Private World Research Articles

The First World War in Women’s Autobiographical Writing. What, in What Way, and Why Was Omitted?

Summary This article deals with omissions, lacunae and understatements in women’s personal diaries featuring the First World War, in particular the Diaries of Zofia Nałkowska, the Diaries of Maria Kasprowiczowa and Memoirs of Podolia by Helena Kutyłowska. Their content provides ample clues for identifying the characteristic features of women’s wartime autobiographical writing shaped by both the historic context and the personality of the female author. In their autobiographical accounts the war is an eye-opener, making people see things in a more nuanced way, and as an menacing force intruding upon their private worlds. Each narrative works under its burden, and yet none of them is overwhelmed by it. If only for that reason women’s wartime diaries and memoirs remain an interesting historical and personal record, capable of yielding new insights both to historians and historians of literature.

Self- resistance in Dina Mehta’s Getting Away with Murder

Dina Mehta is an Indian writer belonging to the Parsi community. Among the Indian writers belonging to the community of Parsi's, Dina Mehta is prominent. Generally, the Parsi novelists who write in English are differentiated into two categories; expatriate writers and stay-at-home writers and Dina Mehta falls into the category of stay-at-home writers. Other Parsi novelists like Firdaus Kanga, Rohinton Mistry, Farrukh Dhondy and Bapsi Sidhwa are included in the list of expatriate novelists. The work of these novelists reflects the life of their community and the history of India. Their works also portray their ethnic identity and relationships like motherhood, intricate baffling relationship of men and women, incest and adultery. Dina Mehta'sGetting Away With Murderdeals with various issues like child abuses, rape, female feticide, and blind superstitious belief that are the hindrance in the development of human development, but this play voices against foeticide, infanticide, rape, inequality, and gender discrimination. This play portrays the independent thinking modern women who work to rise up herself and world around with her conscience thoughts, and harmony. Getting away with murder is one of the three plays in the collection entitled “Body blows- women violence and survival” published by Seagull books, Calcutta in 2000. The play was first performed by Indus International, a socio-cultural group for women at British Council Theatre in Mumbai in 1990. The play seeks to portray the lives of three friends Mallika, Sonali and Raziya who are connected perhaps by the strain of suffering that they undergo in the hands of male hypocritic and dominating human. The private world outside so corrupted that women have to face childhood sexual abuse, differential treatment on the male and the female child, infidelity partners with whom they have an utterly insecure relationship, sexual harassment at workplace and elsewhere, and a disheveled life despite having been educated.

Conceptual view of Cyberloafing and Non-Work Domain

In an attempt to understand the reasons for employees’ personal Internet use at work, known as cyberloafing, this paper attempts a new perspective to look at the phenomenon. As the barrier between the previously separate work and home domains reduces, employees are increasingly integrating their working and private world. This phenomenon has resulted in employees using their personal time for work-related tasks through technology in the privacy of their homes and private domain. Conversely, employees could be carrying out non-work related Internet use during office hours. This paper aims to explore the possibility of non-work domain as a factor for employees to cyberloaf. This paper proposed a conceptual model based on border theory and theory of interpersonal behaviour. The resultant augmented theory offers a richer explanation of how non-work domain affects employees’ decision making process on cyberloafing.

