us, she argues that ‘all acts of reception are forms of interpretation, conditioned by historically and culturally specific systems of reading, learned and practised by individual readers in complex relations to other readers and producing a specific interpretation or reading which is most visible in the form of a new text’ (pp. –). Willis’s categories move from the abstract to the concrete. Under the category of ‘meaning’, she discusses ‘broad conceptual and theoretical questions about the nature of meaning, language, sign systems and interpretations, questions which underpin all literary study and textual analysis’ (pp. –). In...

Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action by Constantine Sandis

Reviewed by: Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action by Constantine Sandis David Landy Constantine Sandis. Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xiii +148. Cloth, $140.00. Constantine Sandis's suggestive new book consists of a series of discrete studies of aspects of Hume's philosophical system that culminate in an argument for the conclusion that "on Hume's view . . . we are only morally responsible for that subset of actions that have been motivated by our character traits" (90). That final conclusion is the end of a wide-ranging and systematic argument that feels too compressed in the scant one-hundred and twenty-three pages in which it is presented, especially since the philosophical and exegetical theses that Sandis presents along the way are intriguing and receive just enough support to make the reader long for a more robust consideration of them. Sandis's grand argument begins with the familiar approach of understanding Hume's Copy Principle as placing strict limits on the possible contents of our mental representations, thereby requiring Hume to revise our understanding of our own ideas. Sandis dubs this "soft conceptual revisionism" (2). In the early chapters of the book, the most important result that this approach yields is Hume's revision of our concept of necessary connection [End Page 406] to comprise only constant conjunction and temporal priority. The upshot of Sandis's discussion is to earn Hume a sense of 'necessity' and 'causation' that meets his criterion of meaningfulness and grounds the aforementioned account of action. Actions turn out to be those bodily movements with certain causes, properly construed, as either acts of will or character traits. Another important piece of Sandis's argument is his provocative claim that "a belief just is the feeling or sentiment accompanying an idea" (23), which "firm conception consists in feeling that something is the case" (24). At first blush, Sandis appears to make the radically heterodox claim that Hume holds that there is a distinct impression that is annexed to, accompanies, all believed ideas, despite the fact that Hume explicitly argues against that thesis (App 3–9/SBN 624–27). Upon closer inspection, however, Sandis denies the radical heterodoxy (24), and his actual claim is more anodyne. Despite his continued reference to belief as a sentiment or feeling, which terms Hume uses to denote distinct impressions (e.g. T 2.1.11.7/SBN 318–19 and T 1.1.1.1/SBN 1–2.), Sandis's actual claim appears to be that we should understand Hume's use of 'belief' to refer to the liveliness of these enlivened ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. What Sandis takes that nominalization to earn him is that beliefs, including moral beliefs, can produce action alone because they "are all sentiments" (99), and Hume is free to hold that we can be motivated directly by at least some of our beliefs, without the need for an additional conative perception. (In this sense, Sandis takes Hume to be non-Humean about motivation.) That is, Sandis holds that the liveliness of some of our ideas can itself be the cause (in the proper Humean sense) of some of our actions. That thesis is significant for Sandis insofar as discovering the cause of our actions brings to bear the question of the disappearing agent (78): if our actions have causes outside of our control, even if these causes are literally parts of us, then in what sense are we responsible for those actions? Sandis's answer on Hume's behalf is that while some actions are bodily movements caused by particular volitional perceptions (acts of will), we are only responsible for those actions that are also caused by manifestations of the long-term dispositions that constitute a person's character. In support of this answer, Sandis also advocates for a revisionist understanding of Hume's account of the self as a bundle of perceptions (chapter 4), an interpretation of Hume's notion of character as long-term behavioral dispositions (chapter 5), a rejection on Hume's behalf of what Sandis calls the Conflating View of Motivating Reasons—the thesis that the reasons for...

Personal Identity and National Identity: An Analogy

AbstractSimone Weil writes in one of her notebooks: “When one arrives at the absolute one can only express oneself by identities … – For identity alone expresses the unconditioned” (Cahiers, in Œuvres complètes, t. VI, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 113). Thus, it is that “the good is the good”, one and the same, unconditionally. Certainly, an individual is unique, a nation is equally so. Nevertheless, personal identity – or “character” – and the identity of a nation are not absolutes. When we wish to treat them as absolutes, we ignore the fact that the “person,” as well as the “nation”, only exists within relationships that they are subject to exterior circumstances and that their identity is situated in time. Is one correct to suppose that the character of an individual or the identity of the nation are “invariables that one continues to find throughout various manifestations”, (“Notes sur le caractère”, Écrits de Marseille, in Œuvres complètes, Op. cit., t. IV, vol. 1 (2008), 87) observed or probable? We hypothesize here that one can apply to national identity what Simone Weil wrote about the notion of character, in notes composed in Marseille and in her commentary on the Our Father (“À propos du Pater”, ibid., 337‐345).

