Monday, September 30, 2019

Synopsis of Renaissance Play, The Roaring Girl

Mary Fitzgerald visits her love Sebastian, dressed as a semester. They were betrothed and something has happened to stop the marriage. Sebastian tells Mary about Moll, whom he's pretending to love to trick his father. Scene 2: Sir Alexander (Sebastian Father) is having guests over. He takes them on a tour of his home and then tells them a story of a man who is in love with a Moll! (Mary and Sebastian were betrothed until his father discovered how low the dowry was, and then he decided not to allow the marriage.Sebastian then pretends to be in eve with Moll to trick his father into letting him marry Mary) A monster†¦ It comes to light that the story is about his own son and Sebastian gets offended and storms out. Sir Alexander then hires Trapdoor to spy on Moll, track her down, and kill her. Act 2: Scene 1: Scenes opens at a group of stores. Here Lagoon is trying to borrow money from Mrs.. Gallop. He pretends to want to sleep with her when really he is using her to get money. (He acts like they have never had the opportunity) We also find out that Lagoon wants to pay Moll for sex†¦ E offers and they agree on a time and place, Gray Inns Fields at 3:00. We have Goshawk who is told a by Mr.. Openwork that he has been seeing a prostitute but sworn to secrecy (Goshawk later in the scene tells his secret because he wants to seduce Mrs.. Openwork) We also see Mrs.. Openwork insult Moll and yell to get out of her store because Moll is considered a where, low class, thief, trash, etc. We also know Moll cross dresses and she pulls a sword on a man who assaulted her at a local tavern. Then Trapdoor approaches Moll and pretends to be her friend, asks to be at her service.They agree to meet at Gray Inns Fields as well between 3:00-4:00. Scene 2: Sebastian is lamenting to himself saying a free man should marry who he wants. His father is hiding in the room and Sebastian sees him but pretends not too. Then Moll and a Porter enter with a Viol. Sebastian then begs Moll for marriage and she states that she is simply too independent to marry. Sir Alexander is dumbfounded. Moll tells him she could possibly love him, but to rethink his proposal, for he could be being too hasty. Then a tailor enters and takes measurements for Molls manly clothing (pants).Moll and Tailor leave and Sir Alexander makes his presence known. He yells at Sebastian for using bad Judgment, he is bewitched, and badmouths Moll saying their marriage would disgrace him. Sebastian defends her saying she is only guilty of having a strong spirit and mingling with male friends. Then Sir Alexander leaves and we hear Sebastian saying how he is using Moll to get Mary. Act 3: Scene 1: Moll meets Lagoon and she takes his money. Then she pulls off her cloak and draws a sword and challenges a duel. She wants to teach him a lesson that not all women are whore's.She says if it were not a sin, women would be better off to sleep tit men, for they lie about it anyway and treat them with disrespec t. They fight and she wins. Lagoon apologizes and leaves. Shortly after, Trapdoor shows (and later he tells Sir Alexander that Moll had met with Sebastian that day) but he doesn't recognize her at first dressed like a man. He then follows Moll. Scene 2: This scene opens with Mrs.. Gallop being somewhat moody and angry before her guests arrive. Mr.. Gallop comes in and asks her if she's pregnant. He unknowingly delivers a love letter from Lagoon (requesting 30 more pounds) Mr..Gallop walks back in and catches her reading the letter. She tears up the letter and to cover up her scheme she tells him that she and Lagoon had a contract to be married, but she thought he was dead. Now he has tracked her down (at the cost of 30 pounds) and wants to marry her. He doesn't want a court battle so agrees to pay Lagoon. Then the guests arrive, they think Mrs.. Gallop is ill and she should lay down, so they leave. Then Lagoon arrives and he falls into the plan (he did not know until he picked up hi nts from Mrs.. Gallop). He then acts angry at the fact not being able to marry her†¦ E says he would marry her no matter what. He takes the 30 pounds and the Gaslight's leave. The scene closes with Lagoon saying women are deceiving. Scene 3: (Sir Alexander acts like Trapdoor owes him money so he can run and talk to him) Scene opens with Trapdoor telling Sir Alexander that he has Moll on the ropes. Trapdoor tells him that Moll meets Sebastian dressed as a man (and says they met that day at three†¦ Moll had once again tricked them) Then we see Sir Dad who is Jack Diapers' father talking about how bad/wild his son is. He tells his plan to hire policeman to arrest Jack, put him in Jail to teach him a lesson.Sir Dad is talking to he two cops (Curtail and Hanger) and they do not realize they are talking to Sir Dad (they insult him to his face and look like fools) The cops go looking for Jack, but Moll and Trapdoor overhear them and warn Jack before they can catch Jack. The cops get angry at Moll, and she's pleased with her ‘good deed'. Act 4: Scene 1: Opens again with Trapdoor bragging that he has Moll. Sir Alexander tries to set Moll up by planting expensive items for her to steal. (Gold Chain, money). They exit and Moll, Mary (both dressed as men) enter with Sebastian. They are talking, Moll tells that she has never initiated (or had) sex?Then Moll sings and later sees the gold chain and diamond. Sebastian then plans to give 40 pound to Moll (maybe to pay for her help? ) Sir Alexander knows who Moll is, but pretends not to know when he enters. And Sebastian covers saying she is a musician and he is paying for her services. Scene 2: This scene opens with Mrs.. Gallop and Mrs.. Openwork talking. Mrs.. Openwork admits to knowing what Goshawk is up to†¦ She says she asked her husband about the affair and she also knows Goshawk wants to date her. Mrs.. Gallop then admits that Lagoon was after her too, but she is finally rid of him as well.Goshawk e nters and offers to try to trap Mr.. Openwork in an affair(? ) They put on masks and Lagoon enters. Then so does Mr.. Openwork. He wants them to take off the masks and she lets him know they are angry (Goshawk doesn't know Mrs.. Openwork told Mr.. Openwork that he told his secret, so he gets really nervous thinking she is going to give him away). Mrs.. Openwork then says for her husband to â€Å"Seek his where† and Mr.. Openwork starts asking who told. No one will tell and he confronts Goshawk, it comes out that Goshawk had told and that everything was a trick to teach him a lesson. Mr.. Openwork had set Goshawk up but now forgives him.Next, Mr.. Gallop enters with Greenest disguised as a Sumner and Lagoon. Lagoon is demanding more money based on Mrs.. Gaslight's lie. Greenest then removes his mask and Mrs.. Gallop tells the truth (and tells that they did not have sex). Lagoon says he was only testing Mrs.. Gallop and was doing it in noble honesty, but says she refused him. L agoon agrees to pay Mr.. Gallop back in full plus interest for what he did. Act 5: Scene 1: Jack Dapper, Moll (dressed as a man) and Sir Beauteous Ganymede enter. Moll tells them that she knows about Trapdoor being a fraud, and Jack says he knows hat he father was the one who sent the cops after him.Then Attract and Trapdoor enter disguised as soldiers (Moll recognizes them) Claimed to have fought in a war that was over 100 years ago. Moll pulls off his patch and reveals him. They still claim to be soldiers and beggars. They give them money. Moll asks Trapdoor if he will still pretend to go along with Sir Alexander plot. Then several structures enter and Moll describes the ways of thieving (busting them), so they leave. Scene 2: Sir Alexander, Goshawk, and Greenest enter. Sir Alexander is still complaining about his son wanting to marry Moll. Sir Guy Fitzgerald enters and aunts him about his son's new choice (? Sir Alexander begs Sir Guy for help, but he is still upset for him not a llowing the marriage to happen in the first place. So Sir Alexander agrees to give up half his estate to get rid of Moll. Then Moll enters it is told that she helped to trick Sir Alexander. Sebastian apologized to his father, Sir Alexander apologized to Mary and Moll states that she did them all a favor. Moll then announces that when gallants are not in fear of being arrested for debt, etc†¦ Then she will marry (in other words, never) Sir Alexander thanks Moll, Trapdoor confesses, and everyone is happy!