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Farina (bio) Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz; pp. 344. Princeton UP, 2018. $43.95 cloth. John plotz's Semi-Detached describes the ways fiction, painting, and film portray the "dual experience" (2) of readers, partially absorbed in the virtual world of the text and partially distracted by the contours of the ambient material world. Plotz traces semi-detachment as it plays out formally in nuances of grammar, perspective, and genre and thematically in local passages or scenes, as for instance when the narrator of The Mill on the Floss notices that her "really benumbed" elbows have been pressing on the arms of her chair even as she imagined them to be on the bridge by Dorlcote Mill (qtd. in Plotz 1). If he sometimes stretches to include under the umbrella of semi-detachment the relationships between such features—including novelistic episodes and plots, inasmuch as they can be concomitantly purposeful and digressive—Plotz convincingly extends the semi-detachment represented in texts and actuated by reading to everyday experience. More often than not, we live flickering between a shared material present and our private worlds of thought, detached from temporal, spatial, and other physical limitations. Here, then, "virtual reality" refers not to secondary, artificial worlds in which we might or might not become immersed, but a distinctly modern mode of experiencing the world (actual or fictive) distractedly. Whether reading or not, "we are" as Ford Maddox Ford puts it in his essay "On Impressionism" "almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another" (3). Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception (2001) identifies the economy of attention and distraction as a principle feature of modernity since the 1850s, and both Stephen Arata and Nicholas Dames have elaborated Crary's claim by detailing how inattention or distraction came to function as a medium of political resistance. In The Physiology of the Novel (2007), for instance, Dames shows how Thackeray cultivates distraction as "negative liberty" (73) from the excessive demands that modernity makes on attention, and Plotz's account of John Stuart Mill tacitly follows suit. "We are defined by our semidetached relationship to those around us" (48), Plotz argues, and Mill promotes an individualism modelled on the "semi-detached sociability" (56) of reading. As "mediated involvement" (48), reading offers freedom from the affective immediacy of face-to-face contact. Semi-detachment affords time to make our own choices. Semi-detachment thus edges close to the cluster of moral, epistemological, and political liberal virtues Amanda Anderson details in The Powers of Distance (2001): disinterestedness, impartiality, cosmopolitanism. Applying Mill's notion of reading, Plotz renders fiction not an escape from social engagement but "the acme of all sociability" (73), a practice that enables engagement but preserves autonomy. Plotz similarly recasts provincial novels, paradoxically, [End Page 307] as privileged mediums of cosmopolitan modernity: their chartable but trivial "Nowheresville[s]" (102) stand in for life everywhere because they cultivate "the awareness that one is living at once inside a tiny world, a trivial world, caught in the middle of nowhere, and yet one is also located within the larger currents of the day, potentially locatable anywhere" (111). Middlemarch, Barsetshire, Mitford, and Wessex, with their variously myopic residents—Farebrother with his beetles, Jude with his Christminster cakes—narrate the feeling of being "half-engulfed in daily cares, and half-aware of the forces at work elsewhere in the great world" (121). In doing so, they instantiate in communal form the semi-detachment of readers, at once stuck in their chairs and alive in fictional worlds. True to form, however, Semi-Detached remains semi-detached from scholarship on attention and liberalism; the book favours instead questions of form, genre, and reading. For example, the category of semi-detachment allows Plotz to belie the singularity of effect that Poe prescribed for the short story by registering a generic "polydoxy" in tales by Hogg, Galt, and Dickens. In Hogg's stories, "a fully coherent account of events is replaced in the final few paragraphs with an equally plausible but incompatible alternative explanation" (25). If this polydoxy...

Social networking as the production and consumption of a self

The ubiquitous use of social networking sites (SNS) has resulted in the blurring of individual's private and professional social worlds. As the use of SNS in the workplace grows, it has been studied along a number of dimensions such as its impact on boundary spanning, the advancement of careers, and campaigning for projects. Earlier research on the personal use of SNS has explored user motivations and benefits of participating in SNS including social capital, status seeking, narcissism, self-esteem, and professional identity. However, these studies attempt to describe with static frameworks what we discover to be a dynamic, cyclical process of creation and consumption of self-identity. We conducted a qualitative research study using a grounded theory approach with semi-structured interviews of SNS users, discovering that the creation and consumption of user generated content (UGC) are symbolic interactions, which recursively produce and consume the users' self-identities on SNS. This cyclical framework for explaining the role of self-identity on SNS is a novel finding with broad implications for understanding the use of SNS, especially in the workplace.

William Blake: Apprentice and Master, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 4 December 2014–1 March 2015; Michael Phillips, <i>William Blake: Apprentice and Master</i>

In 2014–15, William Blake: Apprentice and Master presented an artisan who labored to master difficult processes—bearing no small resemblance to the curator, whose life work it has been to understand and to master the techniques used by Blake. Phillips is himself the producer of beautiful artisanal editions of Blake’s illuminated books, printed from reproductions of the plates. His prints eschew color to reveal the delicate linearity of the plates. The atmospheric exhibition design included a re-creation of Blake’s printmaking studio (painted in tasteful Farrow and Ball colors) and labels that looked like copperplates. The visitor was offered a journey into Blake’s private world via a total immersion in the world of the eighteenth-century print trade, a context that appeals to today’s fascination with the craft of the artisan. This re-creation was clean and elegant, a workplace without clutter or dirt, the rubbish cleared away “from a caves mouth.”

