Possibility Of Closure Research Articles

Emotional closure in autobiographical memories: phenomenology and involuntary remembering

ABSTRACT Open autobiographical memories are events without closure. The current study explored the influence of potential closure in the future. We compared the phenomenology and involuntary recall for events that were either closed, open with a possibility of closure, or open without such a possibility. Participants (N = 87) recalled these events in random order and answered phenomenology questions. We expected open events without closure possibility to be highest in negativity, emotional intensity, regret and involuntary recall frequency, followed by potentially open events and closed events. We found that emotional intensity at recall, negativity and involuntary recall frequency were higher for open than closed events. Open events without closure possibility were the highest in regret and evoked more negative affect upon involuntary recall than open events with closure possibility. We discussed our findings in relation to research on autobiographical memory and involuntary remembering, along with intrusion and possible clinical implications.

Rachael Walsh, Review of Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century

In a timely contribution to deliberative democracy scholarship, Hélène Landemore’s latest book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, positions itself as a response to the current crisis of democracy by proposing a novel, even radical, citizen-centered renewal of democratic systems designed to enhance trust in such systems. Its core thesis reconceives democracy as “an open doorframe leading to an ungated space,” with “entry left open, with no possibility of closure” (at 220). This motif of openness is central to Landemore’s argument throughout the book. Landemore develops an alternative to current systems of representative democracy by reaching into the past, drawing on Ancient Athenian democracy, and into the future, by harnessing digital technology to support a new system of representation. She utilizes her own practical experience of citizen engagement in political decision-making, in particular in France, Iceland, and Finland, to further flesh out her “new paradigm,”...

Decarbonising steel production using CO2 Capture and Storage (CCS): Results of focus group discussions in a Welsh steel-making community

Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) is considered a key strategy for decarbonising industries which have limited options for tackling CO2 process emissions. Previous efforts to develop CCS projects have been thwarted by adverse public perceptions amongst other issues. Understanding and tracking public perceptions prior to project development is therefore highly advisable.This study explores public perceptions of applying CCS technology at the Port Talbot Steelworks in South Wales. Opinions of local residents were gathered by means of two focus groups. Participants were concerned about the impact of implementing CCS on the competitiveness of the plant and, as a consequence, the possibility of closure. Perceived positive impacts were that a CCS facility would improve local air quality as well as the town’s public image, bringing inward investment. Acceptance or otherwise of CCS was found to be influenced by trust. Participants expressed particular distrust towards the local steel firm and various levels of Government, citing poor engagement, whilst showing tentative trust towards scientific/research organisations. Most participants saw emission reducing technologies as an inevitability, with most considering CCS to be of benefit to the Port Talbot Steelworks. If an effective engagement strategy and equal-voice procedures are applied, the residents of Port Talbot could be amenable to CCS.

‘Les suites des suites’: Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the News

ABSTRACTTaking as its subject Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-46), this article explores what the literary critic Alfred Nettement dubbed the newspaper’s ‘influence contagieuse’ under the July Monarchy, and considers the impact of journalism on this ever-popular roman-feuilleton. Reading Dumas’s text alongside the writings of nineteenth-century critics, the article traces the ways in which Monte-Cristo reflects on the pressures and rhythms of serial publication – not simply as a consequence of its structure but as a thematic concern crucial to particular strands of its meandering narrative. The problem of endings is central here, with Monte-Cristo emblematic of the ways in which the possibility of closure is repeatedly deferred in the roman-feuilleton – replaced, instead, by a series of suites.

Negation of the Narrative Framework or the Failure of Narrative Memory: The Case of "Os cus de Judas"

Abstract: As a narrative of the crumbling Portuguese empire written a few years after the colonial war had come to an end, Os cus de Judas denounces the affects and effects of that war, which are perceived as a hindrance to any positive representation of the individual and Portugal. The novel’s unnamed protagonist is continually rendered impotent in his many attempts to escape the disturbing and obsessive images of the war and to restore a memory traumatized by recollections of the past. These images have a bearing on the articulation of his self and color his vision of a nation still beholden to the rhetoric of its fascist past, which has purposefully erased from its memory the atrocities and the horrors of the colonial war. As an individual condemned to live among the ruins of a former empire defined by a strong instinct for collective forgetfulness, the protagonist comes to the realization that it is pointless to construct a narrative that may provide coherence and unity to his life or give meaning to his country. His only option in life is to engage in a mode of self-referential narration without the possibility of closure.

Translation, Language, Anthropology

This essay, in addition to being a reflection on field notes, is about the non-representability of translation. It illustrates the simultaneous possibilities of closure and openness in translation, acts that seal borders, and those that open up new voices. It shows that translation also creates equivalent categories. In doing so, translators align themselves with the dominant codes of classification. These observations have been drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in a remote part of rural India. The essay also shows how fieldwork offers a site of interplay involving both language and ethnography, making the discussion of one in isolation from the other a futile exercise. It extends the idea of ‘difference’ upon which translation studies is predicated. If by ‘difference’ we understand a text, a culture and a context other than those the translator/ethnographer brings with them, the essay shows the dangers of presumed sameness.