Semiotički pristup komuniciranju u analizi reklame

In the paper the problem of applying semiotic approach in the communication process. In the first part of the emphasis on the notion of character as the basic unit of a semiotic system, in terms of different semiotic theory. In the second part, the emphasis is on timacenju (hermeneutic approach) specific advertising, i.e. its linguistic message, visual phenomena such semantic, connecting with their signifying form. Through a semiotic analysis are the meanings of the symbols in the advertisement in which the two different levels of meaning: denotative and connotative meaning. Interpretation of the advertising suggests the possibility of a better understanding of its overall social and komutativnog meaning.

Notes for an econarratological theory of character

AbstractScientists and scholars in multiple fields have been discussing the current geological epoch under the heading of the “Anthropocene” – an era marked by the planetary impact of human activities (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The epistemological shift brought about by this notion exposes the latent anthropocentrism of narrative practices, raising a challenge taken up by narrative theorists such as Erin James (2015) and Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017) in the context of an “econarratology.” In this article, I examine the prime suspect for anthropocentrism in narrative – namely, the notion of character as intrinsically human-like. My point of departure is A. J. Greimas’s (1976) actantial model of narrative, which I revisit and revise in light of work in the field of ecolinguistics (Goatly 1996). I thus explore five strategies through which narrative may integrate nonhuman characters that challenge both anthropocentrism and the subject-object binary that anthropocentrism entails. I exemplify these strategies by discussing contemporary novels that deal with the Anthropocenic entanglement of humanity and the nonhuman world.

Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’sMásnap

AbstractThe essay’s aim is to examine the relationship between perspective and nonlinear temporal structure in Attila Janisch’s 2004 film,Másnap, which is loosely based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’sLe Voyeur(1955). My analysis revolves around the understanding of two important narratological distinctions, that between a nonlinear presentation of events and a paradoxical plot, and that between narrative focalizalization and textual focalization. According to David Bordwell, the most widespread definition of linearity is when the successive events of A, B and C are presented in the narrative in their chronological order. Any other form of their presentation results in a nonlinear narrative. ButMásnapis a special type of narrative, which highlights the limitation of such traditional dichotomies, because a consistent order of events cannot be reconstructed. Many critics tried to grasp the core of the film’s narrative by trying to put together the original timeline of events, relying on false indicators of logic and coherence, while they failed to recognize the narrative’s real rhetorical purpose in preventing a consistent and unambiguous plot to be established. The narrative’s complexity lies in the fact that both assumptions – that it depicts asubjective experience of timeanda storyworld with strange temporality– are necessary to explain the film’s unusual, fragmented structure and interpret its events. I point out how the film requires us to reinterpret the meanings attached to the familiar techniques of continuity editing and how it converts the practices of the early Nouveau Roman, which marginalizes traditional plot-structures, the notion of character, and conventional descriptions of objects, to interact with a subjective vision governed by a fictional mind.

English

This research attempts to throw light on the indigenous African moral philosophy from the yoruba socio-cultural paradigm, espousing the adequacy of its authentic ontological and ethical principles towards sustainable development in the contemporary period. Indigenous African morality revolves around the notion of character and character traits which aim at analyzing actions and motive of a moral agent. Character-ethics approaches moral discourse not on the face value of moral actions; rather, from the broad understanding of the nature of reality and subsisting metaphysical orientation in a socio-cultural experience that shapes the mind and conducts of its individuals. The concept of Omoluabi suffices as generally accepted character (Iwa) model among the Yoruba predominantly in the West African sub-region. An Omoluabi is a well-rounded good person, exhibiting virtues like moderation, truth, diligence, courage and wisdom among others. Behind these virtues are African ontological and ethical principles that inform the making of an Omoluabi in the Yoruba traditional moral setting. The underlining metaphysical orientation accentuates spiritual primacy, duality and complementarity to promote interdependence of all forces and harmonious relationship. In effect, the character of Omoluabi is such that harmonises interests, promotes the spirit of live and let live, diplomacy and collective well-being in the society. Conceptual analysis and critical evaluative reasoning were employed as the methodology to unravel the potential of the African metaphysical orientation via Yoruba traditional morality. “The complementarity and symbiotic orientation drawn from the characteristics of Omoluabi was argued as germane to peaceful coexistence”. Generally, it is our position that the notion of Omoluabi hinged on authentic African metaphysical orientation will enhance sustainable moral development especially in a pluralistic society. Key words: Morality, character (Iwa), omoluabi, duality, African moral philosophy.