The Re-turn: Segments of Recollections from Jawaharlal Nehru University

This essay is a personal reflection of a teacher of sociology taking into account a life-time of decisions, experiences and nuances which have marked the personal and professional lives of the author. It shows the manner in which the situations in the invisible private worlds of family, kin and friends of a person often impact the relatively public worlds of professional life. In many ways, the colour, rhythm and anxieties of these worlds seep into the worlds and words of sociologists who are rooted to their circumstances and not merely restricted by abstractions of theory.

Private world(s): Gender and informal learning of adults

Private world(s): Gender and informal learning of adults

De-publicized secularization and contemporary Chinese mass culture

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to distinguish two kinds of secularization and mass culture in contemporary China by creatively deploying Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas and other western thinkers’ theories of secularization and modernity. It argues that, in the 1980s, China underwent a first process of secularization: that was characterized by liberating a secular society from the quasi-religious totalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution through the re-establishment of a civic society, which integrated individualism and publicness, with awareness of individual rights and rights for participation. The participation of new and self-disciplined rational individuals, who were concerned with pubic interests and issues. This essay takes Teresea Teng's popular songs as an important example of this first kind of secularization, as an attempt to demonstrate how the mass culture of the 1980s actively contributed to the construction of this new publicness. Since the 1990s, however, another kind of secularization emerged, one that did not care about the public world and others, but instead about material enjoyment and intimate private matters. Different from the religious path, this represents a way of abandoning the public world: it takes the form of a retreat into bodily/physiological happiness and one's secluded private world, leading to the development of a morbid narcissistic personality. This essay argues that these two kinds of secularization are the foundation and the starting point for us to understand the political effects of two kinds of mass culture.

Teacher blogs and education policy in a publicly private world: filling the gap between policy and practice

ABSTRACTK-12 teachers who write about their daily work on blogs and other social media platforms share local knowledge and wisdom from the immediate view of the classroom. These first-hand retellings of everyday classroom life offer a unique critique of educational policy from the teachers’ perspective. Reporting on the analysis of 14 public-facing blogs written by New York City public school teachers, this paper highlights the possibilities held in these digital narratives by painting a picture of how teachers respond to the implementation of new educational policies.

Entre lo público y lo privado: empleadores y trabajadoras domésticas frente al Tribunal del Trabajo Doméstico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires

El servicio doméstico ocupa un lugar ambiguo entre los mundos público y privado. Desarrollado en el interior de los hogares de los empleadores, da lugar a relaciones en las que lo laboral y lo afectivo están imbricados. Los juicios laborales entre empleadores y trabajadoras domésticas constituyen un escenario privilegiado para observar el solapamiento de estas dimensiones. Si las demandas de las trabajadoras frente a las instituciones de justicia sitúan esta relación en el mundo público, las respuestas de los empleadores muchas veces buscan resituarlas en el orden privado. Por otra parte, en algunos escenarios, las demandas de las trabajadoras son también expresadas en un lenguaje que remite a lo privado. En este artículo analizamos las lógicas de la confl ictividad judicial establecidas en las estrategias de empleadores y trabajadoras frente al Tribunal del Trabajo Doméstico (TTD), un organismo creado en 1956 para atender los confl ictos individuales que derivan de las relaciones de trabajo de este sector en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Tomamos dos horizontes temporales caracterizados por cambios en la regulación del trabajo, en general, y del servicio doméstico, en particular: el de los primeros años de funcionamiento del TTD y el cambio de siglo.

Mixing methodology, nursing theory and research design for a practice model of district nursing advocacy.

To highlight philosophical and theoretical considerations for planning a mixed methods research design that can inform a practice model to guide rural district nursing end of life care. Conceptual models of nursing in the community are general and lack guidance for rural district nursing care. A combination of pragmatism and nurse agency theory can provide a framework for ethical considerations in mixed methods research in the private world of rural district end of life care. Reflection on experience gathered in a two-stage qualitative research phase, involving rural district nurses who use advocacy successfully, can inform a quantitative phase for testing and complementing the data. Ongoing data analysis and integration result in generalisable inferences to achieve the research objective. Mixed methods research that creatively combines philosophical and theoretical elements to guide design in the particular ethical situation of community end of life care can be used to explore an emerging field of interest and test the findings for evidence to guide quality nursing practice. Combining philosophy and nursing theory to guide mixed methods research design increases the opportunity for sound research outcomes that can inform a nursing model of care.

