Gorilla, My Love Critical Anaysis Essay

The title alludes to a style of musical declamation that hovers between song and ordinary speech; it is used for dialogic and narrative interludes during operas and oratories. The term â€Å"recitatif† also once included the now-obsolete meaning, â€Å"the tone or rhythm peculiar to any language.† Both of these definitions suggest the story’s episodic nature, how each of the story’s five sections happens in a register that is different from the respective ordinary lives of its two central characters, Roberta and Twyla. The story’s vignettes bring together the rhythms of two lives for five, short moments, all of them narrated in Twyla’s voice. The story is, then, in several ways, Twyla’s â€Å"recitatif.† â€Å"Recitatif† is a pioneering story in racial writing as the race of Twyla and Roberta are debatable. Though the characters are clearly separated by class, neither is affirmed as African American or Caucasian. Morrison has described the story as â€Å"an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial†.[2] Plot summary[edit source | editbeta] First encounter[edit source | editbeta] Twyla and Roberta Fisk first meet within the confines of a state home for children, St. Bonny’s (named after St. Bonaventure), because each has been taken away from her mother. Roberta’s mother is sick; Twyla’s mother â€Å"just likes to dance all night.† We learn immediately that the girls look different from one another: one is black, one is white, although we aren’t told which is which. Despite their initially hostile feelings, they are drawn together because of their similar circumstances. They both like to eat chicken. The two girls turn out to be, in famous phrase, â€Å"more alike than unalike.† They were both â€Å"dumped† there. They become allies against the â€Å"big girls on the second floor† (whom they call â€Å"gar-girls,† a name they get from mishearing the word â€Å"gargoyle†), as well as against the home’s â€Å"real orphans,† the children whose parents have died. They share a fascination with Maggie, the old, sandy-colored woman â€Å"with legs like parentheses† who works in the home’s kitchen and who can’t speak. Twyla and Roberta are reminded of their differences on the Sunday that each of their mothers comes to visit and attend church with them. Twyla’s mother Mary is dressed inappropriately; Roberta’s mother, wearing an enormous cross on her even  more enormous chest. Mary offers her hand, but Roberta’s mother refuses to shake Mary’s hand. Twyla experiences twin humiliations: her mother’s inappropriate behavior shames her, and she feels slighted by Roberta’s mother’s refusal. Second encou nter[edit source | editbeta] Twyla and Roberta meet again eight years later during the 1960s, when Twyla is â€Å"working behind the counter at the Howard Johnson’s on the Thruway† and Roberta is sitting in a booth with, â€Å"two guys smothered in head and facial hair.† Roberta and her friends are on their way to the west coast to keep an appointment with Jimi Hendrix. The episode is brief, but long enough to make Twyla feel like an outsider in Roberta’s world. Third encounter[edit source | editbeta] The third time Twyla and Roberta meet is 20 years after they first met at St. Bonnys. They are both married and meet while shopping at the Food Emporium, a new gourmet grocery store. Twyla describes the encounter as a complete opposite of their last. They get along well and share memories of the past. Roberta is rich and Twyla is lower middle class. Twyla is married to a firefighter; Roberta is married to an IBM executive. Fourth encounter[edit source | editbeta] The next time the two women meet, â€Å"racial strife† threatens Twyla’s town of Newburgh, NY in the form of busing. As she drives by the school, Twyla sees Roberta there, picketing the forced integration. Twyla is briefly threatened by the other protesters; Roberta doesn’t come to her aid. Roberta’s parting remark unsettles Twyla: â€Å"Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.† Twyla replies, â€Å"Maggie wasn’t black.† Either she does not remember that she was black, or she had never classified her sandy skin as black. Twyla decides to join the counter-picketing across the street from Roberta, where she spends a few days hoisting signs that respond directly to Roberta’s sign. Fifth encounter[edit source | editbeta] We meet Twyla and Roberta once more; this time it is in a coffee shop on Christmas Eve, years later, probably in the early 1980s. Roberta wants to discuss what she last said about Maggie. The conversation is sympathetic but ends on an unresolved note.