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Charles Baudelaire

Born in Paris in 1821, Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized as not only one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century but also a forefather of modern art. Baudelaire lived during a tumultuous time in French history and his work was impacted by a number of political events. However, his personal life was also turbulent: One of the most scarring episodes of his life was the death of his father in 1827 and his mother's hasty remarriage to a general in the French army. Baudelaire detested his stepfather both personally and as a symbol of the corrupt July monarchy established following the 1830 Revolution.He went to great lengths to upset his stepfather, squandering his inheritance and living a bohemian lifestyle. Worried about his behavior, his family sent him on a trip across the Mediterranean, whose exotic beauty left a lasting impression on the young poet. Shortly after Baudelaire's return to Paris, the 1848 Revolution overthrew the July monarch and established a republic in France for the first time in more than fifty years. Baudelaire greeted the revolution with enthusiasm, fighting among the barricades and openly defying his stepfather in public.However, his joy soon turned to disenchantment when Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleon's nephew, overthrew the Second Republic in 1851. Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat instituted the Second Empire, ending the hopes for a republican form of government that men like Baudelaire favored. His disenchantment then turned to despair when Louis Napoleon began an intense rebuilding and public works project aimed at modernizing Paris. Baudelaire was horrified with the destruction of the ancient and medieval sections of Paris that he had called his home. His longing for the â€Å"old† Paris would play a major role in his poetry.Baudelaire's disgust with politics led to a rejection of reality in favor of an obsessive fantasy world inspired by drugs, the exotic beauty of the Mediterranean, and the search for lov e. He was strongly influenced in this regard not only by his experiences along the Mediterranean but also by Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings he translated into French. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's evocation of the dark side of the imagination, and he found a comparably sinister seductiveness in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, as well as the music of Wagner. These themes and influences play a redominant role in Baudelaire's 1857 collection of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and death with an ideal universe of happiness. Baudelaire's exotic themes quickly caught the attention of the government, which condemned The Flowers of Evil for immorality. Unlike his friend, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was also put on trial, Baudelaire lost his case, had to pay a fine, and was forced to remove some poems from the collection. Baudelaire was devastated by this rejection of his work, which he attributed to the h ypocrisy of a bourgeoisie incapable of understanding artistic innovation.Yet at the same time, he saw the condemnation of his work as the culmination of the different themes and events that had shaped his artistic talent since his youth: no achievement of beauty could be unaccompanied by bitterness and disappointments. Indeed, with this philosophy, Baudelaire shifted the attention of the art world to the darker side of life, inspiring contemporary and future artists to new levels of perception and provocation. Analysis A confession of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil attempts to extract beauty from the malignant.Unlike traditional poetry that relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire felt that modern poetry must evoke the artificial and paradoxical aspects of life. He thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and even fueled by sin. The result is a clear opposition between two worlds, â€Å"spleen † and the â€Å"ideal. † Spleen signifies everything that is wrong with the world: death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. ) In contrast, the ideal represents a transcendence over the harsh reality of spleen, where love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy. The ideal is primarily an escape of reality through wine, opium, travel, and passion. Dulling the harsh impact of one's failure and regrets, the ideal is an imagined state of happiness, ecstasy, and voluptuousness where time and death have no place. Baudelaire often uses erotic imagery to convey the impassioned feeling of the ideal. However, the speaker is consistently disappointed as spleen again takes up its reign. Read also Edgar Allan Poe DrugsHe is endlessly confronted with the fear of death, the failure of his will, and the suffocation of his spirit. Yet even as the poem's speaker is thwarted by spleen, Baudelaire himself never desists in his attempt to make the bizarre beautiful, an attempt perfectly expressed by the juxtaposition of his two worlds. As in the poem â€Å"Carrion,† the decomposing flesh has not only artistic value but inspires the poet to render it beautifully. Women are Baudelaire's main source of symbolism, often serving as an intermediary between the ideal and spleen.Thus, while the speaker must run his hands through a woman's hair in order to conjure up his ideal world, he later compares his lover to a decomposing animal, reminding her that one day she will be kissing worms instead of him. His lover is both his muse, providing ephemeral perfection, and a curse, condemning him to unrequited love and an early death. Women, thus, embody both what Baudelaire called th e elevation toward God and what he referred to as the gradual descent toward Satan: They are luminous guides of his imagination but also monstrous vampires that intensify his sense of spleen, or ill temper.The result is a moderate misogyny: Baudelaire associates women with nature; thus, his attempt to capture the poetry of the artificial necessarily denied women a positive role in his artistic vision. Baudelaire's poetry also obsessively evokes the presence of death. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† a possible love interest turns out to be a menacing death. Female demons, vampires, and monsters also consistently remind the speaker of his mortality. However, the passing of time, especially in the form of a newly remodeled Paris, isolates the speaker and makes him feel alienated from society.This theme of alienation leaves the speaker alone to the horrific contemplation of himself and the hopes of a consoling death. Baudelaire further emphasizes the proximity of death through his relia nce on religious imagery and fantasy. He earnestly believes that Satan controls his everyday actions, making sin a depressing reminder of his lack of free will and eventual death. Finally, elements of fantastical horror–from ghosts to bats to black cats– amplify the destructive force of the spleen on the mind.Baudelaire was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and he saw Poe's use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of human existence. For example, Baudelaire's three different poems about black cats express what he saw as the taunting ambiguity of women. Moreover, the presence of tortured demons and phantoms make the possibility of death more immediate to the speaker, prefiguring the fear and isolation death will bring. Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! In â⠂¬Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evokes a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon. The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life.The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies. Just as in the introdu ctory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. † This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty.In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically subli me and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. † He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure.Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation. He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination. Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † FormBaudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect. For example, in â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with he calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone. Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title.The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,â₠¬  meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death. But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre.The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. † He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelair e felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve. He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"TheAlbatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world. For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,† the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses. This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean.In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the speaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness. The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! wims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part I Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! † In â€Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evok es a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon.The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life. The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies.Just as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. † Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty. In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically sublime and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure. Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation.He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination.Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † Form Baudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect.For example, in â€Å"Exotic Per fume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with the calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone.Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,† meaning both evil and sickness) comes to sign ify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death.But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other . Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve.He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"The Albatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world.For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,â €  the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses.This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean. In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the sp eaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness.The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! swims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part II Summary Despite the speaker's preliminary evocation of an ideal world, The Flowers of Evil's inevitable focus is the speaker's â€Å"spleen,† a symbol of fear, agony, melancholy, moral degradation, destruction of the spirit–everything that is wrong with the world. The spleen, an organ that rem oves disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") Although the soothing ideal world in the first section does remain a significant presence for the speaker, it will now serve primarily as a reminder of his need to escape from a torturous reality. Even â€Å"The Ideal† begins with â€Å"They never will do, these beautiful vignettes. † Baudelaire's juxtaposition of the poem's title (â€Å"The Ideal†) with its content suggests that the ideal is an imagined impossibility.He insists that he cannot find the ideal rose for which he has been looking, declaring that his heart is an empty hole. The comforting, pure, and soothing presence of a woman has also given way to â€Å"Lady Macbeth, mighty soul of crime. † As the speaker acknowledges in â€Å"Earlier Life,† the beautiful majesty of blue waves and voluptuous odors that fill his dreams cannot ful ly obscure â€Å"the painful secret that lets me languish. † Baudelaire uses the theme of love and passion to play out this interaction between the ideal and