Private World(s): Gender and Informal Learning of Adults

Book Review Of:PRIVATE WORLD(S): GENDER AND INFORMAL LEARNING OF ADULTSJoanna Ostrouch-Kamińska and Cristina Vieira (Eds.). The European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) in Collaboration with Sense Publishing, Rotterdam, 2015, 194 pages.

Role of justice perceptions and social exchange in enhancing employee happiness

This study looks at procedural, distributive, and interactional justice as antecedents of perceived organisational support (POS) and leader-member exchange (LMX). It also looks at the effect of all these on positive and negative affect. It was hypothesised that all the three justice variables would be positively related to POS, and interactional justice and POS would be positively related to LMX. It was also hypothesised that both POS and LMX would be positively related to positive affect and that POS, LMX, and positive affect would be negatively related to negative affect. Data were collected from 262 managers of a large multi-division Indian Company in the manufacturing space. All respondents had spent at least six months working with their current supervisors. Structural equations modelling was used to test the goodness of fit of the hypothesised model. All hypotheses except the relationship between LMX and negative affect were supported. Ability of workplace events to mould our private world and the obscuring of boundaries between work and personal lives are discussed.

Invisible Things and Unnoticed Expanses

The social world and the private world are most clearly demarcated when it comes to what is most intimately one’s own, namely the things that others cannot, even in principle, possess. Among the things others cannot possess is one’s own field of vision, where the obstacle to another having it, and thereby appreciating it, simply lies in the fact that two human beings cannot occupy the same visual perspectives continuously throughout their lives. Even more intimately one’s own are the things one sees that no other can, even if another managed to occupy one’s visual perspective on the world. This essay is an exploration of those things, so-called “pure visibilia,” focusing on the question of whether those putative items can be discharged in favor of a common visual language of predicates, true or false, of publicly viewable objects. The conclusion is that they cannot be discharged in this way. The important theoretical question is: what does this mean for the theory of vision?

Emerging Hybrid Cloud Patterns

The hybrid cloud model provides the best of the private and public worlds, combining the economies and efficiencies of public cloud computing with the security and control of private cloud computing. However, marrying public and private cloud services requires advanced thinking and some handy technology.

Lies We Tell Sick Children: Mutual Pretense and Uninformed Consent in Cancer Narratives

Lies We Tell Sick Children:Mutual Pretense and Uninformed Consent in Cancer Narratives Susan E. Honeyman (bio) In “A Person’s a Person: Children’s Rights in Children’s Literature,” Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham write that “children’s literature [has] been ignored as a rights-bearing discourse” yet “literature is a source of law for children” (1). In this spirit I propose reading children’s books about cancer as potential rights-bearing, or rights-suppressive, discourses, through the lens of anthropological findings about actual children facing potentially terminal illness. Myra Bluebond-Langner, in her 1978 study of children with leukemia, The Private Worlds of Dying Children, depicted a range of denial, deceit and rare honesty she witnessed and rigorously collected, most frequently demonstrating “mutual pretense,” an unspoken consensus in which “each party defines the patient as dying but acts otherwise,” resulting in hopeful expression only (199). Rather than encouraging child patients, such denial further burdens them with keeping up a masquerade while denying their need for “open awareness,” which would allow freely discussing concerns, questions, and fears (220–21). High-profile cases from news media suggest that this trend is on-going in spite of positive developments codifying child medical rights, demonstrating how mutual pretense infringes on the right to informed consent. Adults often actively withhold the truth from dying child patients, denying their rights to medical honesty, awareness, and agency. I will demonstrate how pervasively popular American adult narratives for children about cancer mirror the same relation—most often modeling “mutual pretense” rather than “open awareness” by either depicting dishonesty towards the dying in their representations without critique or by directly lying to the reader, thus perpetuating a rights-suppressive discourse. The few exceptions that critique mutual pretense help to highlight the dominant practice but also [End Page 179] suggest that through more recent and mature narratives about cancer, open awareness (and thus implicitly, informed consent) is encouraged. Considered within the ethical parameters of child medical rights, texts as diverse in ethnic and historical contexts as Eleanor Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977), Virginia Hamilton’s Bluish (1999), Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira (2004), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) depict and sometimes perform the same denial and dishonesty, demonstrating the pervasiveness of a protectionism that in fact impinges upon children’s participatory rights to full knowledge and self-determination of their bodies. Ultimately cancer narratives tend to protect parents during their emotional struggle to support children rather than respecting young patients and readers by acknowledging their right to be informed and participate as knowing medical subjects. The pretense of “getting better” and “thinking positively,” though sensible in the abstract, simply imposes a greater emotional and social burden on a suffering child. Children’s literature should instead foster open awareness, which the characters in Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) argue for consistently while foregrounding how difficult it is to achieve. Mutual Pretense in “Cancer Books” for Kids In John Green’s 2012 novel, The Fault in Our Stars, narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, describes her favorite book: “it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck” (48). The main character of her favorite novel has cancer, but “Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is” (49). Throughout The Fault in Our Stars, Green reminds his readers that dishonesty pervades popular discourse surrounding young people with life-threatening illness, and his novel invites us to consider not only how deceptive cancer books for young people can be, but also how dishonesty about terminal disease can dominate family dynamics, hospital conversations, even social media and public ritual. Green clearly positions his own novel against a traditional formula of sentimental denial—a formula so well known that Saturday Night Live did an off-color but on-point parody trailer of the film adaptation called The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything, clearly referencing the formula even more than Green’s novel. The schmaltzy mess made of Jodi Picoult’s My Sister...