Leadership theory and competency framework Essay

Introduction Leadership is always been interesting topic to be discussed. Given the theories that continue to grow and evolve. There is none of the theories that really can define what is the real meaning of leadership but we agree that the leader must have knowledge, skills on how to analyse the information in order to make appropriate decision. An effective leader is one who is able to read the situation, correct the problem, responsible, willingness to develop the followers, have integrity and good ethics. Effective leadership expected to act within the ethical framework. The ethical framework itself is about what right or wrong and good and bad. The reason why ethical decision becomes so important in the leadership is because business involves in a lot of transactions with people both within and outside the organisation. The purpose of this report is to provide better understanding about effective leadership, decision making and ethical management and how they linked each other both in theori es and practices and how the leaders ensure that every decisions are made within the ethical framework. Ethics . According to Ciulla (1998) Ethics is study about human relationships it is about the role that we play in life on what we should do and what we should be like as human being. Ethics is about right or wrong and good or devil. Ethics is the foundation of leadership. There are four theories in ethics: 1. Virtue ethics. Focused on in individual processes whether their act is expressing good character (moral virtues) or not. 2. Deontological ethics. In deontological perspective, intentions are the morally relevant aspects of an act. As long as the leader acts according to his or her duty on moral principles then the leader acts ethically, regardless of the consequences. In simple words, deontological focus on what is right based on the facts. 3. Ethical growth and learning ethics. Ethical growth and learning ethics also called as the character ethics. According to Covey (1992) the character ethics based on living effectively including things like integrity, courage, fidelity and so on. He believes that human have to go through the necessary stages in their life for their personal growth. Senge (1990), see learning process in each individual are important for the organisation learning  development. 4. Teleological. This theory locates the ethics of the action in its results. Leadership Leadership is the one of the specific type of human relations. There are a lot of thoughts behind the theory of leadership, even those theories still growing from time to time and it stills remain without satisfactory conclusion on that. According to Bolden, The theories of leadership are ranging as follow (Bolden et all.,2003): 1. Great Man theories. These theories based on the idea that leaders are those who are incredible, born with leadership qualities and destined to become a leader. 2. Trait theories. The theories based on the qualities and traits that leaders have. Trait theories often 3. Behavioural theories. These theories are opposite from great man theories. The theories believe that good leaders are made, not born. 4. Situational theories. These theories view leadership as something that is specific into the situations. For example: there are some situations that require the type of autocratic leadership, in other situation participative approach might needed. 5. Contigency theories. These theories focus on particular variables related to the environment to suit the style of the leadership. According to this, successful leadership depends on numbers of variables including leadership style, follower’s quality and the conditions. 6. Participative theories. The theories suggest that ideal leadership style is one that taking input from others. These leaders are more engaging the group members in decision making process. According to Lewin (1939) there are three leadership style in participatory, autocratic, democratic and laissez faire. 7. Management theories or transactional theories These theories focus on the role of organisation and group performance. These theories use rewards and punishment system and most used by the business organisations. 8. Relationship Theories or transformational theories. These theories focus on the connection between the leaders and followers. In this theory, beside focus on the overall performance of the groups, the leader also focusing on each member’s potential. This theory also often has high ethical and moral standards. Decision Making According to business dictionary, Decision making is process of selecting a choice from the available options. In order to make good decision, someone must be able to predict the result of each option and based on that options, take the best for the particular situation. There are two dominant decision making process models: 1. Rational model Rational model is mechanistic. The foundation of this model is quantitative discipline. It involves a cognitive process where each step follows in a logical order in order to get the best result. Disadvantage of this method is slow process in decision making 2. Bounded rationality Bounded rationality foundation is qualitative approaches. Bounded rationality model recognize that the data that available may or may not be completely valid but decision maker stills allow to make decision based on available data. 1. Toyota Toyota started in 1993 as one of Toyoda automatic divisions. Toyoda Automatic was encouraged to develop Japanese automobile production by Japanese government for supply their domestic vehicles. In 1993, Toyota motor co. became independent and separated from Toyoda automatic. Toyota started to expand in 1960 to other countries began by establishing new research and development facility in Thailand and in 1963, the first Toyota built outside Japan located in Melbourne, Australia. During that decade, Toyota had  exported one million units which had their presence established worldwide. In 2010 Toyota facing the most critical crisis on their history as one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world. At least 8 million cars were recalled from the market regarding to floor mats and gas peddles that causing uncontrollable acceleration that reported become the cause of accidents and death. This incident costing the company of millions dollars in repair expenses lost in sales and destroy ed the company image for its reputation and of course undermining its credibility. The company also faced some of expensive lawsuits because it accused that Toyota leaders knew about the problems but they held back the information to held recall and in this case the Toyota leaders using ethical growth and learning approach. A lot of organisation experienced crisis incidents that need them to make audience public messages in explanation, apologies, and other efforts to fix their image. The unethical things that resulting in public accusation often can result in harm to shareholders and stakeholders of the organisation and will have negative impact in organisation’s sustainability. Toyota confront by some very clear situational limitation in trying to respond effectively in responding to the allegations and fixing its bad image. The allegations including the causes of the problem is not all clear yet ranging from engineering issue to human’s error. In reality, some reports suggest that the company do to repair the product are not solving the problems. The toyota also accused on having slow decision making process because they didnt respond to that that problem quickly and decisively. Ideally, the organisation expected to have quickly responsive actions to make positive image in the society because it is indicate that the organisation primary interest is to solving the problems rather that avoid legal problems. Such organisations are likely to be seen as ethical, responsible and decisive. However, the most difficult part that the company confront regarding their CEO. Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the founder. He facing the culture conflict associated with his multinational company’s nature. In general, Japanese corporate cultures encouraging harmony and try to avoid addressing the problems in public and prefer to manage behind the scenes and the process of their decision making is using consensus model. Consensus model is time consuming process and it will slow organisation in  their respond to the crisis. For some countries this can be seen that company is not decisive. Also in the Japanese organisation culture, they more focus on their leader’s opinion than public’s opinion. 2. Trafigura Trafigura is a private company established in 1993 by six partners, Claude Dauphin, Eric de Turckheim, Graham Sharp, Antonio Cometti, Daniel Posen and Mark Crandall. They are focusing on three regional markets, South America for oil and mineral industry, Eastern Europe for metals industry and Africa for oil industry. Currently, the group has 81 offices in 56 countries. The story of ethical issues that faced by Trafigura begun in early 2006 when Trafigura’s oil trader decided to buy Coker naphtha, a refinery by product from Mexico. They did this to make a quick profit. In between March and June 2006, three loads of 28.000 tonned was received in Texas and transferred to chartered cargo ship, Probo Koala. Dangerous chemicals were used to clean the Coker naphtha and then Trafigura realised that they facing the problem on how to dispose the toxic material safely. In July 2006, Probo Koala arrived in Amsterdam where one of the branch corporate offices is located. The Amsterdam Port Service, a Dutch waste management company agreed to treat and dispose the waste but in the higher price than it was agreed because APS discovered that the slop was much more polluted and requiring special treatment. As the consequences of that problem, the Probo Koala back to the sea and in August 2006, it arrived in Ivory Coast to deliver the waste to local company called Compagnie Tommy. Tommy then was illegally dumped the waste without treating it across Abidjan. The weeks after, thousands were sick and at least 10 death reported. Trafigura reached out of court agreement with Ivorian government by paying $ 198 million for cleaning up and helping the victims. Here we can see that the company using teleological approach in handling the problem. However, they denied that what they did is wrong and refused to accept any legal liabilities for that incident. The way Trafigura handled the crisis criticized by corporate responsibility observer. They said it was clearly messed up because when facing the problem, company ideally needs to find the facts quickly,  disclose them quickly and involve those who can reduce the problem and work with affected community in order to clean up the damage. In contrast, Trafigura, held everything privately and in the company like this they don’t have the same transparency and ethical requirements that a publicly company has. By looking for those examples, we realised that the need for ethics in leadership become obvious. Ethics influenced the leader in their leadership and decision making. Understandings of ethics begin with the analysis of values, both individual and organisational. Effective leaders must aware of their values, and system of ethics and ethical decision making. Good character and integrity are what we want to see from the leader. Somehow there is always the connection between a value system and the ability of the leader to use these values in their decision making. According to the Josephone Institute’s (1999), there are six pillars of character that might easily be applied to business setting. They are: Trustworthiness – honesty, integrity, reliability, loyalty, keeping promises and not deceiving others. Respect – using the golden rule or treating others as you wish be treated, in addition to being courteous, listening to others, and accepting individual differences Responsibility – accountability, self-control, the pursuit of excellence and considering consequences of our actions prior to making them Fairness – playing the rule, not taking advantage of others, making informed judgments without favoritism or prejudice, and not blaming others Caring – Kindness, compassion, and altruism, acting to minimize hardship and to help others whenever possible Citizenship – working to make one’s community better, protecting the environment, making our democratic institution work, and operating withi n the law How the leaders ensure that all decisions are made ethically? The foundation of ethical decision making involves choice and balance. As we discuss before ethics is the study of human relationship about right and wrong. To ensure that all decisions made ethically, leaders have to do ethic checks. There are varies on ethic checks but to make it simple, we can define ethic checks into three parts. The most common questions when we questioning about ethics are whether it is legal?, whether it is fair?, and if we do this, how it  will affect ourselves as human being s a member’s of society. The first part of ethic check is bout legality. Legal here means not only within legal system but also whether it is legal within the organisation policies. After we get the answer for the first part the next question will it be fair? One of the traits that effective leadership must have is putting the organisation’s interest above their personal interest. Hence to ensure the decision has made ethically here the leader should check whether the decision will be fair for all stakeholders. Lastly, after those two questions answered, the leaders must ask themselves how they want to be view by the society because whatever it is, regardless the power that the leaders have, they are still a member’s of society. Conclusion Ethics is the heart of leadership. In understanding the leadership it is important for us to understand about the ethics. Ethics is the study of human relationship. It is about what we should do and what we should be like in the society. The ethics can be different from one and another because ethics influenced by other factors such as family influence, religious belief, culture, experience and personal reflection. Leadership on the other hand is the particular type of human relationship that involving power. The effective leader has to have good ethics as one of their traits because in effective leadership, leader should put the group interest above his or her personal interest. Nowadays, many organisations in the world have been damage by their unethical decision making and most cases because they put self- interest above group or society interest which destroys the society trust to the organisations. Regarding to that we can see that ethics and leadership should go hand in hand and the effective leadership should have good ethics that stick to the moral values on the society and oppose all the unethical conduct. Like other things in the world nothing is perfect, but it is very good for the leader to ensure that the decisions are made ethically through questioning their decision whether it is legal or fair for them and for the community and the leader also consider their decision as their personal reflection. References Bolden, R., Gosling, J., Marturani, A. and Dennison, P. (2003). A review of leadership theory and competency framework. Centre for Leadership studies, UK : University of Exeter Linstead, S., Fulop, L., Lilley, S. (2009). Management & Organization A critical text. New York, NY: Palgrave Ciulla, J.B. (ED). (1998). Ethics, the heart of leadership. Westport, CT:Praeger. Driscoll, D. M. & Hoffman, W.M. (2000). Ethics matters: How to implement values-driven management. Waltham, MA Hitt, W.D. (1990). Ethics and Leadership. Columbus, OH: batelle Johnson, C.E. (2001). Meeting the ethical challenges of leaderhip. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers. The six pillars of Character. (2009). Retrieved from http://charatercounts.org/six pillars.html Leadership Theories and styles. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.etsu.edu/ahsc/documents/Leadership_Theories.pdf History of Toyota. (n.d). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Toyota Seeger, M. (2010) Image restoration and Toyota recall. In communication currents. Retrieved from https://www.natcom.org/CommCurrentsArticle.aspx?id=967 Trafigura corporate history. (n.d). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura Chhabara, R. (2009) Trafigura –Toxic ethics. In communication reporting. Retrieved from http://www.ethicalcorp.com/communications-reporting/trafigura-%E2%80%93-toxic- ethics 10 of most unethical business practices in business (n.d). Retrieved from http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-unethical-business-practices/

1) Conceptualizing Social Class - Classes Society 2) Conceptualizing Essay

1) Conceptualizing Social Class - Classes Society 2) Conceptualizing Social Class - Understanding life Circumstances - Essay Example But if we give a keen thought, we come to the conclusion that our society is still divided into rich class and poor class. There are communities that are dominant over other communities. We face racism which strengthens the roots of the process of dividing the society into classes: tribal, nomadic, so on and so forth. If we talk about United States, the believers of the myth of the classless society stand for the idea that a large part of American population shares the same lifestyle, which means that America is a classless society. But by going into the details of this myth, we come to know that since some decades, the wages of Americans have been declining and to keep up with the expenditures, people had to increase the daily working hours and women started going out looking for jobs. Media has been playing big role in promoting this myth. The print media delivers news about business events but not about the related labor statistics which means that the citizens are only informed a bout the major economic activities and not about the conflicts arising as a result of class distribution. The circumstances that a person faces through his life leave a great impact upon his mental and physical health. People have always been facing unfortunate life circumstances like poverty, starvation, child abuse, obesity, mental torture, and so on. Poverty adversely affects a person because he faces lack of income, resources and assets, and encounters disadvantages in his daily routine. Poverty results in continuous generation of a social class that lacks access to proper food, clothing and shelter. The poor do not have the power to change their circumstances as they do not afford education too. They learn to live with poor relationships within family and with other members of the society, degraded sense of worth and spiritual ignorance. Poverty is mainly caused by overpopulation which is a situation

How to Encourage Economic Stability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

How to Encourage Economic Stability - Essay Example In answering the questions above, the economy will determine what is necessary to produce in order to achieve the desired economic goals and the manner of production i.e. whether to use the labor-intensive or capital-intensive technique. After production, the goods and services must be distributed to the target group or sector of the economy. In doing this, the economist must further ensure that it promotes economic stability i.e. a situation in which the inflation rates, interest rates, unemployment rate, foreign exchange rate are all put under control. Moreover, resource allocation must promote economic growth. The government in solving the economic problems and achieving economic stability uses both fiscal and monetary policies. Fiscal policy is the use of taxation and government spending to influence economic performance whereas monetary policy entails the control of interest rates and spending to attain economic stabilization (Bidard 66). The government can use either fiscal policies or monetary policies or both in solving the economic problems. During the recession, for instance, the level of economic activity is low and the government problem will be on how to stimulate economic activities in the economy. To achieve this, the government will increase its level of spending and reduce the tax rate. This would, therefore, result in an increase in disposable income that would be invested to stir economic activity. Increased investment would lead to economic growth and increased level of employment. Similarly, the government will control the level of inflation by the use of monetary policies. In the case of high level of inflation, the government, through the central bank will increase the level of interest rates (Bidard 72). An increase in the interest rates will lower the level of economic activity and reduce the amount of spending.  Ã‚  

Not by popular demand Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Not by popular demand - Essay Example The agenda of the government highlight deficit cutting as a booster for employment is also criticized by the author. The statistics on people’s opinion on this clearly suggested that they even believed that deficit cutting would have negative impacts on job generation. The history of US politics shows that people have always reacted by voting down the parties which couldn’t bring in economic development. Looking into the issue in these terms, the stand of the republicans to go by the deficit cutting policy does fit into the bracket political manipulation of people’s opinion by using the media. The democrats are observed by the author as acting based on the common sense notion that ‘debt is bad;’ and are not concerned of the economic facts prevailing in the country. They are trying to create sentiments over the amount of debt that the country is in and is trying to push the deficit cutting agenda. Taking into account the history of the response of the voters on governments not oriented on economic development, the author warns the democrats to be careful on the cutting budget deficits agenda. More than the net result being bad for the democrats, the author fears that it may prove bad for the country.