the spleen.In â€Å"Hymn to Beauty,† he asks a woman: â€Å"Do you come from the deep sky or from the abyss, / O Beauty? Your look, infernal and divine, / Confuses good deeds and crimes. † The speaker projects his anxiety at a disappointing reality onto a woman's body: Her beauty is real but it tempts him to sin. Both angel and siren, this woman brings him close to God but closer to Satan. He then refers to his lover as a witch and demon in â€Å"Sed non Satiata† (â€Å"Still not Satisfied†). The reality of her tortuous presence awakens him from his opium-induced dream, his desire pulling him toward hell.This ambivalence between the ideal and the spleen is also played out with the juxtaposition of the speaker's lover to a decaying corpse in â€Å"Carrion. † While out walking with his lo ver, the speaker discovers rotting carrion infested with worms and maggots, but which releases pleasing music. He compares the carrion (a word for dead and decaying flesh) to a flower, realizing that his lover will also one day be carrion, eaten by worms. Just like the corpse, nothing will be left of their â€Å"decomposed love. † The theme of death inspired by the sight of the carrion plunges the speaker into the anxiety of his spleen.The nostalgic timelessness and soothing heat of the sun are replaced by the fear of death and a sun of ice in â€Å"De Profundis Clamavi† (â€Å"From Profoundest Depths I Cry to You†). The mythical and erotic voyage with a woman in the ideal section is now phantasmagoric pursuit by cats, snakes, owls, vampires, and ghosts, all of whom closely resemble the speaker's lover. In two separate poems both entitled â€Å"The Cat,† the speaker is horrified to see the eyes of his lover in a black cat whose chilling stare, â€Å"prof ound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword. In â€Å"The Poison,† the speaker further associates the image of his lover with death. Unlike opium and wine, which help the speaker evade reality, the evasion of his lover's mouth is the kiss of death: â€Å"But all this doesn't equal the poison kiss / Arising in your green eyes. † The section culminates with four poems entitled â€Å"Spleen. † Depressed and â€Å"irritated at the entire town,† the speaker laments the coming of death and his defunct love, as a ghost and the â€Å"meager, mangy body of a cat† evoke the haunting specter of his lover. In the next â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker watches the world around him decompose.He is swallowed up by death, comparing himself to a cemetery, a tomb, and a container for withered roses. Empty physically and spiritually, only the miasma of decay is left for him to smell. In the fourth and final â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker is suffocated by the tradi tionally calming presence of the sky. Devoid of light, â€Å"the earth becomes a damp dungeon, / When hope, like a bat, / Beats the walls with its timid wings / And bumps its head against the rotted beams. † Drenched by rain and sorrow, the bells of a nearby clock cry out, filling the air with phantoms.Horrified and weeping with misery, the speaker surrenders as, â€Å"Anguish, atrocious, despotic, / On my curved skull plants its black flag. † Form Baudelaire uses the structure of his poems to amplify the atmosphere of the speaker's spleen. In â€Å"Spleen† (I) each stanza accumulates different levels of anguish, first beginning with the city, then creatures of nature and nightmare, and finally, other objects. This layered expression of pain represents Baudelaire's attempt to apply stylistic beauty to evil. Moreover, his sentences lose the first-person tense, becoming grammatically errant just as the speaker is morally errant.By beginning the first three stanzas of â€Å"Spleen† (IV) all with the word â€Å"When,† Baudelaire formally mirrors his theme of monotonous boredom and the speaker's surrender to the inexorable regularity and longevity of his spleen. Another aspect of Baudelaire's form is his ironic juxtaposition of opposites within verses and stanzas, such as in â€Å"Carrion,† with â€Å"flower† and â€Å"stink. † Commentary Baudelaire is a poet of contrasts, amplifying the hostility of the speaker's spleen with the failure of his ideal world. Like the abused albatross in the first section, the poet becomes an anxious and suffering soul.It is important to remember that the speaker's spleen is inevitable: It occurs despite his attempts to escape reality. The flowers he hopes to find on a â€Å"lazy island† in â€Å"Exotic Perfume† do not exist: It is the stinking carrion that is the real â€Å"flower† of the world. The failure of his imagination leaves him empty and weak; havi ng searched for petals, he finds their withered versions within himself. The poetry itself suggests a resurgence of the ideal through its soothing images only to encounter the disappointing impossibility of calming the speaker's anxiety.In this sense, the speaker's spleen is also the poet's. Indeed, the gradual climax and terror of the speaker's spleen in â€Å"Spleen† (IV) has often been associated with Baudelaire's own nervous breakdown. The hostile and claustrophobic atmosphere of the speaker's world is most eloquently expressed in the failure of his ability to love. The poet originally intends his love to be a source of escape but is soon reminded of the cruel impossibility of love that characterizes his reality. For him, love is nothing but a decomposing carrion. Instead of life, love reminds him of death: A woman's kiss becomes poisonous.Baudelaire often spoke of love as the traditionally artistic attempt to escape boredom. Yet he never had a successful relationship and as a result, the speaker attributes much of his spleen to images of women, such as Lady Macbeth and Persephone. Cruel and murderous women, such as the monstrous female vampire in â€Å"The Vampire,† are compared to a â€Å"dagger† that slices the speaker's heart. But Baudelaire also finds something perversely seductive in his demoniacal images of women, such as the â€Å"Femme Fatale† in â€Å"Discordant Sky† and the â€Å"bizarre deity† in â€Å"Sed non Satiata. Baudelaire often described his disgust at images of nature and found fault in women for what he saw as their closeness to nature. However, what comes through in the poetry is not so much Baudelaire's misogyny as his avowed weakness and insatiable desire for women. The speaker's spleen involves thoughts of death, either in the form of an eventual suicide or the gradual decay of one's body. Sickness, decomposition, and claustrophobia reduce the expansive paradise of the speaker's ideal to a single city pitted against him.Baudelaire felt alienated from the new Parisian society that emerged after the city's rebuilding period, often walking along the city streets just to look at people and observe their movements. This self-imposed exile perfectly describes the sense of isolation that pervades the four â€Å"Spleen† poems. Yet while the city alienates and isolates, it does not allow for real autonomy of any kind: The speaker's imagination is haunted by images of prison, spiders, ghosts, and bats crashing into walls.Unlike the albatross of the ideal, the bat of the spleen cannot fly. This restriction of space is also a restriction of time, as the speaker feels his death quickly approaching. Baudelaire saw the reality of death as fundamentally opposed to the imagined voyage to paradise; rather, it is a journey toward an unknown and terrible fate. The â€Å"frightful groan† of bells and the â€Å"stubborn moans† of ghosts are horrific warning signs of the impending victory of the speaker's spleen. According to the poet, there are no other sounds. Parisian Landscapes SummaryBaudelaire now turns his attention directly to the city of Paris, evoking the same themes as the previous section. In â€Å"Landscape,† he evokes a living and breathing city. The speaker hears buildings and birds singing, also comparing window lamps to stars. He considers the city a timeless place, passing from season to season with ease. It is also a space of dreams and fantasy, where the speaker finds â€Å"gardens of bronze,† â€Å"blue horizons,† and â€Å"builds fairy castles† during the night. Paris becomes an enchanted city, where even a beggar is a beautiful princess.For example, the speaker admires the erotic beauty of a homeless woman in â€Å"To a Red-headed Beggar Girl,† especially her â€Å"two perfect breasts. † He does not see her rags but, rather, the gown of a queen complete with pearls formed from drop s of water. The speaker then laments the destruction of the old Paris in â€Å"The Swan. † Evoking the grieving image of Andromache, he exclaims: â€Å"My memory teems with pity / As I cross the new Carrousel / Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal). All he sees now is the chaos of the city's rebuilding, from scaffolding to broken columns. Baudelaire then juxtaposes the pure but exiled image of a white swan with the dark, broken image of the city. The swan begs the sky for rain but gets no reply. The speaker forces himself to come to grips with the new city but cannot forget the forlorn figure of the swan as well as the fate of Andromache, who was kidnapped shortly after her husband's murder. The presence of the grieving Andromache evokes the theme of love in the city streets.But in the modern city, love is fleeting–and ultimately impossible– since lovers do not know each other anymore and can only cat ch a glimpse of each other in the streets. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† the speaker conjures up a beautiful woman and tries to express his love with one look: they make eye contact, but it is quickly broken, as they must each head their separate ways. The encounter is tragic because they both feel something (â€Å"O you who I had loved, O you who knew! â€Å") and yet they know that their next meeting will be in the afterlife; a foreboding presence of death looms over the poem's end.Baudelaire continues to expose the dark underside, or spleen, of the city. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") In â€Å"Evening Twilight,† he evokes â€Å"cruel diseases,† â€Å"demons,† â€Å"thieves,† â€Å"hospitals,† and â€Å"gambling. † The different aspects of the city are compared to wild beasts and anthills, while â€Å"Prostitution ignites in the streets. † Paris becomes a threatening circus of danger and death where no one is safe.By the end of the section, in â€Å"Morning Twilight,† â€Å"gloomy Paris† rises up to go back to work. Form It is important to note that most of the poems in this section are dedicated to Victor Hugo, who composed long epic poems about Paris. In this context, Baudelaire abandons the structure and rhythm of the previous section in order to emulate Hugo's own style. However, in â€Å"To a Passerby,† Baudelaire returns to his original form, using a traditional sonnet structure (two quatrains and two three-line stanzas).As in â€Å"Spleen and Ideal,† he emphasizes the imperfection of the speaker's spleen with imperfections in meter, isolating the words â€Å"Raising† and â€Å"Me† at the beginning of their respective lines. Commentary Baudelaire was deeply affected by the rebuilding of Paris after the r evolution of 1848. Begun by Louis-Napoleon in the 1850s, this rebuilding program widened streets into boulevards and leveled entire sections of the city. Baudelaire responded to the changing face of his beloved Paris by taking refuge in recollections of its mythic greatness but also with a sense of exile and alienation.The swan symbolizes this feeling of isolation, similar to the â€Å"Spleen† poems in which the speaker feels that the entire city is against him. The Swan asks God for rain in order to clean the streets and perhaps return Paris to its antique purity but receives no response. Suddenly, the city itself has become a symbol of death as its rapid metamorphoses remind the speaker of the ruthlessness of time's passage and his own mortality: â€Å"The shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal. † The speaker sees Paris as a modern myth in progress, evoking such mythological figures as Andromache and Hector.Even the negative aspects o f city life, ranging from prostitution to gambling, are described as animals, giving Baudelaire's poetry an allegorical quality. For example, in â€Å"Evening Twilight,† the poet evokes â€Å"Dark Night,† which casts its shadow over the ants, worms, and demons, symbolizing Parisian prostitution, theater, and gambling. Together, the city, its vices, and its people form a mythical, â€Å"unhealthy atmosphere,† instructing the reader to learn his or her lesson. Yet Paris is primarily a cemetery of failed love, as described in