Please mind the gappy content

Representationalist theories of experience face the problem that two sets of compelling intuitions seem to support the contrary conclusions that we should ascribe, respectively, singular contents and general contents to experience. Susanna Schellenberg has, in a series of articles, argued that we can conserve both sets of intuitions if we award a central explanatory role to the notions of gappy-contents and content-schemas in our theory of experience. I argue that there is difficulty in seeing how gappy-contents and content-schemas can fulfil the explanatory role envisioned for them by Schellenberg. The central problem is that both gappy-contents and contentschemas lack truth-conditions. Schellenberg attempts to support her view by suggesting an analogy between the role of content-schemas in our account of experience and the role of Kaplan’s notion of character in our account of demonstrative statements. However, I show that this analogy breaks down at crucial places when it is explored in detail. Hence, gappy-contents and content-schemas cannot fill the explanatory roles that the representationalist awards to fully truth-evaluable contents. Therefore, Schellenberg’s theory provides no way for the representationalist to conserve both sets of competing intuitions.

The character–personality distinction: An historical, conceptual, and functional investigation

Many interdisciplinary discussions seem to operate on a tacit assumption that the notions of character and personality can be used interchangeably. In order to argue that such an assumption is at least partly erroneous, the character–personality distinction drawn in various contexts is systematically scrutinized both in an historical and conceptual way. Then, in turn, two particular issues are addressed. The character–personality distinction is shown to be reliant on the dichotomy between value and fact, respectively, and to have a considerable functional dimension with some of the functions fulfilled by the notion of character (but not by that one of personality). The outcomes achieved, finally, are referred to the subtle differences between the fact–value distinction and the Humean is–ought dichotomy.

Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

Reviewed by: Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Eraby Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai Timothy J. Williams Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. By Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 263. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7182-5; cloth, $140.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7181-8.) In this study of college-educated New Englanders coming of age in the 1840s and 1850s, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai asks what motivated young men to leave their homes and to take up arms for their country. For his answer, Wongsrichanalai turns to a sample of forty-nine young men who attended prestigious New England colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and Williams. He finds that a uniquely northern culture of "character" compelled young men to fight (p. 8). "An idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought and selfless action," this [End Page 688]notion of character "should be regarded as a northern variant of the better-known code of southern honor," he argues (p. 2). A matter of a man's interior self and earnest self-presentation (even in the face of adversity), character informed how men thought about their own personal honor as New England's "gentleman class," viewed the South and southerners, and experienced war in various leadership capacities (p. 7). The book extends George M. Fredrickson's classic work The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union(New York, 1965) to include young intellectuals. Whereas Fredrickson found in New England's intelligentsia a longing for sectional crisis to turn into war to prove the need for educated leadership, Wongsrichanalai shows that this desire was not so for the younger generation. Young college men "did not aimlessly wander through the mid-nineteenth-century world waiting for a conflict to erupt," Wongsrichanalai argues. "Rather these young men concerned themselves with codes of conduct that qualified them as members of the gentleman class, worried about their careers, and observed national affairs with interest" (p. 7). In the language of gender history, and Amy S. Greenberg, these young men valued "restrained manhood" (p. 6). In making this argument, Wongsrichanalai follows a single generation from youth to old age. The book's principal strength is that it traces antebellum ideas about character and leadership through the Civil War and into the twentieth century, as students became soldiers, veterans, and civic leaders. The first three chapters focus on the antebellum period, especially the social world of college life. The New Brahmins' college writings—mostly commencement orations—revealed a striking New England–centered version of American history, which emphasized nationalism rooted in free labor and the Protestant work ethic. The classical curriculum enforced these ideas, as did the capstone moral philosophy course, which taught young men how to build character through introspection and self-control. Collegians believed that education distinguished them as America's natural leaders; war presented "the ultimate test of character" instilled during college (p. 17). In the four chapters related to the Civil War—the strongest of the book—Wongsrichanalai describes how these young men viewed the South though this lens, criticizing the region's educated class for what they viewed as an impoverished and backward land. Significantly, these men espoused racist views about former enslaved persons, particularly that they had to be taught character and self-control. This presumption fueled many of these men's advocacy for educating freedpeople after the war. In the end, the book is more successful in proving some claims, mostly those about wartime leadership, than others. Indeed, readers of this journal should question the author's premise that "northern character" was regionally unique. Wongsrichanalai argues, "Historians agree that honor, as a cultural code, pervaded southern society" (p. 5). This is not true. While some historians continue to emphasize honor, many other scholars, including myself, have shown that this rigid binary, while convenient, is not reliable, especially in studying education and gender. Southern colleges and universities instilled character by promoting discipline, industry, sobriety, self-control, emulation, and the cultivation of healthy civic leadership. In this...