Constitutional Ethic Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Constitutional Ethic - Essay Example ral competence involves the capacity of the public administrator to work for the government with demonstrated expertise and with precise intent principles unlike party or private loyalties and compulsions (Kennedy & Schultz, 2010). Neutral competence contributes positively towards democratic consolidation where novel democracies emerge and become established in ways that demonstrate no possibility of demanding political compliance unless with exterior forces. This way, the value of government performance is recognizable given the isolation of politics from administration, hence resulting in policies that endorse a well-served society. Neutrality in public administration in open fora permits participation by interested parties, including various stakeholders who then point out social values to be addressed facilitating formation of effective policies. Public administration dichotomy defines the contributions of administrators in policymaking and involves topologies that distinguish public administrators as trustees, interpreters, and delegates (Zhang, Lee, & Yang, 2012). Delegate administrators do not try to influence elected bodies to alter their policy focus and do not take any action until they are issued with policy guidance by the voted body. Additionally, delegates only offer policy recommendations when forced by serious issues. Conversely, trustee administrators advocate for novel policy focus of public interest, have strong and firm stance on the policy issues, and do not support council’s expressed desires. Interpreter trustees are neither trustees nor delegate administrators since they believe in their capacity to identify political failures, but only endorse what is acceptable to the ruling body. Anarchical and hierarchical organizations are prone to fragmentation resulting functionality incapacitation (Kennedy & Schultz, 2011). The key principle of bureaucracy facilitates functional specification and differentiation of tasks and competencies

Tetralogy of Fallot Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Tetralogy of Fallot - Research Paper Example Due to the mixing of deoxygenated and oxygenated blood in the left ventricles through the ventricular septal defect, there is a low oxygen supply to other parts of the body. This, coupled with blood flow through the aorta due to the obstruction at the pulmonary valves leads to a distribution of blood that is completely devoid of oxygen. Consequently, there is cyanosis right from birth or within the infantile stage. The patients also suffer from heart mummers ranging from impeccable to very loud mummers (Graham, Volpe, Barker, Economy & Valente, 2013). The patient also presents with difficulty in breathing, dyspnea on exertion, retarded physical development and growth, clubbing of both toes and fingers and lastly polycythemia. Children are suffering from this condition; sometimes experience Tet spells that are as a result of the continued circulation of the desaturated blood due to the increased resistance of blood flow to the lungs. Tet spells are manifest with cyanosis, which leads to syncope and brain death or injury depending on the duration of hypoxia. Most children squat when experience the Tet sell with increased resistance of the vessels which allows for a reversal of the shunt temporarily. There are a number of other conditions to consider while evaluating a patient suspected to be suffering from tetralogy of the fallot. Some of them include pulmonary stenosis, acute anemia, bacteremia, stenosis, cardiogenic shock, pneumothorax, pediatric pneumonia and Patent Ductus arteriosus. With delayed management of the tetralogy of the Fallot, there is hypertrophy of the right ventricle that is as a result of the resistance of the right ventricle and the ventricular septal defect. This eventually progresses to dilated cardiomyopathy that begins with the right heart and then the left side of the heart. According to

Pharm assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Pharm - Assignment Example This type of disorder results to hyperglycemia, a state where the body glucose level rises above normal. According to (Derrick, 2010) the past five years researches have been conducted on how to control hyperglycemia in T2DM. He argued, Pharmacotherapeutic agents that were previously used were proving to be inefficient e.g. Sulfonylurea. In the late 2009 a new pharmacotherapeutic agent, Bromocriptine mesylat was approved after a series of research to verify its efficiency. Example of drug that has Bromocriptine mesylat as active ingredient is Parlodel. Bromocriptine lowers the level of glucose concentration in the blood. Researchers had a thought the Pharmacotherapeutic agent uses a mechanism that resets the body’s circadian clock through enhancing dopaminergic. This agent’s dosage is unique from other T2DM dosages. For a start a T2DM patients are advised to take 0.8mg of the drug containing the agent with food once per day, taken along with food it will enhance bioavailability. The dosage should be taken during bedtime. The dose can be increased at a weekly interval. For instance, if a T2DM patient takes a dose of 0.8mg per day this week next he/she can increase it to 1.6mg per day. However, this can only be increased up to a limit of 4.8mg per day (â€Å"Bromocriptine mesylate†, 2009). Increasing the dose will increase the efficiency of the agent in controlling hyperglycemia. Precaution should be taken when using Pharmacotherapeutic agent. A T2DB patient, who is breastfeeding, should not use it because it suppresses lactation process. If you happen to experience uncontrolled high blood pressure, this agent is not advisable for you since this will make it to be inefficient. While using this agent you will experience some side-effects as a result of your body reacting to the introduction of a â€Å"foreign agent†. Some of the side-effects include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, diarrhea, vision, and chest

Gender and Sex roles Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Gender and Sex roles - Essay Example Eunuchs have had a hugely varied life with some of them being constrained to lead a life of hugely ridiculed servants while some others having the good luck of rising to the pinnacle of society in the form of military generals and highly respected court eunuchs. The book by Kathryn Ringrose presents an in-depth study of eunuchs as they were perceived in Byzantine culture that held sway for nearly a thousand years ‘†¦the founding of Constantinople in 324 to its capture by the Turks in 1453’ (p. 3). Most refreshingly, the author has not followed the standard historical procedure of adopting a chronological approach. Rather she has traced the condition of eunuchs through the entire period with special reference to all those that could achieve social status and glory. Another interesting feature of this book is that the author also clearly describes how the medical definitions and legal perspectives about eunuchs kept varying from one century to the other during the ent ire period of Byzantine civilization. The theoretical issues on gender construction in Byzantine Empire through the entire one thousand years have been discussed in great detail. These issues and discussions found their way into medical treatises, ecclesiastical tomes and hagiographies penned during that period. While clarifying that castration was never removal of penis but surgical removal of testicles, the author concludes that castration never robbed a man of his outward symbol of masculinity but prevented a man from procreation. Hence, the term eunuch often referred to a man who has never procreated (p. 14f). The church, therefore, often referred to a celibate monk as a eunuch, one who has not undergone surgical castration but spiritual castration in the sense that he has become devoid of any desire to procreate as his entire attention has been focused on Jesus Christ and God. In a sense such an explanation or understanding of the term eunuch possibly clarified to many the real meaning of what Jesus had hinted at when he said that some people convert themselves into eunuchs for greater glory of the kingdom of Heaven. However, there was a strict separation between those who could not procreate as they were biologically incapable to do so and those that opted not to procreate as a matter of choice. However, around eighth century, eunuchs began to be more readily accepted in higher echelons of society and this spilled over into religious domain too when churches began to allow eunuchs to occupy ‘†¦prominent religious positions’ (p. 118) with Germanos being one of the most famous eunuchs that went on to occupy very high position in the theological hierarchy. While the first part of the book deals with theoretical and conceptual issues of gender construction in Byzantine society the second deals with historical details of eunuchs who rose to occupy prominent social positions either as ministers or military generals. Ringrose has been very cle ar on two points: first is eunuchs within Byzantine kingdom formed a distinct ‘†¦third gender’ (p. 4), and, second is there is an inherent difficulty in accurately describing the lives of eunuchs as most of these accounts have been written by eunuchs themselves. 2. Sturges, Robert S. 2000. Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse. NewYork: St. Martin's. $45.00 hc.

Assess and comment on presentations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Assess and comment on presentations - Essay Example The presentation fails to define natural language and conversational interface, which are two key terms that should not be left undefined because we, the audience, need to understand the presenter’s scope of definition. Other limiting sections of the presentation are the First Street Investments example that does not fully capture the concept of natural language and conversational interfaces, and the use of only two references by the author. The researcher should have used at least six references to add depth to his arguments. 2/5 – use of a good example and good definition of a key term. The lack of a definition for natural language and conversational interface, limits our ability to fully evaluate the author’s understanding of these key terms. Limited use of references. The first item we notice is a wrong presentation title. The title is not appropriate because a communication interface need not necessarily be a conversation interface. Graphical interfaces are also communication interfaces and from the presentation the author restricts himself to conversation interfaces. Another concern is that the presentation is unnecessarily lengthy probably because of redundancy for example conversation interface is defined in slide 3 and 12, and the slides look clumsy from too much wording. Nevertheless, one of the biggest strengths of the presentation is the definition of key terms - natural language, conversation interface and natural language – and the presenters discipline in restricting his/her conversation within the given boundaries. Based on the author’s definition of both natural language and conversation interface the example provided about a webpage is appropriate. However, we notice that half of the resources used for reference are pr e year 2000. The presenter should seek more current references to work with. The presentation structure and skill utilized here