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Business Ethics from Profit domain Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Business Ethics from Profit domain - Essay Example Business Ethics from Profit domain Business ethics is concerned with how businesses relate with the globe at large as well as their one-on-one relationship with their individual customers. Most business across the globe has earned bad reputation as a result of just being in the world of business. In the eyes of most people, the bottom line of business in making money, and this action is referred to as capitalism. Indeed, it is not wrong to have a means of generating money in the business world, but the manner in which it is being done is what counts, hence, a concern in business ethical behavior. It is conflicting to resolve the existing tension between a philosopher who believes in ethics in business and a money minded business owner. To fine the conflict the paper will look at three different ways that will lead the business world into business ethical standards (Chryssides and Kaler, 12-13). Business Ethics from Profit domain There has been an argument that business and ethics have a symbiotic correlation in which naturally ethics emerges from the businesses which are profit oriented. As a result of this, there are two ways of explaining the ethical standards. One, the application of good ethics in the business results to successful business. In general, it means that when businesses practice moral standards, they earn profits. However, this is not usually the case; for instance, making of safe products is profitable since product liability is decreased. In addition, businesses are profitable if employees privacy is respected, since there will be increased motivation hence efficiency. (Hartley, 44), Argues that, the only way a business can earn long-term interests, it’s by seeking trust from the public. However, this version has its weakness; for instance, most business that upholds moral practice will attain an economic advantage in the long run only. Little incentives are provided to businesses that seek profits within a short time. In addition some business morals may not be economi cally viable whether in the long run or short term. On the other hand, moral business depends on what it is being the product or service that will earn the business good profit. Therefore, the conflict that exists between business ethics and profits is incidental. The Second way is that, the profit motive in a free market which is competitive will bring about business ethics. Meaning that, if safe products are demanded by consumers, or if employees demand for their privacy, then consumers will purchase from or the individuals would wish to be employed in business that have their demand. It is therefore obvious that, good businesses lead to standard ethics, when business standards are observed by individuals involved in the business it is automatic to attract the consumers. However, the assumption that consumers and employees will demand there need to be met is challenging. The consumers may desire poor products if they are making a saving and the employees will forego their needs if they are compensated with high pays. It is important to note that not every ethical behavior in a business will lead to profitability. Business Ethics against laws The other strategy of business ethics is that the ethical obligation in a business encounters laws constrains. Across the globe, morality from the westernized has been put into legal laws such as harassments, killings and fraud. For