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

AbstractSince the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, over 150 female American military personnel have been killed, over 70 following hostile fire. Given Western society’s long-standing practice of reserving the conduct of collective violence to men, these very public deaths are difficult to encompass within the normative and ideological structures of the contemporary American political system. This study examines the ways in which the public duty to commemorate the heroism of soldiers – and the private desire to accurately remember daughters and wives – poses a significant challenge to coherent discursive representation. In doing so, the study employs hermeneutical interpretation to analyse public representations of female soldiers and their relation to death in US popular culture. These representations are examined via Judith Butler’s concept of grievability – the possibility of receiving recognition as a worthy life within the existing social imaginary. It is argued that female soldiers are grievable as both ‘good soldiers’ and ‘good women’, but not as ‘good female soldiers’. The unified subject position of ‘good female soldier’ is liminal, and thus rendered socially and politically unintelligible. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this liminality for collective mourning and the possibility of closure after trauma.

Utilization of Metallurgical Waste in Non-Metallurgical Industry

The iron and steel industry is one of the largest sources of waste materials, primarily in the form of steelmaking dusts, sludge and slag. Those wastes are a serious threat to the environment. Main precondition for the protection of natural resources in the environment is to recover raw material and energy from waste. The use of waste as raw materials does not involve the storage and creates the possibility of closure of the existing landfill. The article presented utilization of same metallurgical waste containing 4-20 wt. % zinc in non-metallurgical industry. Performed chemical analyzes of pollutants contained in waste tested (dusts, sludge and slag) and in manufactured products (cement bricks, ceramic construction materials, colored glass products and slag for road construction). Aqueous extracts analysis results were compared with the maximum values for the sewage entering into water and soil. The performed research proves that proposed technologies (production of cement clinker, construction bricks, hollow glass, decorated glass) do not pose threat to environment. Harmful impurities are eluted from the products – clinker, constructions bricks and slag after the recovery of zinc recovery. Proposed technologies substitution of primary raw materials recyclable materials can reduce environmental degradation.

Are Managers Measuring the Financial Risk in the Right Manner? An Exploratory Study

The basic problem with corporate finance is that it deals with the fundamental analysis issues while the tools used are those applicable for technical analysis. That is the reason why finance managers often arrive at wrong decisions which snowball into issues like the subprime crisis. Initially, Markowitz model was used to calculate risk for portfolio management. It gave importance only to systematic risk as unsystematic risk could be avoided through diversification. Later on, CAPM model was developed for corporate finance and project finance for calculation of risk. Finance models dealing with risk management are applicable only for a short period and that too for an average of a large number of companies. The approach to apply risk measurement technique suitable for portfolio management to corporate finance is not correct. Even the econometric techniques applied to validate calculation of risk for portfolio management should be different from those applied for corporate finance. The present article analyses the problems of applying such risk measurement techniques for corporate finance purpose. A company faces mainly two types of risks: liquidity risk and bankruptcy risk. In case a company suffers from bankruptcy threat (which may or may not lead to actual bankruptcy), i.e., possibilities of closure due to losses, there will be two possibilities: The company may move with market index in normal times while it may come down suddenly with index and may not bounce back (Kink in the beta curve), as in the case of MTNL and Jet Airlines. There may be a sudden bankruptcy threat as in the case of Satyam. The latter case does not allow investors to react. However, corporate managers will have to take account of the first possibility of bankruptcy risk which cannot be ignored by assuming beta to be constant. This paper examines three companies, Mastek, Jet Airlines, and MTNL, in this category. The author suggests that instead of segregating risk into systematic and unsystematic risk, it should be segregated into bankruptcy and liquidity risk. In this way, unsystematic risk is also priced while determining the value of a company.