Glorious Celebration Essay Example for Free

Glorious Celebration Essay Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson, is regarded as one of the celebrated American writers alive. Besides writing a lot of memorable works, she is also the subject of other authors who have written a lot about her life and works. There is her biography written by two of her friends, Marcia Gillespie and Richard Long, along with her nephew Rosa Butler. Mary Jane Lupton writes a biography-cum-writer’s guide on Maya Angelou’s works. L. Patricia Kite also writes a similar book depicting her life story and so does Jill Egan who highlighted the trials Angelou went through but also the triumphs as well. In his work, Jeffrey Elliot compiled interviews made by several authors on Maya Angelou to create a verbal mosaic of the life and works of the writer. Lyman Hagen makes a critical analysis of her works and managed to find the â€Å"secret† behind the success of Angelou. Priscilla Ramsey makes a critical analysis of Angelou’s poems in a journal. Another analysis is made by William Sylvester. Carol Neubauer analyzes one of her works, The Heart of a Woman to understand the woman behind the words. Sidonie Ann Smith wrote an analysis of Angelou’s first work The Song of a Caged Bird which centers on self-acceptance. Gillespie, M. , Butler, R. J. and Long, R. A. (2008). Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration. New York: Doubleday. This biography was written by her friends Gillespie and Long with her nephew Butler. This was written and published in celebration of Angelou’s 80th birthday and as the title of the book suggests, it has been 80 glorious years of her life though it has had its ups and downs as the authors hold nothing back in relating the colorful life of one of America’s celebrated literary artists. The book covers the traumatic experience she had at a young age to the beginning of her literary talents during her adolescence; she ventured briefly into acting and took part in the civil rights movement, rubbing elbows with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X until the time she took part in the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Though Angelou had a troubled youth, she moved on and it was through literature that she was able to pull through and used it as her vehicle to express happiness and optimism. Lupton, M. J. (1998). Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Lupton provides a critical analysis of Angelou’s 5-volume autobiography. For each one, she provides an general overview, a background of the story. This would be followed by an analysis of various points of view like a narrative in the case of Heart of a Woman then describe the structure of the story where patterns are found. Then there is a plot development which focuses on revealing the character of the subject followed by a character development which reveals the character’s personality as the story develops. Then there is the thematic issues which identifies the theme of the story. This is followed by styles and literary devices which describes what devices were deployed by Angelou. This book would be a reliable guide to anyone who reads Angelou and needed a quick reference to its technical aspects besides the stories themselves. Kite, L. P. (2006). Maya Angelou. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company. This book is a biography of Angelou. The author touches on the personal aspects of Angelou’s life. She starts the story in 1993, the day Angelou recited a poem at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration and segues back to the day she was born and moving progressively to 1996. Her poems are mentioned here but not fully presented. This book caters mainly to elementary school students and serves as an ideal starter for anyone who appreciates poetry and will be surely inspired after reading Angelou’s story. Egan, J. (2009). Maya Angelou. A Creative and Courageous Voice. Pleasantsville, New York: Gareth Stevens Publishing. As the title suggests, this book mainly tackles the life and times of Maya Angelou. In the nine chapters of this book, Egan takes the reader on a journey covering the life and times of Angelou which is fraught with trials and tribulations but also of the courage to go one despite its presence. In the chapter â€Å"Finding Her Voice† was the start of Angelou’s literary career which was meant to be a form of therapy but later on became her calling. In the latter chapter, â€Å"A Glorious Legacy,† she turned to writing greeting cards for Hallmark not because she needed a job but for the love of writing and the celebration of life. Elliot, J. M. (Editor). (1989). Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson City: University of Mississippi Press. Elliot has compiled several interviews made by selected authors with Maya Angelou. Each interview or conversation tells the same story. It is about the triumph over adversity and her works serve as her vehicle of conveying that message. Angelou also clarified that her works are not exclusively dedicated to African-Americans though she lived through the turbulent times with them, but for all mankind. This book is ideal for scholars and students who wish to gain more insight to the woman behind remarkable works. Hagen, L. B. (1997). Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer and Soul of a Poet. Lanham Maryland: University Press of America. Hagen’s work is a critical analysis of the works of Maya Angelou. The first chapter is devoted to telling her life story. Chapter 2 reveals Angelou’s â€Å"secrets† to her very successful works which is the use of humor to offset the trying times she had gone through in her life instead of dwelling on the hurts of her past. The rest of the chapters makes an analysis of her works – her autobiographies and her poems as well as other aspects of Angelou’s multi-faceted life. These are purely analysis and do not give the full text of her works save for excerpts used in making the analyses. Ramsey, P. R. (1984). Transcendence: The Poetry of Maya Angelou. Current Bibliography on African Affairs 17 (2). 139-153. Priscilla Ramsey makes an in-depth analysis on the poems of Maya Angelou. Angelou’s poems are grounded on the reality of life as she has experienced them. Angelou uses her poems as a means to express her thoughts and sentiments not only about her own life but also the events that were unfolding around her from segregation to the civil rights movement. Angelou has practically employed every known literary device to be able to write elaborate poems that pretty much capture life the way she has seen it through her own eyes. Sylvester, W. (1995). Maya Angelou: An Overview. In T. Riggs (Editor) Contemporary Poets. New York: St. James Press. Sylvester gives an overall analysis of the poems of Maya Angelou. While doing so, he highlighted events in Angelou’s life which have had a profound influence on her, from William Shakespeare which she confessed was her â€Å"first love† to her involvement in the civil rights movement as an organizer working alongside Martin Luther King. Sylvester reveals that her poems are uniquely hers and are not imitations of other works as revealed with unique words she used. Neubauer, C. E. (1983). Displacement and Autobiographical Style in Maya Angelou’s Heart of a Woman. Black American Literature Forum 17 (3). 123-129. Neubauer makes an in-depth analysis of one of Angelou’s work Heart of a Woman which is more of an autobiography. Her starting point is the time she already reached adulthood, highlighting her different careers especially in one of the turbulent times not only of her life but to all black Americans for this was the civil rights movement. She uses her own life experience to mirror how â€Å"little people† felt. She provides a grassroots level view of the things happening in society here through her own eyes. She also compared and contrasted the styles of two of its prominent movers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, finding the latter more congenial. Smith, S. A. (1973) The Song of a Caged Bird: Maya Angelous Quest after Self-Acceptance. The Southern Humanities Review. 365-375. This is another analysis of a work by Maya Angelou. From the year, one can tell this is one of the earliest analysis made and this is â€Å"fresh† from the recent events of the previous decade where Angelou had been very active in the civil rights movement. But this story highlights the childhood of Angelou which was anything but happy. Her youth is a journey to freedom from â€Å"imprisonment† caused by misery and highlighted moments of struggle as she moved on until she finally attained the freedom she sought and it all boil down to self-acceptance. Angelou’s story is not a mere autobiography but also serves as a lesson in life where self-acceptance is the main theme and one of the keys to coping with life’s problems.

Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes Essay Example for Free

Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes Essay In the following essay, I will examine the development of Plaths poetry through analysis of major themes and imagery found in her description of landscapes, seascapes, and the natural world. Following the lead of Ted Hughes, critics today tend to read Sylvia Plaths poetry as a unity. Individual poems are best read in the context of the whole oeuvre: motifs, themes and images link poems together and these linkages illuminate their meaning and heighten their power. It is certainly easy to see that through almost obsessive repetition some elements put their unforgettable mark on the poetry: themes such as the contradictory desires for life and death and the quests for selfhood and truth; images like those of color, with red, black and white dominating the palette; and symbols of haunting ambiguity, for example, the moon and the sea. But equally obvious is the striking development that Plaths work underwent in the course of her brief career as a professional poet. This is perhaps most readily seen in the prosody: from exerting her equilibristic skill at handling demanding verse forms, such as the terza rima and the villanelle, she broke free of the demands of such literary conventions and created a personal verse form which still retained some of the basic elements of her earlier academic style. She turned the three-line stanza of the villanelle into a highly flexible medium. Freed from the prosodic strictness of poems like Medallion, written in 1959, this verse form reappeared in poems composed in the last year of her life in a superbly liberated yet controlled form. Some of her finest and most personal poems are written in this medium, for example, Fever 103 °, Ariel, Nick and the Candlestick, Lady Lazarus, Marys Song, and the late Sheep in Fog, Child and Contusion. More important, though, is the development one can observe in Plaths handling of images and themes, of settings and scenes. My concern in this essay is Plaths use of landscapes as settings. There are indoor settings in her poetry, such as kitchens and bedrooms, hospitals and museums, but the outdoor ones are in overwhelming majority. Plaths use of landscapes and seascapes is indeed one of the most characteristic features of her poetry. They put their mark on a considerable part of the work and appear throughout her career, linked as they are to her experiences as a woman and a poet. The seascapes with their crucial relevance for themes like the daughter-father relationship, loss and death, deserve a special and thorough treatment of their own and will have to fall outside the scope of this essay. No reader can fail to note the many items of nature that Plath makes use of as setting and image. Three scholars have paid special attention to this aspect. In her pioneering work, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes (1972), Ingrid Melander includes analyses of poems set in different landscapes and seascapes that Plath knew; in addition to discussing a group of poems connected to the sea, she deals with the following landscape poems: two poems on the moorland (Hardcastle Crags and Wuthering Heights); two idylls (Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows and In Midas Country); and three landscapes as experienced by the traveller (Sleep in the Mojave Desert, Stars over the Dordogne and Two Campers in Cloud Country). Melanders approach is thematic and she makes no attempt to suggest development or continuity concerning this aspect of the poetry. In Jon Rosenblatts Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (1979), in my view still the most useful book-length critical study, the idea of development is a main concern. He devotes one chapter to Plaths use of landscapes and seascapes, focusing on the transition from early to late poetry as part of his overriding argument: that Plaths poetry enacts a ritual of initiation from symbolic death to rebirth. He programmatically refrains from placing her poems in extraliterary contexts, such as her biography. Edward Butscher, on the other hand, goes to the other extreme in his critical biography, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976), where he makes no essential difference between the life and the poetry. While he offers many imaginative and perceptive comments on Plaths anthropomorphizing of nature, they naturally become subsumed in the telling of the story of the poets life and also, frequently, slightly distorted by Butschers  psychoanalytically loaded thesis about the emergence of Sylvia Plath the bitch goddess. Since the appearance of these three studies Sylvia Plaths Collected Poems has been published (1981) with a securer and more precise dating of the poems than before, and we are now in a better position to deal with the poems chronologically. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) also add to our knowledge of the composition of the poems. Linda W. Wagner-Martins recent biography (1987) has given us a firm platform to build our critical studies on, by confirming or correcting information provided by previous biographies and memoirs. With the premise that Plaths poetry should be read as a unity I wish to study the development of her use of landscapes throughout her career, paying special attention to the role the landscape plays in the individual poemquantitatively and qualitativelyand to the way the poet creates psychic landscapes out of concrete places, scenes and objects. I tie this discussion firmly and consistently to actual landscapes Sylvia Plath had seen. With a poetry like Plaths, which is highly subjective and concrete, it is surely a disadvantage to disconnect the poems from the poets life. My use of biography aims at illuminating the poetic process, and my main interest is in the subtle and gradual shift in the poets technique: the process by which her landscapes become increasingly psychic and at the end fragmented. Sylvia Plath evidently looked upon herself as a city person (in spite of her documented love of the sea). Amidst the beautiful scenery at an artists colony in upstate New York she complained: I do rather miss Boston and dont think I could ever settle for living far from a big city full of museums and theaters. Nevertheless she seldom used the cities and towns where she lived, more or less permanently, as settings in poems. Cambridge, England; Northampton, Massachusetts; Boston and London, these places made little impact on the poetry as cityscapes. When she draws on such settings, she usually lets her persona move from the streets and buildings to parks or gardens or surrounding fields. When she remembers Cambridge, she sees meadows and fields outside the town, as in Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows (1959). Of Northampton she commemorates above all a park with frog pond, fountain, shrubbery and flowers, as in Frog Autumn and Childs Park Stones, both written in 1958. Where the town of Northampton itself does figure, in Owl (1958), it is as a frivolous contrast to harshly elemental nature. Commenting on an actual experience in the summer of 1958 such as described in this poem, she noted: Visions of violence. The animal world seems to me more and more intriguing. One of the rare poems with a London setting is Parliament Hill Fields (1961), but typically the scene has a rural touch. (It is set on Hampstead Heath). Inspiredand sometimes proddedby her husband who was versed in country things, Sylvia Plath the city person turned to nature for topics and scenery. Shortly after having met Ted Hughes in the spring of 1956 she confided to her mother: I cannot stop writing poems! . . . They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth that Ted is teaching me. Prodded or inspired, Plath drew on her personal experiences of different places and landscapes as raw material for many of the poems. One might actually plot locations and stages of her life on the map of her work. Among the poems that open her career as a professional poether debut can conveniently be set to 1956we can find scenes from her stay in England and her travels on the Continent. Later there will be scenes from New England and other parts of the United States and Canada. After her return to England in 1959 she set many of the poems in Devon and a few in London. Ones immediate reaction to Plaths outdoor scenery is that the per sona never seems to be quite at home in nature. Descriptions of nature will most often register feelings of estrangement, fear and the like. This is true even of poems commemorating travel experiences in happy moods, such as camping in a California desert (Sleep in the Mojave Desert) or by a Canadian lake (Two Campers in Cloud Country), poems written in 1960. Plaths depictions of places and landscapes reveal her interest in pictorial art. She said that she had a visual imagination and that her inspiration was painting, not music, when I go to some other art form. We know of this interest in art, American and European, and the inspiration she derived from specific paintings resulting in, for example, the poems Snakecharmer (1957) and Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies (1958), both modelled on paintings by Henri Rousseau, and Sculptor (1958), dedicated to her friend Leonard Baskin. Her own efforts as a draftswoman establish a link between her verbal gifts and her graphic talents. Some of her drawings have been reproduced; The Christian Science Monitor (November 5 and 6, 1956) illustrated her reports about a summer visit to Benidorm in Spain with a couple of strictly realistic sketches by her hand: sardine boats pulled up on a beach; a corner of a peasant market; and trees and houses clinging on to steep sea cliffs. In his collection of essays on Plaths poetry, editor Charles Newman included three drawings of scenery that we can recognize in the poems; strong pen strokes show an old cottage in Yorkshire (Wuthering Heights); an irregular row of houses in Benidorm; and small fishing boats left for the winter on the bank of a river nea r its outlet into the ocean at Cape Cod. She evidently did not give up the habit of drawing. As late as October 1962, in a letter to her mother, she rejoices over the gift of pastels that she will surely find time to use. By and large Plaths early poems betray the same sort of literary artificiality that marked most of her Juvenilia; they strain too noticeably toward effect and cleverness. But there are some whose subjects and settings introduce thoughts and moods which reverberate in the rest of the oeuvre. Winter Landscape, with Rooks is one such poem. The very title tells us that this scene is rendered by a painterly poet. It describes a pond where a solitary swan floats chaste as snow. To the observer-speaker it is a landscape of chagrin scorn[ed] by the setting sun. The speakers mind is as dark as the pond: walking about like an imaginary rookthe only creature fit to match the wintry landscapeshe finds no solace from her sorrow at the absence of a cherished person. In a journal entry for February 20, 1956 Plath outlined the scene that inspired some of the realistic details of this poem. On her way to a literature class which was to be held at some distance from her Cambridge college, she noticed rooks squatting black in snow-white fen, gray skies, black trees, mallard-green water. The real rooks are missing from the  poem; there is only a metaphorical one. We find features that will characterize a great deal of the poetry to come: the color scheme of black, white and red; the theme of loss and frozenness; and the parallel between landscape and human observer. Plath referred to the poem as a psychic landscape. From now on her poetic landscapes will embody association between scene and mood. What marks Winter Landscape, with Rooks as an early poem is the lack of proportion between the loss suggested and the mood resulting from the contemplation of a calm winter scene. The poem ends with a sigh of self-pity: Whod walk in this bleak place? The punning title of another poem written in 1956, Prospect, suggests comparison with a painting, calling to mind, for example, the Italian veduta of landscape or city. We find in it some of the same elements as in Winter Landscape, with Rooks: the fen, here with its gray fog enveloping rooftops and chimneys, and this time not with a metaphorical rook but two real ones sitting in a tree, with absinthe-colored eyes cocked on a lone, late, / passer-by. As in an impressionist painting much is made of colororange, gray, black, greenat the expense of line and composition, but here too there is suggested a psychic element: the solitary human being neither seeks nor derives protection or comfort