Friday, September 27, 2019

Small and Medium Enterprises in the USA Case Study

Small and Medium Enterprises in the USA - Case Study Example In this chapter, all the problems and issues that are associated with a small scale business have been discussed, including their aims and objectives and how these businesses function on such a small scale. Their main sources of finance, as well as profit capabilities, have been discussed, as well as the ways by which these businesses tend to make money.  ASME functions on a very small level and the employees that are usually working in an SME are quite illiterate or do not have the desired level of qualification that is needed. Commonly, a small scale business can be functional in several ways. For instance, a small handicraft business would be regarded as an SME. This is because i) the number of profits generated by a business is quite low and not consistent and ii) the number of employees that are working in an SME is lower than 50, which is the actual limitation set by the European Commission. A ‘medium’ sized business is one which functions on a slightly larger sc ale as compared to a small business, and as described by the EU Commission, the number of employees in a medium scale business is more than 50 but less than 250. There are several issues that arose while this research was undertaken. Due to the lack of records that are unavailable, most of the research had to be undertaken on a purely qualitative level and very little quantitative data was found with which a proper extract an idea could be generated about small business. Furthermore, the types of businesses that are functioning on a small scale level are quite diverse. For instance, an online business is a small scale business, because the profits generated online are usually not as high as compared to a large scale business, and the numbers of employees in such a business are usually quite low. On the other hand, an agricultural business is also a small scale business, because the number of employees that are hired for agricultural purposes is not that high, and therefore their ill iteracy causes a huge hindrance in proper communication (Goodman, 2003).  Ã‚  Ã‚   Another research issue that arose was the fact that a small business keeps very little records of their past dealings because of the lack of space or storage data. Therefore, most of the claims made by small businesses could not be verified and only after extensive research could it be found whether the word of a small scale business entrepreneur was true or not. This caused a problem because all data that had to be included in the research needed to be verified and validated, and it took a lot of effort and intellect in order to come up with the right results.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 20