Professionalism and Accountability

School principals and headteachers are increasingly working within a high stakes accountability framework. In many countries, these senior leaders are judged on student outcomes as measured by public examination and test results. In England, and elsewhere, conformity with government policy is policed through a national inspection regime, which grades leadership as well as classroom practice. The consequences of an ‘unsatisfactory’ grade are profound and may lead to the school being labelled as ‘failing’, with the possibility of closure. In this climate, it is unsurprising that most leaders adhere closely to national prescriptions and work hard to enhance published learning outcomes. In England, this may lead to leaders being focused mainly on ‘borderline’ students, such as those on the C/D boundary in GCSE examinations. A related practice is ‘teaching to the test’, where learning is closely aligned to test outcomes, rather than wider knowledge and understanding. Where leaders operate in this way, they might be regarded as sacrificing their professionalism on the altar of accountability. The first article, by Neil Cranston, examines this issue. He begins by arguing that ‘the constraints of accountability on school leaders need to be framed by a new liberating professionalism’, framed around notions of professional responsibility. He reinforces the accepted mantra that leadership is vital to school success and student learning and comments that the rhetoric of self-management has not led to school leaders driving educational priorities. He outlines four principles for school leadership and concludes that professionally responsible leaders need to understand their fundamental values, and position themselves as proactive leadership professionals, not reactive managers. Leadership practice is inevitably influenced by principals’ socialisation experiences. This is the focus of the second article, by Ed Bengtson, Sally Zepede and Oksana Parylo. They examine organisational socialisation, linked to principal succession, in the state of Georgia in the USA. Drawing on 29 interviews with principals, superintendents and other central office leaders in four systems, the authors note that collective leadership training is common, what they describe as ‘serial socialisation’. They point to the importance of succession, and retention, of principals and conclude that socialisation ‘can no longer be left to chance’. In the third article, Matti Kuittenen, Anu Puusa and Oksana Parylo examine the concept of organisational identity, linked to strategic change. Drawing on interviews with senior lecturers and managers at a Finnish university, they note similarities and differences in interpretations of identity. Notions were similar within groups but rather different between managers and lecturers. Managers were perceived to be future-oriented but lecturers claimed that this was at the expense of current activities. They also note the ‘fragmentation of identity’ because of separate sub-group Educational Management Administration & Leadership 41(2) 127–128 a The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1741143212469505 emal.sagepub.com

Karatani Kojin and the (Im)Possibility of Closure in Korean Literature

Karatani Kojin and the (Im)Possibility of Closure in Korean Literature

History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure, ed. Mark Levene, Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts

History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure, ed. Mark Levene, Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts

Closure of population biobanks and direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies

Genetic research gained new momentum with the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. Formerly centered on the investigation of single-gene disorders, genetic research is increasingly targeting common complex diseases and in doing so is studying the whole genome, the environment and its impact on genomic variation. Consequently, biobanking initiatives have emerged around the world as a tool to sustain such progress. Whether they are small scale or longitudinal, public or private, commercial or non-commercial, biobanks should consider the possibility of closure. Interestingly, while raising important ethical issues, this topic has hardly been explored in the literature. Indeed, ethical issues associated with sale, insolvency, end of funding, or transfer of materials to other entities (which are all issues either related to or possible consequences of closure) are seldom the subject of discussion. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper will discuss-using population and direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies' biobanks as case studies-(1) international and national normative documents addressing the issue of closure and (2) the internal policies of population biobanks and DTC genetic testing companies. The analysis will inform the debate on biobank closure and elucidate the underlying ethical issues, which include, but are not limited to informed consent, storage and privacy.

Patent ductus arteriosus in adults – indications and possibilities for closure

Patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) is a rare diagnosis in adults, since symptoms and signs usually occur in infancy and most cases are treated shortly after diagnosis. We present two patients who were first diagnosed with PDA during adulthood. The first case represents a more severe form of PDA, where the need for closure of the PDA is obvious. In the second case the sequelae of the PDA are less clear. In both patients, closure of the PDA (surgically in one case, percutaneously in the other) was successful.