from nature. Alicante Lullaby, one of several poems inspired by Plaths stay in Spain in the summer of 1956, attempts to record the actual sounds of a busy little Spanish town. The poet uses onomatopoeia to recreate realistic sounds. (Evidently Sylvia Plath regretted that she did not have an ear for music.) In another poem, Departure, the speaker, taking leave of her temporary Spanish refuge sketched in bright colors, is able to note, with self-irony, that nature does not grieve at all at the parting. The reason why she leaves is decidedly unromantic: The moneys run out. The last glimpse of the scene is unromantic in another way and may suggest a parallel between the speakers mood and nature: what she sees is a stone hut Gull-fouled and exposed to corroding weathers, and morose and rank-haired goats. It may all be in the viewers eyes. Returning to the favored rook in Black Rook in Rainy Weather the poet again  musters up self-irony to face her urge to commune with nature. She might wish to see some design among the fallen leaves and receive some backtalk / From the mute sky, but this, she knows, would be to expect a miracle. Still, she leaves herself open to any minute gesture on the part of nature lending largesse, honor, / One might say love even to the dullest landscape and the most ignorant viewer; this could be achieved, for instance, by letting a black rook arrange its feathers in such a way as to captivate the viewers senses and so grant // A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality. The miracle has not happened yet, but the hope of such a moment of transcendent beauty and communion is worth the wait. She knows that it might in fact be only a trick of light which the viewer interprets as that rare, random descent of an angel. The next set of landscape poems, chronologically, are located in the West Yorkshire moorland which Sylvia Plath knew from visits with her husbands family. November Graveyard introducing this group describes a setting where naturetrees, grass, flowersstubbornly resists mourning over death. But it does not deny death; the visitor notes the honest rot which reveals natures unsentimental presentation of death and decay. And the poet concludes that this essential landscape may teach us the truth about death. Coming at the end of Plaths first year as a professional poet this poem may be seen to exemplify a minor change in her depiction of landscapes; elements of nature are discreetly anthropomorphized: skinflint trees refuse to mourn or wear sackcloth, the dour grass is not willing to put on richer colors to solemnize the place, and the flowers do not pretend to give voice to the dead. Two other Yorkshire poems, The Snowman on the Moor and Two Views of Withens, written the following year, offer realistic glimpses of the moorland as backdrop for descriptions of relationships between people and of attitudes to nature. In the first poem, a condensed narrative relates a husband-and-wife quarrel with the woman being brought down from her pride by a vision of indomitable male power in the guise of a giant snowman; and in the second, we have in capsule form a definition of two very different  attitudes to natureperhaps also to lifeepitomized in two persons differing responses to a bare landscape and a dilapidated farmhouse with literary and romantic associations. (The scenery is associated with Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights.) The speaker of the poem regrets that she cannot respond the way the you does. To her, landscape and sky are bleak and the House of Eros is no palace. Hardcastle Crags gives a harsher view of a human being alone and defenseless in an unresponsive, absolute landscape. The poem derives its power from a very detailed, realistic picture of fields and animals, stones and hills. The last Yorkshire poem written in 1957, however, with the title The Great Carbuncle, brings in an element of wonder performed by nature: a certain strange light with magical powerits source remains unknowncreates a moment of transfiguration for the wanderers. The Great Carbuncle may allude to a drop of blood in the Holy Grail. But it is a painfully brief moment: afterwards the body weighs like stone. In a poem written in September 1961, Wuthering Heights, Plath returned to the ambiguous fascination this moor landscape held for her. The mood, though, has now become unequivocally sinister. The descriptive details have lost much of their realistic significance. The solitary wanderer bravely step[s] forward, but nature is her enemy: the alluring horizons dissolve at her advance, wind and heather try to undo her. Images of landscape and animals are consistently turned into metaphors for the human intruders feeling of being insignificant and exposed. A seemingly harmless thing such as the half-closed eyes of the grandmotherly-looking sheep makes the speaker lose her sense of identity and worth: it is as if she were being mailed into space, / A thin, silly message. This landscape is indeed psychic to an extent that Winter Landscape, with Rooks was not. This is most certainly a result of Plaths greater ability to transform realistic, concrete objects and scenes into consistent sets of me taphors for her thoughts and emotions. New Year on Dartmoor is a somewhat later poem, inspired by a walk Sylvia Plath took with her small daughter on Dartmoor some distance from the Hugheses home in Devon; the poem may have been written in late December 1961. NEW YEAR ON DARTMOOR This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saints falsetto. Only you Dont know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. Theres no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat. The poem shows how Plaths technique of using landscape scenes has changed even more. Here there is very little realistic description; the setting becomes completely metaphorized and gives rise to the speakers inner words, both sad and humorous, addressing her child who is accompanying her. The year is new and to the child the newness is exciting but baffling. Only the mother is aware of a rawer reality beneath the glinting and the clinking, and she knows what newness entails of challenge and hardships. In the fall of 1959 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent several weeks at Yaddo, the artists colony in upstate New York. Although she was at first charmed by the old-fashioned beauty of the estate, she soon tired of it, and on the whole the Yaddo poems do not express any genuine pleasure in nature. Some of  the poems she set in the grounds of the estate evidence a certain strain of finding something to write about and of getting the most out of the scenery. She was pleased with Medallion, a poem she defined as an imagist piece on a dead snake. Nature is here in a somewhat macabre fashion used to aestheticize death. The speaker is only a cool observer. In another Yaddo poem featuring animals, Blue Moles, with its unequivocal message that strife and violence are the modes of nature, nature is anthropomorphized; the speaker empathizes with the moles (Down there one is alone) while the sky above is sane and clear. The anthropomorphizing tendency is strong in the Yaddo poems; it does not serve to explain nature, rather to express the human protagonists feelings and moods. Thus in Private Ground the grasses / Unload their griefs in the protagonists shoes, and in The Manor Garden items from nature are used to parallel and explain the growth of a foetus in a human body. It is not enough for Plath in these poems to call forth a human mood or attitude from a fairly detailed, more or less realistic picture of objects and scenes in nature; now she will more readily metaphorize natural processes, and detailed pictures become rarer. Often key words or phrases will suffice to hint at a parallel or an origin in nature. Early in 1959 Plath had made clear what she wished to achieve in her nature poems. After finishing Watercolor of Grantchester Meadowsa memory of the Cambridge surroundingsshe noted: Wrote a Grantchester [sic] poem of pure description. I must get philosophy in. As every reader knows, Plath was wrong about this poem: in her picture of a seemingly idyllic landscape, cruelty and violence are lurking beneath the smooth appearance. The realistic scenery is distorted, not in the direction of the ugly and the grotesque, but in the direction of nursery-plate prettiness. The philosophy is apparent: terror and violence in the shape of an owl swooping down on an inoffensive water rat are at the heart of creation. Melville had said the same thing in Moby Dick when he let Ishmael reflect on the tiger heart that pants beneath the oceans skin. Plaths most ambitious piece of writing done at the artists colony was the  sequence Poem for a Birthday. Making notes for it she acknowledged the influence of Theodore Roethke. The greenhouse on the estate must have been a special link to him; it was a mine of subjects. Her tentative plans for the poem were these: To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature: meanings of tools, greenhouses, florists shops, tunnels, vivid and disjointed. An adventure. Never over. Developing, Rebirth, Despair. Old women. Block it out. Her ambition was to be true to [her] own weirdnesses. Starting as an end-of-autumn poem it immediately turns into a seemingly random search for the origins and processes of the self; the landscape disappears, and forays into the past take over. The poem comes full circle by ending with a hope of birth into a new life. Poem for a Birthday is an indication of the direction Plaths poetry was to take from now on: toward greater use of free associations and juxtaposition of fragment s of scenes and objects, experiences lived and imagined, feelings and thoughts harbored. Sylvia Plaths life and surroundings in Devon, where she lived from September 1961 to December the following year, provided rich material for poetry. Court Green, the thatch-roofed house the Hugheses had bought, sat in a two-acre plot with a great lawn, in spring overflowing with daffodils, with an apple orchard and other trees that found their way into the poems. The settings of the poems she wrote in Devon are very varied. Several are set indoors, for instance, in a hospital (The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Three Women), a kitchen (An Appearance, The Detective, Lesbos, Cut, Marys Song), an office (The Applicant), or an unspecified interior (The Other, Words heard, by accident, over the phone, Kindness). These interiors are never described; they are often to be inferred by a situation dramatized or an action going on, such as cooking a Sunday dinner or being served tea. Action and character play the greater role. The trees and flowers of the Court Green garden appear in several poems, such as Among the Narcissi, Poppies in July and Poppies in October, all from 1962. But in these poems too there is much more story or incident than description. The Moon and the Yew Tree offers a good example of how Plath used nature as material for poetry at this transitional stage in her career. Written in October 1961 this was the first poem for which she drew on her immediate  Devon surroundings. As we see from Ted Hughess comments, she still needed an occasional prodding to find a topic: The yew tree stands in a churchyard to the west of the house in Devon, and visible from SPs bedroom window. On this occasion, the full moon, just before dawn, was setting behind this yew tree and her husband assigned her to write a verse exercise about it. This nature poem is marked by the metaphorical mode already in the opening line: This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. Using a phrase from an earlier poem (Private Ground) the poet creates a transition to the garden landscape by anthropomorphizing nature: The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. The light of the mind does not help. The speaker complains: I simply cannot see where there is to get to. Following the upright lines of the yew tree, the speakers eyes seek the mother moon. Yew tree and church, one planted in the earth but striving toward heaven, the other bringing the message of heaven to earth, have nothing to give the speaker. She faces her real self: it is not the Church with its mixture of far reaching authority (the booming bells), its holiness stiffened by convention (the sculptured or painted saints floating above the heads of the churchgoers) and its somewhat sentimentalized sweetness (the mild Virgin), it is not these she can identi fy with: she is the daughter of the wild female moon with her dark and dangerous power. Plath herself evidently read this poem slightly differently. Introducing it in a BBC program she said that a yew tree she had once put into a poem