Philosophy - Essay Example Although it is not possible to say he describes the absolute truth in his works, the lens he uses to look at history—realism—is one of the most valuable and significant. What was Thucydides’ political philosophy? Simply put, people are not perfect and rarely have the best intentions of the human race in mind when they act, in particular if they are leaders of various countries. Thucydides looked at the characters and conflicts and his time and tried to understand why events happened the way they did. He didn’t act in a hardcore ideological way and he did let his curiosity motivate him, but he had decided views about politics. Although he admired Pericles, he hated demagogues who would rile up the masses and force the country and its leaders to act out of the basest of instincts. All of the issues and problems of politics that this great man came up with and first observed thousands of years ago are with us to this day. We can see the philosophical legacy of Thucydides present in today’s world amongst analysts who look at the world from a position of realism. These people would look, for example, at Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and they would say that Russia’s motives in invading Afghanistan were rooted in self-interests, vested interests, the desire to perpetrate the communist ideology in the whole world, the amassing of more powers that would tilt the balance of power in its favor and against the interests of its Cold War adversary, the United States. To the realist and to Thucydides, expansion of power is often a nation or person’s motivating force and ambition. States and people compete for economic resources and the highest degree of security possible. States value military and economic strength and they are stopped in its tracks only when the level of power of opposing claimants are stronger or just as equal. When analyzing a war—Thucydides

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

KFC Product Design Dissertation Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

KFC Product Design - Dissertation Example Basically, KFC is the chain of the restaurant which offers goods and services to the consumers. The Goods offer by KFC is a huge variety of chicken-based products and fast food items. The service includes the quick and friendlier service to its clients in a restaurants industry. The base of service design of KFC is a self-service and quick response to the customers. We will focus on both aspects of KFC product design. The interesting feature of the KFC chain is that it only serves chicken based products but are highly successful worldwide. They have introduced a huge variety of chicken products in different forms. But before discussing the product design of KFC let us know about the general product design of any company and its important features. It is basically concerned with improving the service which is providing to valuable customers. Like for a restaurant, by changing the menu or layout we can change customer’s experience. To use a technique to design the service, there are certain plans which are prepared. The managers have to consider people, material requirements, basic infrastructure, and communication mean to design a service. The service must be accurately designed to gain a competitive edge in the market and appeal to more customers. It is very important to develop the right design for the personnel employed and for the financial growth of a company. The service design basically involves re-organizing the activities in delivering service to the clients. It could be by receiving emails from the customers or in person, telephone or website. This could be done either by improving the existing service or creating new. The concepts and ideas are basically stored in prototypes. With strong visual element and cha nce to test it drastically improve the service and adds real value to compete in markets.

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Explain what you understand the term Transnational Corporation to Essay

Explain what you understand the term Transnational Corporation to mean. Using specific examples of these organisations, assess what contribution they have made to the development of Globalisation - Essay Example These include; product marketing, personnel, financial matters as well as production strategies. The policies may have host country orientation or parent country orientation (Held, D and Mcgrew, 2000 pp.122-127). A transnational corporation may be owned by citizens of one, two countries or more. In another situation, a corporation may establish branches in different countries in order to reduce the cost of transporting raw materials in order to reduce the final cost of the products that is added to the consumer price. A corporation may also establish branches in countries that import its products in order to escape import tax that may be enforced by the importing country against foreign corporations. An example of this is when external levy was enforced against outsiders by the European Community, corporations from the United States engaged in Foreign Direct Investment in order to evade these tariffs (Howard Perlmutter, 1969 pp.36-38). Fluctuating exchange rates are also a factor that leads to the establishment of transnational corporations in order to avoid losses that are associated with these rates. This phenomenon arises when corporations produce at a high value of the local currency and then the value falls during exportation. They opt to establish a subsidiary industry in the importing country. Competition is also a factor that gives rise to transnational corporations. A corporation X in one country may be producing the same products as another corporation Y in a different country, both competing for a common market Z. corporation X may tackle this competition through purchasing company Y and other such corporations in several countries, thereby becoming a transnational corporation. An example is when both Monarch in Germany and Opel in Canada were purchased by GM which gave rise to GM Germany and GM Canada respectively (Hill, Charles W L, 2008 pp 24-31). Lower

Monday, September 23, 2019

Sustainable Management Futures Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words - 7

Sustainable Management Futures - Essay Example Hence, there was considerable opposition from developers of the resort as the scenic splendour The company can adopt the policy of maximum pollution, which can be evaded under the law of South Carolina, in order to maximise the company’s revenues as well as create adequate job opportunities in the concerned area. Then again, this policy will affect aesthetic quality of the environment and hamper business of the resorts in Hilton Head by way of attracting lesser visitors (Taylor, 2011). Long-term effects of pollution are very hard to determine and BASF’s past experiences in other countries, where they had polluted rivers, did not help them with a buoyant feeling. As a result, development of the factory had become more of a moral issue than a business one. In order to solve the moral issue, the researcher proposes that the BASF’s manager had three options. He can either build the factory with the least pollution control or maximise the pollution control or further still, he can choose to not build the factory at all. The first option will yield a tolerable amount of water pollution, huge company profits, satisfied shareholders and extremely antagonistic resort developers as well as greater employment opportunities. The second option, on the other hand, would yield low profits for the company, unsatisfied shareholders, minimal pollution, welcoming developers and high costs incurred so as to implement pollution control measures. The third option would have approval of the developers, yield no profits, incur costs so as to search for a new location and also disappoint the local residents who were in support of the industrialisation. The best course of action in such a case would be to weigh all the options, analyse the environment and organisational benefits and come up with the best possible or optimal solution that would benefit all. Both the manager and the company were confronted with a number of duties and obligations. The organisation management