Bartleby’s Screen

Bartleby holds or occupies space. He sits behind a folding screen, stands in a dead wall reverie, and remains so physical that he stands before the other clerks as an unwelcome tenant, an idler who has nonetheless laid claim to property. Though supremely embodied, a ruined column or an object whose sound behind the screen is most like the scrape of his chair, he takes on all the qualities of a phantom. Both chattel and real estate, movable and immovable, material and immaterial, affixed to the office as if part of its very walls, Bartleby reveals something about the ends of the law, once returned to the claims of spirit. What happens to the person who exists in dialogue with walls? Who stands only to bear witness to his own incapacitation? In self-willed ascesis, Bartleby stands forth as if a monk, a body worked up into spirit, a ghost of impairment that becomes the host of plenitude. What is the meaning of the portable green screen, first put up by the narrator so that he can command as if a disembodied voice, and then removed, leaving Bartleby the motionless occupant of a room? In this time of unrelenting taxonomies, when persons became things—either perishables in the market or fixtures on land—and where felons died in law but lived in fact, Bartleby stands at the limit screen or chancel of these categories, destabilizing the definitions crucial not only to property in slaves but to the regulatory beneficence of civil society. What first seems phantasmagoric is locked into a nature lived as a spectacle of servitude and possession. What we turned into ghosts originated in the legal language of property and persons. These juridical inventions, once summoned in the name of order and civility, were presented as the most natural, the most reasonable things in the world. As I move through these habitats of law’s creatures, I offer grounds for the gothic, a hybrid place into which are seeded legal fictions, spiritual beliefs, and historical fragments. The very notions of character, metaphor, and motive are there transfigured.

SELF-MADE MAIDS: BRITISH EMIGRATION TO THE PACIFIC RIM AND SELF-HELP NARRATIVES

The victorian discourse of self-help, popularized by Samuel Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century, was integral to the success of mid-Victorian British emigration and colonialism. As Robert Hogg notes in his study of British colonial violence in British Columbia and Queensland, Samuel Smiles's notion of character, which embraced the virtues of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and energetic action, helped sanction masculine colonial violence and governance in these regions (23–24). According to Robert Grant in his examination of mid-Victorian emigration to Canada and Australia, one's desire “to better him or herself” was closely entwined with Smiles's self-help philosophy and the rhetoric of colonial promotion permeating British self-help texts “in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work” (178–79). Francine Tolron similarly observes the pervasiveness of the success narrative in emigrant accounts of New Zealand, noting that this story often constitutes “yet another tale of the British march of Progress” (169) with the yeoman, John Bull, as the hero at its centre, who adopts the imperialist impetus to subdue the wilderness and recreate an ideal England in which a man can earn gentility through hard work and uprightness of character (169–70). She extends accounts by male emigrants to New Zealand to the “collective psyche” of all New Zealanders “whose stuff is made up of earth, so to speak, the inheritors of the old archetypal Englishman who worked on the land before the dawn of the industrial era” (173). These studies contribute significantly to a growing body of scholarship that considers the connections between self-help literature and British emigration and colonialism. Yet, occasionally such analyses apply the meaning of self-help rhetoric universally across British male and female emigrant groups when the rise from tenant to landowner was typically a male, not a female, prerogative. Building on this important body of work, this paper considers how domestic concerns, rather than a sole focus on controlling foreign lands and people, informed versions of success penned by a particular group of mid-Victorian middle-class female emigrants and these women's understanding of their positioning within the colonies.