began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived . . . and so on, as it might have been in a novel. Oh no. It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated iteverything! I couldnt subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a yew tree. The yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel. As I have indicated, another reading of the poem highlights the moon as the one who is taking over the scene. The yew tree appears again in Little Fugue, written in 1962, but only as an introductory image bringing in a contrast through its blackness counterpointed with whiteness in the concrete form of a cloud (The yews black fingers wag; / Cold clouds go over). Black and white do not merge, just as the blind do not receive the message of the deaf and dumb. These counterpointing absences prefigure the main theme of the fugue: the speaker-daughters despair at not being able to reach her dead father: Gothic and barbarous he was a yew hedge of orders. Now he sees nothing, and the speaker is lame in the memory. The fugue ends by finally joining the two items from naturethe black yew tree and the pale cloudas images of a marriage between death and death-in-life. The Devon milieu is the scene also for Among the Narcissi. Here an ailing old neighbor is the main subject, the flowers attending upon him like a flock of children. Another poem with a Devon setting is Pheasant. It is a scene in the drama of tensions in a marriage, of suspicions, hurt, jealousy and anger, which was begun in Zoo Keepers Wife and continued in Elm, The Rabbit Catcher, Event, Poppies in July and Poppies in October. Two poems written in the last month Sylvia Plath spent in Devon, Letter in November and Winter Trees, testify to the almost uncanny equilibristics she was capable of by now in realizing highly different topics, scenes, moods, as it would seem from one moment to the next. Anger at deception (The Couriers), longing for spiritual rebirth (Getting There), tender anguish at a childs future (The Night Dances), revulsion at death (Death Co.) and fascination with the dynamics of motion and life (Years), naked hatred and contempt (The Fearful), these are some of the emotions embodied in the November poems. Letter in November is set in the Court Green garden. It is unusual for Plath at this stage in her career in that it contains a fairly detailed picture of the scenery. The letter is addressed to an unspecified receiver (perhaps a child) apostrophized as love. It describes, in a relaxed tone, details of a well-known garden which in this moment of seasonal transition is shifting color and form as if by some kind of magic that a child would  understand. The speakers boots squelch realistically in the wet masses of fallen leaves. The old corpses buried under the death-soup she is walking in prefigure the despair at total defeat revealed in the final allusion to the destruction of a heroic army at Thermopylae (The irreplaceable / Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae). Was the lovingly detailed description of her garden an incantation for a moments relief from pain? Winter Trees is also set in the garden. WINTER TREES The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history Full of wings, otherworldliness. In this, they are Ledas. O mother of leaves and sweetness Who are these pietas? The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing. The opening image, of trees barely visible in the early morning fog, might have led us to expect a landscape of the kind Plath wrote in her earlier years, that is, a fairly realistic description with a mood attached or a philosophy as the outcome of pictures turned into metaphors. In this poem, however, trees are immediately turned into an aesthetic product: a drawing presenting themselves (On their blotter of fog the trees / Seem a botanical drawing)! This idea is at once dropped and without the modulating help of language we are brought into the human domain of memories, relationships between people, values and morality. Memories, rings, weddings, abortions, bitcherythese words hint at a miniature narrative of past love and union, contrasted with ugly losses and failures. The speakers muted despair has turned into disgust at the very idea of human femaleness. The trees have become symbols of ideal humanity: at the same time as they partake of the solidity and security of elemental earthliness, they achieve spirituality. Visited by a god, these Ledas share in the sacred, but being Ledas they also know suffering. In a last transformation, the trees take on the appearance of the grieving mother of another god. The final lines of the poem express the speakers anguished cry lamenting her inability to partake of the perfection and pity of nature. Being a woman she appeals to a Mother Goddess for a clue, but no sounds or sights in nature bring her relief. This superb poem is an example of the skill and power Plath had reached in her thirtieth year. Within the span of a few short lines she manages to create a complex of sight and sound, history and myth, Christian and pagan, ugliness and beauty, hope and despair. As has been argued by a recent critic, this is a fine example of Plaths ability to raise her poetry above the level of the private and the confessional to a level of universality. The poems Sylvia Plath wrote in the last few weeks of her life maintain  continuity with her earlier work in subject matter and style. She still favors the two- or three-line stanza, and essential also in these poems are emotions and attitudes such as love for childrenwhat Helen Vendler so succinctly refers to as the small constructiveness of motherhoodhatred of deception, and conflicting urges toward stasis and motion. But as a whole they are more concise and more referentialeven to the point of obscuritythan earlier poems. They do not offer easy readings, for one thing because images from strikingly different spheres of life are juxtaposed, with no apparent associations to join them. By establishing links to the earlier poetry as reference and source material we may be in a better position to read these difficult texts. Plaths use of landscapes is one such line to pursue. In these late poems recognizable, actual landscapes do not occur; here the poet uses only fragments from her experiences of various kinds of scenery, fragments that often suggest moods and attitudes similar to those that the more fully described landscapes had once signified. The first poem dated 1963, Sheep in Fog, was begun in December 1962 and completed the following January, and it works as a transitional poem. It is the last poem Plath wrote in which we can recognize the outlines of an actual landscape. It keeps some of the elements of poems set in an English landscape, with touches of the moorland, perhaps Dartmoor where Plath took riding lessons. She introduced the poem for a BBC program with these words: In this poem, the speakers horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep. This is of course only the bare skeleton around which the poem itself has been fashioned. The title suggests a realistic landscape with figures, and we find several such items: hills, horse and fields. No sheep are visible in the poem; the dolorous bells indicate their presence. There is a watercolor aspect to the hills dimly seen in the fog, the faint line of smoke from a passing train and the touch of color provided by the horse. Human references, which are counterpointed with the touches of nature scenery, take over in the latter part of the poem. The speaker interprets the scene as an expression of her own situation. Resignedly registering her own inadequacy (People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them) she  perceives her situation as darker and darker. Against the normal order in nature All morning the / Morning has been blackening. She fears that she has to accept nothingness as her lot, even after death; this is expressed in the image of the distant fields which thr eaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and fatherless, a dark water. This is no longer a psychic landscape of the kind exemplified by Winter Landscape, with Rooks; in Sheep in Fog the landscape as reality almost ceases to exist. Items from Sheep in Fog reappear in even more fragmentary form in Totem, a poem written on the same day as the former one was completed. Here we find a train on a useless journey, darkened fields, and mountains letting us glimpse an unchanging sky. These fragments of a landscape are only small signs in a composition overwhelming in its rich confusion, of images which all spell the greed of inevitable death. Plath spoke of this poem as a pile of interconnected images, like a totem pole. Other late poems have a similar quality of interconnected images like a totem pole in which fragments of landscapes may reappear in a weak or distorted form. In The Munich Mannequins the yew tree from beside the Devon church has been transformed into a part of a womb (the womb // Where the yew trees blow like hydras); an unhappy memory of Sylvia Plaths own visit to Germany in 1956 in search of roots identifies the city of Munich as a place of death and sterility. In Child, expressing a mothers wish to create a happy world for her child, there are remnants of the Devon garden in bloom as a contrast to the mothers worried Wringing of hands. Gigolo recalls a Mediterranean setting with crooked streets, cul-de-sacs and fruits-de-mer, alluring and disgusting as the professional seducer himself. In Mystic there may be traces of a summery Atlantic coastmemories of smells of pines, sun-heated cabins and salty windsas well as references to the harsh London winter Sylvia Plath was facing while she was composing these poems (The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats). These fragments accompany a more important religious imagery. The poem has been interpreted in several ways; one interpretation sees it as the mystics dark night of the soul, but the last line, The heart has not stopped, indicates hope of an end to this night. And in Edge, one of the two last poems Plath  wrote a few days before her death, she may have drawn on visual memories of the Yaddo estate. The perfected body of the woman whose epitaph the poem is and her children make up a sculptured group of death. In addition to other allusions, such as the Laocoon group, here inverted from struggle against death to fulfilled death, this group may vaguely recall the marble statuary at Yaddo. In the preceding pages we have seen how Sylvia Plath sought inspiration and raw material for her poetry in different settings and how she very early saw the potential for psychic qualities or parallels in realistic word paintings. In depicting external reality she is not concerned with representing, as faithfully as possible, shapes and lines, color and light, objects and figures. She hardly ever devotes an entire poem to something that looks like mere description of a scene in nature. There is always a metaphorical touch or dimension to the realistic composition. At times there is a narrative hinted at or rendered in some detail. Her landscape poems do not give the impression of a spontaneous pleasure in nature, nor of a wish to understand the processes of nature. They seem rather to serve as mirrors for a self in search of identity and truth. Plaths career as a poet was brief, but even so it is possible to see a development in her use of landscapes, toward more metaphorizing, more anthropomorphizing of nature, and in the late poems, more fragmentation of scenes in nature. In the early poetry she includes more documentable detail, sometimes established already in the titles of poems, such as Hardcastle Crags and Two Views of Withens. She may have coerced herselfor been proddedto broaden her palette by consciously turning to now one, now another landscape that she had experienced, but at the end she no longer had to look for settings as inspiration. Elements of landscapes came to her when she needed them as pieces in a mosaic more fraught with meaning than the early psychic landscapes. She had at her command an extraordinary set of highly diverse materials which she juxtaposed into poems of striking originalitysometimes with less than complete success. Even though we may not be able to reach into the obscurest crevices of her imagery and thought, the poems Sylvia Plath wrote in the last few weeks of  her life haunt us with their cries and whispers. Recognizing fragments of earlier landscapes may not be the most important clue to these and other poems, but it may help us clear the ground for entering deeper into her poetic world. Source: Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes, in English Studies, Vol. 71, No. 6, December, 1990, pp. 509-22.