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - Essay Example While the Act was initially seen as being bad for US business abroad, the long-term effects have been for the benefit of US companies both domestically and internationally. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 was implemented to further restrain the practices of American business in the areas of using undue influence in international business. According to the Congressional Research Service the FCPA was, "...enacted principally to prevent corporate bribery of foreign officials" (Seitzinger). Before the Act was passed, there were cases of corporations using secret funds to influence and bribe foreign officials. The government contended that these illegal payments, "...affected adversely American foreign policy, damaged abroad the image of American democracy, and impaired public confidence in the financial integrity of American corporations" (Seitzinger). The FCPA also reasserted the ideals of fair trade and anti-trust policies by curtailing the unfair practices that might place a corporation in an unfairly advantageous position over a competitor through a corrupt practice. While these business practices had been outlawed by the array of prev ious legislative acts, the FCPA codified and focused the illegal activity under one act. The FCPA of 1977, and the amendments of 1988 and 1998, specifically prohibits the bribery of any foreign official and making false or misleading entries into a company's financial records. Prior to the FCPA, companies would use slush funds to make payments to foreign officials to gain a business advantage. Often these payments would be incorrectly described in their accounting practices (Johnson). In addition the FCPA also expanded the definition of 'foreign official' to include not only highly placed government officials but also private persons who may have a function similar to a government employee. This could include contractors working on government contracts or doing business with a foreign government. The FCPA further outlawed the practice of influencing regulatory policies and the obtaining of permits or licenses through fraud and bribery. The FCPA also further defined and prohibited the practice of "willful blindness" where a company pays money and does not make an inquiry that any reasonable person would make as to the use of said money (Johnson). The FCPA does not differentiate between a bribe that succeeds and an offer that fails or is declined. The Act defines corruption as the intent to unfairly influence. There are two sections that define the enforcement of the FCPA. There is the criminal provision that is enforced by the US Department of Justice and the civil portion that is enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ("Foreign Corrupt Practices"). The SEC also has responsibility to monitor and enforce the accounting standards set forth in the Act. The criminal fines for violation can be quite extensive. The corporation can be fined up to $2 million, while individual violators can face fines of up to $100,000 and be sentenced to 5 years in prison (Shaheen and Geren, 3). Shaheen and Geren further note that the corporation is banned from reimbursing the fines and penalties levied against an individual violation. The fines that can be levied by the SEC for

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Five Traits Essay Example for Free

Five Traits Essay 1.Define and discuss the importance of the following traits associated with leaders: intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability. Is this list all inclusive? a.Intelligence: Having a strong verbal ability, perceptual ability, and reasoning abilities; Leaders intellectual abilities, however, should not differ too much from their subordinates; Intelligence is also defined as a trait that significantly contributes to a leader’s acquisition of complex problem-solving skills and social judgement skills; Intelligent leaders have the ability to consider every situation individually and make an assessment as to what is the best solution. b.Self-Confidence: The ability to be certain about one’s competencies and skills is self-confidence; Includes both self-esteem and self-assurance; Self-confidence is an essential trait for any leader because without self-confidence it may become harder for followers to fully trust their leader c.Determination: Determination is the desire to get a job done and includes characteristics such as initiative, persistence, dominance, and drive; these people are proactive and have the perseverance to face obstacles; this trait is needed in order for leaders and followers to overcome goals. d.Integrity: Integrity is the quality of honesty and trustworthiness; these people are those who adhere to a strong set of principles and take responsibility for their actions; Leaders need integrity in order to inspire confidence in others since they are trusted to do what they say they are going to do. e.Sociability: A leader’s inclination to seek out pleasant social relationships; people who possess sociability are able to create strong relationships with their fellow followers. f.The five traits described above are all traits in which strong leaders possess. While the list is certainly not all-inclusive, these five seem to be essential in order to produce a strong and successful leade r.