Nobody’s Novel

In the novel, fictional characters may be thought of as the richest of signifiers. Traditionally, it is the character who mediates fictional worlds for our benefit, who calls out to us, engages our attention, and encourages us to inhabit those worlds, either briefly or in a more enduring manner. Yet character has become a very embattled and precarious topos in contemporary fiction. Marie Cosnay's writing offers representations of humans that are especially thin, most particularly in Villa Chagrin (2006), which puts conventional notions of character on trial in strategic fashions.

Comics and characterization: the case of Fritz Haber (David Vandermeulen)

Comics theory has rightly emphasized the medium-specific use of narrative devices and narrative strategies in the graphic novel. However, the more innovative readings of the field have paid less attention to what remains one of the cornerstones of the graphic storytelling: the character. In this paper, I defend a medium-specific approach of the notion of character and propose a brief example of the visual reading of a ‘protagonist’. The example I analyse is Fritz Haber, a five-volume historical graphic novel on the father of chemical warfare, by Belgian artist David Vandermeulen.

Ten Myths About Character, Virtue and Virtue Education – Plus Three Well-Founded Misgivings

Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses. Most of those echo familiar misgivings about the notions of character, virtue and education in virtue – as unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and situation dependent. I expose those misgivings as ‘myths’, while at the same time acknowledging three better-founded historical, methodological and practical concerns about the notions in question.

Wirklichkeitsbrüche. Theorie und Analyse mit Blick auf Texte der frühen Moderne und Postmoderne

The article concentrates on the collision between plural concepts of reality in narrative fiction. For that purpose it focuses on theoretical aspects of world construction as well as on issues concerning the notions of character and narrative instances from a narratological point of view. Narrative collisions depend on heterogeneous, pluriregional or instable worlds, characters’ deficits in knowledge and problematic perception, metalepses and the exposure and handling of the borderline between two or more concepts of reality. To illustrate these theoretical preliminaries the article attempts to show how texts functionalise such structures to create narrations of transition. Arnold Höllriegel’s The Films by Princess Fantoche (1913) was written in the context of the early modern period. It correlates the collision of ‘realities’ to general questions of the modern crisis about whether to follow traditional ways or to find new ones. In Benjamin Stein’s Replay (2012) subjectivity is raised as a problem insofar as the narrating character loses himself in entangled time-circles and delivers an unreliable narration. Stein discusses the postmodern game of intertextuality, technologism, eroticism, and self-reflection as well as the loss of the narrative and the wish for its renewal.

The IBM Brand System: An interview with Kevin Bishop

This interview describes IBM innovations in management of its ‘brand system’, which integrates brand with organisational culture through the notion of character within a coherent, holistic approach: the organisation as a unique system of systems, embedding the principles of how the company organises into the fabric of the company, defines ‘organising ideas’, or agendas, and places them ‘at the top of the integration pyramid’. The brand system and agenda contextualise IBM's approach within the present and emerging individualistic, empowered and highly-networked world.

On Coordinate Independent State Space of Matrix Theory

We investigate symmetry structure of coordinate independent states in Matrix theory. Those states are building blocks of gauge invariant wavefunctions, and especially we consider zero energy bound state wavefunctions. First we construct some states in lower representations of the space rotation group SO(9) explicitly in the case of SU(2) gauge group, and classify them into SU(2) representations. Next we count the multiplicities of SO(9)×SU(N) representations in the coordinate independent state space by using the notion of characters in group theory. For N = 2 case we give complete decomposition of the space into SO(9)×SU(2) representations, and give partial results for higher gauge groups.

The Mind's Eye: Focalizing “Nature” in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

This article contrasts the ideas of nature on which Charlotte Brontë builds her Bildungsroman Jane Eyre (2001. New York and London: Norton) with those on which Jean Rhys builds her revisionist prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1968, Harmondsworth: Penguin). The argument is that Jane Eyre exemplifies the idea of nature which has dominated the Western narrative of rationality. This derives from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, and from myths which recreate the lost garden on earth. Wide Sargasso Sea, by contrast, rewrites English landscape and vegetation into a “dreamscape of desire and dread” (Howells, Carol Ann. 1991. Jean Rhys. Hemel Hempstead:Harvester Wheatsheaf, 112), undermining the teleological and patriarchal assumptions of the Bildungsroman. Both Brontë and Rhys dramatise their protagonists’ focalization so as to reinforce—or subvert—conventional notions of character and identity.