Luminescence in Low-dimensional Nanostructures

Luminescence in Low-dimensional Nanostructures NANO AU RSY Luminescence in Low-dimensional Nanostructures: Quantum Confinement Effect, Surface Effect Whenever the carrier localization, at least in one spatial direction, becomes comparable or smaller than the de Broglie wavelength of carriers, quantum mechanical effects occur. In this limit the optical and electronic properties of the material change as a function of the size and the system is called a nanostructure. As the size is reduced the electronic states are shifted toward higher energy and the oscillator strength is concentrated into few transitions. Nanostructures are classified by the number of dimensions in which the carriers are confined or, alternatively, free to move. In case of confinement in only one spatial direction, the nanostructure is named a quantum well (QW). The carrier motion is frozen in one dimension but electrons and holes can still freely move over the other two directions. Therefore the QW is a quasi two-dimensional (2D) system. A structure which provides carrier confinement in two directions, allowing the motion along the remaining dimension, is calle d quantum wire (QWR) and it is a quasi 1D system. In the case of confinement in all three spatial coordinates, the nanostructure is denominated quantum dot (QD). QDs are 0D systems since the carrier motion is completely frozen. The physics of the quantum size effect relies on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle between the spatial position and kinetic momentum of a quantum particle. It is not possible to measure both the momentum and position of a particle to an arbitrary precision. The product of the standard deviation in space and momentum satisfies the uncertainty relation: à ¢- ³x.à ¢- ³p ≠¥ à ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚ /2 (1.26) This equation means that the smaller is the carrier localization in the nanostructure, the larger is the spread in the momentum p, or, better said for semiconductor systems, in the crystal momentum à ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚ k. The energy may still be well defined, but the momentum is not well defined. In bulk systems, for states around the edge of conduction and valence band, the dependence of the energy on the wavevector k is quadratic, Where m* is the carrier effective mass. Following this equation, the spread in the momentum à ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚ k gives minimum kinetics energy to the localized particle. This is in contrast with the classical physics, where the lowest energy state in whatever potential corresponds to no kinetic energy. The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics imposes a positive zero-point energy, which is approximately inversely proportional to the square of the nanostructure size. Therefore, the energy of theground state of electrons and holes in semiconductor nanostructures not only depends on the materials but also on the dimension of the confinement region. Nanostructured materials with a size range of 1-100 nm have been the focus of recent scientific research because of their important optical properties, quantum size effects, electrical properties, chemical properties, etc. The low-dimensional materials have exhibited a wide range of optical properties that depend sensitively on both size and shape, and are of both fundamental and technological interest. The ability to control the shapes and size of nanocrystals affords an opportunity to further test theories of quantum confinement and yields materials with desirable optical characteristics from the point of view of application. The exciting emerging important application of low-dimensional nanocrystals is in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and Displays. Recently, there has been much recent interest in low dimensional systems such as quantum well (two dimensional system), quantum wire (one dimensional system) and quantum dot (zero dimensional system). Optical properties of low-dimensional systems are substantially different from those of three-dimensional (3D) systems. The most remarkable modification comes from different distributions of energy levels and densities of states originating from the spatial confinement of electrons and holes. The simplest model for two dimensional (2D) systems is that of a particle in a box with an infinitely deep well potential, as shown in Figure 1.6. The wave functions and energy levels in the well are known from basic quantum mechanics and are described by: ÃŽ ¨n(z)=(2/Lz)1/2 cos ( nÏ€z/Lz ) (1.28 ) n = 1,2,3,†¦. (1.29) Figure 1.6: A particle in a box made of infinitely tall potential barriers In semiconductor quantum wells (two dimensional (2D) systems such as layered materials and quantum wells), both electrons and holes are confined in the same wells. The energy levels for electrons and holes are described by [1.8]: (1.30) (1.31) Where and are the effective masses of electron and hole, respectively If electric dipole transitions are allowed from the valence band to the conduction band, the optical transition occurs from the state described by nh , kx , and ky to the state described by ne, kx and ky . Therefore, the optical transition takes place at energy: (1.32) Where ÃŽ ¼ is the reduced mass given by ÃŽ ¼-1 = The joint density of states Ï 3D for the 3D for an allowed and direct transition in semiconductors is: (1.33) The joint densities of states for 2D, 1D and 0D systems are: (1.34) (1.35) (1.36) Where ÃŽ ¸ is a step function and ÃŽ ´ is a delta function. The sum of quantum confinement energies of electrons and holes are represented by El , Em and En ; where El , Em and En refer to the three directions of spatial confinement Obviously the physics of the nanostructures strongly depends on their dimensionality (Figure 1.7). In a semiconductor structure a given energy usually corresponds to a large number different electronic states resulting from the carrier motion. In a bulk material where the motion can occur in three different directions the density of states increases proportionally to the square root of the energy. In quantum wells the motion in the plane gives a staircase DOS, where each step is associated with a newstate in the confining potential. In quantum wires a continuum of states is still present, but strong resonances appear in the DOS associated with the states in the confining potential. Finally in quantum dots only discrete energy states are allowed and the DOS is therefore a comb of delta functions. The possibility to concentrate the DOS in a reduced energy range is extremely important for a large variety of fundamental topics and device applications. It is at the base of the quantum Hal l effect in quantum well (QW), of the quantization of the conductance in quantum wire (QWR), and of the single electron tunnelling in QDs. In the case of lasers the presence of a continuum DOS leads to losses associated with the population of states that do not contribute to the laser action. Conversely, the concentration of the DOS produces a reduction of the threshold current and enhances the thermal stability of the device operation. Clearly this property is optimized in QD structures. Due to the three-dimensional carrier confinement and the resulting discrete energy spectrum, semiconductor QDs can be regarded as artificial atoms. Figure1. 7: Density of states of three-dimensional ( 3D ) bulk semiconductors, a two dimensional ( 2D ) quantum well, a one dimensional ( 1D ) quantum wire, and zero dimensional ( 0D ) quantum dots. The most striking property of nanoscale semiconductor materials is the massive change in optical properties as a function of size due to quantum confinement. This is most readily manifest as a blue-shift in the absorption spectra with the decrease of the particle size. The blue-shift in the absorption spectra with decrease of particle size in semiconductor nanoparticles is due to the spatial confinement of electrons, holes, and excitons increases the kinetic energy of these particles. Simultaneously, the same spatial confinement increases the Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes. The exciton Bohr radius is a useful parameter in quantifying the quantum confinement effects in nanometer size semiconductor particles. The exciton Bohr radius is given by [1.8]: (1. 37) and an inequality holds. Here and are defined as: and (1.38 ) Where ÃŽ ¼ is the reduced mass given by are the effective masses of electron and hole, respectively. And also ÃŽ µ is the dielectric constant, à ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚  is the Planck constant. As the particle size is reduced to approach to the exciton Bohr radius, there are drastic changes in the electronic structure and physical properties. These changes include shifts of the energy levels to higher energy, the development of discrete features in the spectra (Figure 1.8). Figure 1.8: A schematic models for the energy structures of bulk solids, nanoparticles and isolated molecules. The quantum confinement effect can be classified into three categories: the weak confinement, the intermediate confinement and the strong confinement regimes, depending on the relative size of the radius of particles R compared to an electron , a hole , and an exciton Bohr radius , respectively. In strong confinement (R , ), the individual motion of electrons and holes is quantized and the Coulomb int eraction energy is much smaller than the quantized kinetic energy. The ground state energy is [1.8]: (1.39) Where the second term is the kinetic energy of electrons and holes, the third term is the Coulomb energy, and the last term is the correlation energy. In intermediate confinement ( ), the electron motion is quantized, while the hole is bound to the electron by their Coulombic attraction. In weak confinement ( ), the center-of-mass motion of exciton is quantized. The ground state energy is written as: (1.40 ) Where is the translational mass of the exciton Figure 1.9: Size dependence of band gap for CdS nanoparticles. In strong confinement, there is appearance of an increase of the energy gap (blue shift of the absorption edge), which is roughly proportional to the inverse of the square of the particle radius or diameter. For example, it can be observed from Figure 1.9 that the strong confinement is exhibited by CdS particles with diameter less than ~ 6 nm (R ~ 3 nm), and this is consistent with the strong confinement effect for particles with The luminescence dynamics in low-dimensional nanostructures also deals with the interaction of light with the material. The interaction of light depends strongly on the surface properties of the materials. As the size of the particle approaches a few nm, both surface area to volume ratio and surface to bulk atom ratio dramatically increases. The basic relationship between the surface area to volume ratio or surface atoms to bulk atoms and the diameter of nanoparticles can be seen in Figure 1.10. Figure 1.10: Surface area to volume ratio and percentage of surface atoms (%) as a function of particle size. It is observed that the percentage of surface atoms in corner and edge vs. Particle sizes display dramatic increase when the size is decreased below a few nm, whereas percentage of face atoms decreases. For particles of ~1 nm, more than 70% atoms are at corners or edges. This aspect is important because light interaction with material highly dependent on the atomic scale surface morphology. As in nanoparticles, a large percentage of the atoms are on or near the surface, therefore, surface states near the band gap can mix with interior levels to a substantial degree, and these effects may also influence the spacing of the energy levels. Thus in many cases it is the surface of the particles rather than the particle size that determines the optical properties. Optical excitation of semiconductor nanoparticles often leads to both band edge and deep trap luminescence. The size dependence of the excitonic or band edge emission has been studied extensively. The absence of excitonic or band edge emission has attributed to the large non-radiative decay rate of the free electrons trapped in these deeptraps of surface states. As the particle size becomes smaller, the surface to volume ratio and hence the number of surface states increases rapidly, reducing the excitonic emission. The semiconductor nanoparticles exhibit broad and Stokes-shifted luminescence arising from the deep traps of surface states [1.25 – 1.27].

Essays --

Expansionism overseas in the 1800’s became a very indispensable factor to the United States we know today. The issue of acquiring overseas territories in the 1800’s was very controversial because many citizens felt it was â€Å"un-American† because the U.S itself went through that with the colonization of Britain. However, the government did not consider that when taking into account the interest that came with taking these lands. Economically the Philippines gave the United States potential access to Chinese markets and they also saw advantage of the cheap raw materials in Latin America. Militarily, because the merchant ships were unarmed and carried all their products therefore its required military presence for protection. Also the United States found they competing against France, Germany and Britain, which had the largest navies in the world. The U.S also felt that their presence in the pacific would give them power of the port of Hawaii which was used a re fueling stop for ships headed to Asia. Another very important factor with the expansion overseas was the culture that being taken to them. Many Americans felt superior to other people in the work because the Christian religion made them morally better than everyone else. Due to that fact, missionaries were sent o these countries so they can covert and adapt to the culture and become more â€Å"American and white† and this led to the boxer rebellion in china. Economically the United States was trying to override the rest of the world. Back then and even today people around the world see the United States as a country with money and a land of opportunities. Industrialization in the late 1800s increased the need to trade with other countries. Nothing was dependent on man but instead... ...t to the climax, which later on they did. Even though most of those territories were lost the U.S still managed to keep the relationship it has with other countries. The United States and the issue of acquiring land overseas was not at all something easy to do. From being a weak nation to becoming more economic, militarily and morally superior whom they did accomplished. Even though this concept of expansionism overseas was displayed as a good thing it was truly a hard task to accomplish. Many other countries were willing to go to war with the United States for the territories but even then the U.S still came out reigning successful. Trade was really the main reason for this, to try and find a new way to have open markets and develop allies with other countries, which ultimately and even still is imperative to have in order to have a lot of income for the country.