Friday, September 20, 2019

Concepts on pilgrimage as a social process

Concepts on pilgrimage as a social process To what extent do Turners concepts of liminality and communitas cast light on pilgrimage as a social process? The concepts of liminality and comunitas is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. (Shure, 2005) It attempts to achieve some formalization of a social process in a theoretically perspective, though academically this can be achieved; it is very hard to master the full and in-depth concept of the pilgrimage. As all academic essays require the clear and standard definition of the question, Turners concepts will subsequently be explained and furthermore the meaning behind both the pilgrimage and social process will be dealt with in detail. Turner draws on concepts of Van Genneps model of rites of passage; liminality is a state of transition argued by Turner, it is neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner, 1969, p. 95) The attempt of the essay will show how the liminality iden tifies itself as period of transition with the social process of a pilgrimage, identify the equality and communitas will attempt to illustrate the process of a pilgrimage, however is structure truly lost during a pilgrimage and what is the concept of a social process and does a pilgrimage really fit into this definition, is a pilgrimage one of equality and individuality or that of a structured formation or a social experience. The rite of passage, focuses on the fact that a member of a group neither belongs to the group she was a part of or the group she will belong to after the luminal stage has been completed. A typical liminal stage can be seen as the child between becoming an adult and staying a child, puberty as a liminal stage in every individual persons own life pilgrimage. (Turner V. E., 1978) Continuing with the notion of liminal periods one can observe that in Mary Douglas Purity and Danger, illustrates that the individual is a polluting force on the external groups as liminal individuals are of no status, insigniakinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally (Turner V. , The forst of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual, 1967, p. 98) Liminality, In the use of Van Genneps model of the three, Turner illustrates the phases of the ritual, the ritual is an catalyst and exemplifies the transitional period. The transitional period is identified as the liminal period. (Turner V. , 1967, p. 94) S eclusion from everyday life is a typical consequence to the liminal period which is the attempt to remove the individual from the society, subsequently forcing the individual into an interior pilgrimage of development of self. The application of classification is often used, in doing so this continues the transition and the removal of previous identity, furthermore denoting the status of transition. Turner develops this concept further in the ambiguity that is suggested, the concept of seclusion, and the non identification of the individual of gender or class. Turner continues to suggest the equality of this transitional period however many anthropologist are hesitant to apply this to an overall spectrum as in various societies the formation of structure is still imposed. (Turner V. , 1967) Turners three phase concept is simplistic in concept and difficult in application, phase one being the communication of sacra, where secret symbols are communicated to the ritual subjects in the form of exhibitions of sacred articles, actions, and instructions; the symbols represent the unity and continuity of the community. This then transcends into the liminal period of ludic deconstruction (Deflem, 1991, p. 13) and then subsequently the recombination of the individual; Turner develops on this and we move into the phase three, which is the removal of all social structure and what is left is solely the authority of the instructor and aim of the ritual. (Turner V. E., 1978) This phase three fuelled Turner into formalising the concept of Communitas as the identification of one. Anti-structure and Communitas are blood brothers in the opposition to structure, Turner clearly notes that communitas is present within in a liminal stage when structure is not present (Turner V. , 1969, pp. 94-96) as criticised above Turner clearly identifies this to be present within a period of liminality in a ritual process. The removal of all social elements and the exclusion from this constitutes a community bond, one of human kindness; constituting this ritual communitas of individuals in a separate transition society such as the concept of limbo between heaven and hell, between life and death. Turner further explains communitas in the Ritual Process, explaining that they refer to two further modalities of society. (Turner V. , Pilgrimage and communitas, 1974) A Dialectic process between various communitas, a general view of equality of individuals (later works such as Eade argue against this concept) and that of the structured individuals in a hierarchical system such as in t he Hindu religion. The Dialectic has been used throughout time such as in Revolutions and the maximization of communitas provokes maximization of structure, which in turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitus. (Turner V. , 1969, p. 129) Communitas is observed as something that is a phase in a process of a ritual not something that will continue after the process has been completed as the fate of any type of communitas is inevitably a decline and fall into structure and law (Turner V. , 1969, p. 132), after which a new form of communitas may rise again. (Turner V. , Pilgrimage and communitas, 1974, p. 282) The concept of a pilgrimage and the community are centred to many scholarly debates, Eade and Sallnow question the role of the pilgrimage in sustaining or negating the social structure. (Sallnow, 1981) In following onto the concept that is discussed, the contrast to Marxist understanding to the pilgrimage as a structural maintenance juxtaposed with Turners pilgrimage concept of spontaneous communitas. Therefore in discussion of the experience does it not bind one to the larger concept of a community? (Eade J. a., 1991, p. 5) The pilgrimage is an area of anthropology that had lacked any in-depth focus within the field till Turners Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture and when formalising concepts on the pilgrimage one is prone to focus on the most powerful rituals performed by religious members and not necessarily the simplistic rituals of everyday life Eade Coleman suggest that pilgrimage has been neglected due to this assertion of a pilgrimage of a liminal nature, and that of a daily life furthermore suggesting that a pilgrimage is something of extraordinary nature such as the pilgrimage to Mecca, a pilgrimage to a holy shrine Why in this definition has pilgrimage has been removed from everyday life and imposed on that of a religious ritual background, one could suggest that the simplistic notion of going in search of a new pair of shoes or a job is a pilgrimage of the individual. In doing so one is removing themselves from the pre-persona and transition into the new entity and within this liminal stage they are neither. (Eade, 2004) Though Turner states that the individual accounts such as documents or oral narratives of the personal experiences allow us to envisage the social process of a pilgrimage, subsequently suggesting that even though a pilgrimage maybe an interior one between the divine or one or a social community to Mecca, a pilgrimage none the less is a social process. The pilgrimage as a social process is formed on the symbolic and structural elements, directly important when considering the apparent or lack of structure, anti-structure, communitas, and liminality. (Turner V. , 1974) (Turner V. , Pilgrimage and communitas, 1974) Turner observes structure as a more or less distinctive arrangement of mutually dependent institutions and the institutional organization of social positions and/or actors which they imply. (Turner V. , 1974, p. 272) Therefore in such pilgrimages as Muktinath in Nepal such social relations as caste cause the formation of distance and ine quality (Turner V. , 1974, p. 272) (Edwards, 1972) That religious pilgrimage serves to highlight social principles which are idiosyncratic to a particular religious system (Messerschmidt, 1980) Most of Turners work was based on the Christianity bases of a pilgrimage as a result communitas behaviour was expectedinherent principles and idealistic expectations (Turner V. E., 1978) though juxtaposed with the pilgrimage of Hinduism, it is very much a contradiction as a Hindu society is hierarchical and subsequently even though through transition this structured formation is enforced. In relation to the question being addressed, this example illustrates Turners specific concepts of liminality and communitas do not act coherently throughout all religious pilgrimages. Even though structure plays an element in this example of a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage does not inherently maintain or remove the structure, though Starke and Finke suggest that it rather strengthens the bonds between the individual to a symbolic community. Therefore even though Me sserchmidt suggests that structure is within the liminal stage and subsequently communitas does not exist, could not suggest that the symbolic bond that is being achieved is subsequently causing a communitus that exists in a greater place. (Stark, 2000) If we look at the Hajj, it is one of the largest and most well known religious pilgrimages to date, that brings pilgrims back into the time of the Prophets and into the utopian-like society that previously existed. This pilgrimage is international, members of Islam ascend Mecca to fulfil a once in a life connection to a spiritual community, it is a pilgrimage of the individual however a social process which will forever be linked into history, with the notion of communitus one could further suggest that the linking with a spiritual holy place one is not just linking to a communitus of the present but that of the past and future. If all are equal at this period of time and structure therefore the communitus above time. (McCarter, 2005 ) Turners concepts of liminality and communitas cast a light on the social process of a pilgrimage in some specific notions. It has been clear that Turner has centred all research majorly on a Christianity stance and subsequently foreshowing other religious pilgrimages that actually do not have the removal of the structure within the liminal stage and therefore the inherent structure is transposed from the pre to post formations of the individual. As the question directly asks to what extent does Turners concepts cast light, it can be seen that metaphorically Turner has been the lighthouse to the development of anthropology of the pilgrimage; however inevitably with the development of theories, Turners concepts notwithstanding will always foreground others. Though as Modern development requires less need for lighthouses, so do the concepts of Turner no longer stand alone with theories of social process and pilgrimage. Turner illustrates that ritual is a response to a societys demand bu t that is actively involved in the human interaction and meaning. His actions and concepts are far from static. (Deflem, 1991) Furthermore supported in new research of John Eade, one can see that within Turners concepts the expression of a pilgrimage as something that is not a daily process has once again cast a shadow on the mundane concepts of a pilgrimage. One, can see that the direct social understanding of a pilgrimage is that of a religious one; the search for the divine inspiration and where miracles once happened, still happen, and may happen again (Turner V. E., 1978, p. 6)