Tolstoy, stories, and facilitating insight in end of life care: Exploring ethics through vicarious experience (with Glackin M and Henry R)

Facilitating moral insight in end of life care can be challenging, and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this can be nurtured by means of creative literature. Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych is presented as an example of such literature. Aristotle's Nichomean Ethics provides the philosophical underpinning for the method used. Sources also include the nursing literature, and students' evaluations of the impact of Tolstoy's novella on their ability to perceive the ethical issues arising in end of life care. Comments from evaluations were analysed and significant themes emerged. Students' comments clearly support the suggestion that use of this novella has facilitated insight into ethical issues at the end of life. Evaluations also indicate that vicarious experience gained through reading this novella has helped to nurture sensitivity and professional insight into the importance of compassion and offering ‘comfort’ to the dying person.

The Uncertainty of Experience: On George Brecht's Event Scores

George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus, is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s. His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’. This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that, while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

Church of St George and St Thomas

Abstract: A vibrant inner city parish needed space for meetings, language classes, children’s play and other support accommodation as well as a clearer link between the interior of the listed church and the space outside.

The project builds itself about the entrance to the church. The form is manipulated such that the intervention recedes from those entering the church, drawing them into the plan before becoming readable as an addition. The resultant poché between this entrance sequence and the fabric of the church is hollowed out to provide the required accommodation. These rooms are insulated and lined in cork to allow for their use separate to the main body of the church. With budget at a premium the construction methodology was developed from an analysis of traditional Irish boat building techniques, which allowed the use of the solid timber to act as the primary structure with no additional material support.

Constructed in solid walnut the intervention reads with the existing brick interior and yet is clearly identifiable as a contemporary addition.

Aims / Objectives Questions

1 To accommodate new space inside an existing protected structure.
2 To form a new threshold between interior and exterior.
3 To develop an affordable means of construction that would be durable and rapid to erect.
4 To make a contemporary addition in sympathy with the qualities of the existing protect structure, in line with best conservation practice and research.
5 Traditional forms of construction as a model for contemporary technologies.

“A Labour Leader in a Frothy Scoundrel”: Farce and Social Justice in the Popular Dramaturgy of George Shiels

In the financially precarious period which followed the partition of Ireland (1922) the Northern Irish playwright George Shiels kept The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, open for business with a series of ‘box-office’ successes. Literary Dublin was not so appreciative of his work as the Abbey audiences dubbing his popular dramaturgy mere ‘kitchen comedy’. However, recent analysts of Irish theatre are beginning to recognise that Shiels used popular theatre methods to illuminate and interrogate instances of social injustice both north and south of the Irish border. In doing so, such commentators have set up a hierarchy between the playwright’s early ‘inferior’ comedies and his later ‘superior’ works of Irish Realism. This article rejects this binary by suggesting that in this early work Shiels’s intent is equally socially critical and that in the plays Paul Twyning, Professor Tim and The Retrievers he is actively engaging with the farcical tradition in order to expose the marginalisation of the landless classes in Ireland in the post-colonial jurisdictions.