Coetzee’s Lateness and the Detours of Globalization

Introduction To suggest that there is an untimeliness about M. Coetzee's latest sequence of anti-novels, from Youth (2002) through to Summertime (2009), is to observe a determinate lack of fit--perhaps even an unfitness--between the writing and its time, or times. There is an intransigent, albeit brittle, energy to these texts, a posture of refusal to conform to any standardized version of the form as dominates the market today: no rollicking adventures a la Chabon, nor Franzenesque discursiveness, nor liberal humanist levelheadedness in the McEwan vein--to say nothing of the fiction lists, stocked with translated epics of generational struggle, war-torn tragedies, and sentimental evocations of vanished village childhoods. The post-postmodern turn has flooded the world of letters with the larger narrative and discursive pleasures once barred from serious literature, and inundated us with the lures of the planetary exotic. It is a literary space in which, as Perry Anderson has recently observed, the once-degraded genre of the historical novel, in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history (28) now enjoys predominance. And so, in every sense, Coetzee's is the studied inversion of what passes for the novel today. Minimal in world, abrasive in texture, irresolute in form, these books tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before (7), as Edward Said once observed of Ibsen's last plays. Are these works, then, throwbacks to an earlier and more overtly modernist phase of textual production, a kind of homeless late modern enterprise, stranded like silty, barren islets in an archipelago of indifference within the floodwaters of hysterical realism and postimperial romance? Is their untimeliness of that sort--reactive, backward-looking, formally nostalgic? Surely not. It would be preferable to argue that is less this circumambient literary context on which has now turned his back (for when, truly, was his back not turned to that context?), than the accumulated authorial identity associated with the J. M. Coetzee itself Here the award of the Nobel prize for literature in 2003, and Coetzee's move to Australia the year before, furnish material turning points around which his subsequent career can reasonably be plotted: a (doubtless welcome) dismantlement of habitual practices of and interpretation foisted on the work by the South-Africanness of his national origins, coinciding with the supreme act of consecration open to a living author, would inevitably result (for so spare and selfcritical a writer) in a searching act of formal self-inquisition. And what we find, we enter these texts, is virtually the negation of everything the Nobel tends to confer upon the author function as a semi-autonomous entity; the extirpation of that very aura of authority the Swedish Academy had officially endowed. Instead, we bear witness, over and again, to a protracted aesthetic moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, relationship with it (Said 8). Both in the stories they strive (and sometimes fail) to tell, and in the newly experimental forms through which those stories are made to allegorize themselves and their coming-into-being, these texts irascibly break the bonds that hold a readership together--above all by violating the aesthetic contract that had been drawn up between and his own established community of readers. Which is not to say that his readers have abandoned him, but simply to remark that this new alienated relationship with the text has presented them with challenges of an altogether distinct nature, and that the author function, Prosperolike, has abandoned much of the responsibility had previously assumed with regard to this contract, let alone to the assumed contract with the wider reading public itself. …

The Trauma and Complicated Grief of Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss is a newly identified type of loss that occurs when a loved one is physically present, but psychologically absent. Dementia is just one example. Because the lost person is here, but not here, grief is frozen, life is put on hold, and people are traumatized. With no official verification of death, no possibility of closure, and no rituals for support, there is no resolution of grief (Boss 1999). Clergy, especially pastoral counselors, can witness and provide comfort for such uncanny loss because people rely on them for support, not just from the clear loss of death, but from the ambiguous losses, catastrophic and ordinary, that inevitably will occur across the life course.

Auto on leikki, auto on hauta

The car is a game, the car is a grave. Poststructuralism in Jyrki Kiiskinen’s car poems in his collection Kun elan This article focuses on poems where cars and driving play a key role in Kiiskinen’s collection Kun elan (1999, When I Live), and demonstrates the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations that they evoke. The car is a common denominator in Kiiskinen’s poetry; his poststructuralist play on meanings often begins from the vehicle, and leads to comments on, and deconstruction of perceptions of language and identity. The car poems are examined from a poststructuralist and psychoanalytical perspective through a theoretical framework based on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. Interpreting the etymology and polysemy of the word ‘car’ becomes an element of deconstruction in Kiiskinen’s poems by dissolving the possibility of closure on one meaning or interpretation. The ‘car’ also creates an intertextual connection with Derrida’s concept of differance, and expresses Lacan’s idea of the substitute object as a function and object of lack. The poems communicate experiences of emptiness and transience, as well as Kristeva’s idea of the dissolution of the form of the sign. The ‘car’ in Kiiskinen’s poems can be seen as a symbol of power and a creator of a complete and uniform identity, but it can also become linked with nearness of death, and melancholy.

PERENNIAL QUESTIONS

In his essay ‘What are twelve-note rows really for?’ (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 225, July 2003, p. 36), Michael Graubart suggests that ‘twelve-note rows may give back to atonal music a goal-directed force and the possibility of closure’. He argues that by using a row, composers set up a pattern that can ultimately provide a sense of completion or closure to an atonal piece, although he admits that listeners may have trouble recognizing this completion. Closure in tonal music is in fact a powerful musical force, but one whose strength depends largely upon the hierarchy found in tonal melody and harmony. Consider the closure at the end of a piece. It is here that an authentic cadence signals the coming to rest of large-scale musical forces, both melodic and harmonic, on several levels of structure. We might make analogies, as Graubart does, between tonal closure and the pattern-completion possible with a twelve-note row, but one wonders if any row, or any twelve-note piece for that matter, can provide the type of multi-level completion that is possible within the tonal hierarchy.

Samuel Delany writes difference: Desire and style in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand

Summary This article explores the intersection of transgressive sexual desire, literary convention and the boundaries of style in the Epilogue to Samuel Delany's science fiction masterpiece, Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand (1986). My argument has three parts. First, I discuss themes of gender and transgression in Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988). Second, I examine Delany's subversion of the codes of Romantic poetry in the Epilogue of Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand. Finally, I explore markers of gender and power in Marq Dyeth's speech in the Epilogue, where Delany uses his viewpoint character to plead eloquently that erotic desire should be valorised over public interests. I conclude that Delany radically undermines the possibility of closure in terms of gender, literary tradition and desire.

Rupture, Closure, and Dialectic

The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.