Translation of Byzantium to the Other Continent

The issue of “creative” translation and interpretation between English and Serbian literary expression, based on the correspondence of two poets, is the starting point for this essay. The basis of the discussion are the lyrics about Byzantium by Ivan V. Lalić, translated and prepared by Charles Simic. Examples of the letters are taken from the book “A view across the ocean: The correspondence of Ivan V. Lalić and Charles Simic 1969–1996,” edited by Svetlana Šeatović Dimitrijević. In preparing this correspondence, a private and authentic world has come to light, and a “surplus of meaning” as the key for understanding the relation between the two poets, who built a friendship in a “scarce time” and kept their presence of mind. This essay presents a critical review of a dialogue about creativity, which forges a bond between Serbian and American literature through the letters of the two poets. The second part of the essay provides a cultural and literary analysis of Simic’s critical interpretation of the reconstructed Byzantium myth in the poetry of Lalić.

User perceptions of mental health consequences of hallucinogen use in self-identified spiritual contexts

Aims The article aims to gain insight into the private worlds of users of hallucinogenic drugs in spiritual contexts, with a focus on the self-perceived mental health implications of their practices. This will help us understand the rationale behind and consequences of hallucinogenic drug use. Method Respondents were recruited at several internet fora for individual email-mediated interviews (n = 5) or group interviews in public discussion threads (n = 11). They were predominantly males in their 30s or 40s with stable jobs and living conditions and extensive hallucinogen experience. Results Both positive and adverse consequences were assessed, and respondents emphasised the capacity of hallucinogenic drugs for healing and personal growth; even adverse experiences (“bad trips”) were regarded as valuable for these purposes. The dependence potential of these drugs was regarded as low because of an inherent self-regulatory mechanism whereby positive effects disappear with overuse. A minority of participants reported mental health problems that may result from their hallucinogen use, but the majority have experienced no significant adverse reactions after many years of use. This should be seen in light of the low frequency of their hallucinogen use. Conclusion The study obtained evidence of a predominantly male group of mature users taking hallucinogens in carefully prepared sessions for the purpose of personal spiritual growth, acknowledging some risks but also several benefits from this practice.

Literary Communities and Commemorations in the Edinburgh Cape Club

AbstractThis article examines the roles of literature and poets in Edinburgh's Cape Club towards the end of the eighteenth century. It examines the club's manuscript collection of songs and poems, including a long narrative poem on its history entitled ‘The Capeiad’, to demonstrate that literature had simultaneously celebratory, commemorative and moralistic functions within the Cape's private world. It analyses the club's yearly literary ‘jubilees’, which memorialise James Thomson, author of The Seasons, and William Shakespeare, to reveal the literary networks at play in the Cape, thereby demonstrating that literature is central to its community.