Poema of Lieutenant Schmidt’s End: Pasternak’s Dialogue with Tsvetaeva through the Prism of Genre.

Boris Pasternak’s poemy are acutely self-conscious of their place in the epic tradition. Lieutenant Schmidt (LS) represents one attempt at exploring the parameters of the poema itself as the poet makes a “difficult” transition from “lyric thinking” to “the epic.” In this article I examine this transition against a contemporaneous example in the genre, Tsvetaeva’s Poema of the End (PE). In LS, structural elements of the poema are counterposed to those of PE. While PE amplifies the individual voice, LS muffles what is personal for the sake of the public voice. While PE is atemporal, LS is historical. While PE unfolds on symbolic planes, with elements of plot kept to a bare minimum (a single moment of separation), LS is a plot-driven account based on concrete, documentary material. Finally, while PE is an “overgrown lyric”—representing the “lyric thinking” that Pasternak hopes to transcend— LS is an exploration of the possibilities that a more traditional model of the poema can offer. Although in the present analysis I draw on several theories of poetic genres, this is by no means an exhaustive study of epic versus lyric forms of poetry. Instead, my analysis focuses on those structural and thematic features of the poema that the poets themselves perceived as central to their texts. Pasternak, for his part, develops the structure and thematics of his poema in ways that are inspired by PE, but also, as we will see, in more significant ways, contrast with it.

The Visual, the Epic, and Pasternak’s ‘Devjat’son pjatyj god’

In this study I consider the role of poetic description in Pasternak’s ‘Deviat’sot piatyi god’ (‘1905’) in the context of the genre of the poema. Descriptive passages in poetic narratives, as a rule, provide a static setting for a protagonist’s actions. In the absence of any single hero in Pasternak’s poema, topography itself begins to move. I examine the categories of stasis and motion, central to ‘1905’, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal. The idea of reanimating the events of the first Russian revolution twenty years after the fact borders on the ekphrastic in places, where the poet transposes techniques and genres from the visual arts into a verse epic. Finally, I suggest that aesthetic perception itself is the dominant principle in the poema, as opposed to documentary faithfulness, which is traditionally emphasized in the scholarship on this work.

An Ethical History of Photography in Combat and of Combat Photography in the United States during World War II

With the United States‘ entry into the Second World War, the word ?censorship? was seen largely as antithetical to, rather than a necessary counterpart to, victory among Americans. People did not want to be censored in their writing, photographs or speech,but it proved to be necessary even before the war began, in order to protect government secrets and the people on the home-front from scenes that were too disturbing. Even before the war had officially begun, there were problems with censorship among journalists and newspapers. The initial response of outrage in reference to censorship in the United States was common among journalists, newspapers, magazines, and radio news; nevertheless, there was a necessity for censorship among Americans, on the home frontand the front lines, and it would be tolerated throughout the war to ensure that enemies of America did not gain access to information that would assist in a defeat of the United States in the Second World War. The research I have conducted has dealt with the censorship of combat photography during World War II, in conjunction with the ethics that were in play at the time that affected the censors. Through exploring the work of three combat photographers — Tony Vaccaro, James R. Stephens and Charles E. Sumners — I wasable to effectively construct an explanatory ethical history of these three men. Research on the censorship and effects it had on the United States brought me to three distinctareas of censorship and ethics that would be explored: (1) the restrictions and limitations enforced by the Office of Censorship, (2) a general overview of war and photography as it influenced the soldiers and their families on the home-front, (3) and the combat photographers and personal and military censorship that influenced their work. Although their work was censored both by the military and the government, these men saw the war in a different light that remained with them long after the battles and war had ceased.Using the narratives of Tony Vaccaro, Charles E. Sumners and James R. Stephens as means for more in depth research, this thesis strives to create lenses through which to view the history and ethics of censorship that shaped combat photography during the Second World War and the images to which we refer as representative of that war today.

Health, Justice, and Fairness

In this study I will endeavor to show that the American system of health care violates any conception of distributive justice understood as equality of opportunity. This system fails to provide equal access through a lack of universal insurance, a consumer driven conception of quality, and a system wide focus on cost control, leaving millions of Americans exposed to the ravages of disease. However, if health is understood as an antecedent for one's ability to function across a number of categories that have been objectively deemed as vital to engage in a life that is fully human than the commitment our nation has to the protection of fair equality of opportunity, established by our adoption of a Rawlsian conception of justice, necessitates a revision of our nation's conception of quality to encapsulate health outcomes as well as the advent of a system of universal coverage. Quality care will come to be understood as care that returns to the patient the ability to function across those categories of functioning that illness has jeopardized, and this conception of quality will precipitate system wide reform geared at the creation of positive health outcomes. This paper will articulate this argument by reconstructing and synthesizing precepts from the contemporary philosophical sources and then applying these to the practical workings of our healthcare system, while concurrently demonstrating that a system of distributive justice is compatible with the creation of a universal system of healthcare.

So Very Far Away

I began my thesis planning to craft pieces of both fiction and nonfiction. I had very much enjoyed working on a travel essay during the fall semester, but I have always had an inherent interest in writing short stories, so I had hoped to explore both genres, using my previous work from a seminar in fiction and a travel writing class as a springboard. However, in writing “So Very Far Away,” my second nonfiction piece, which I developed from material that I was unableto keep in the essay “Lunch with the Americans,” I discovered that nonfiction was an incredibly freeing genre because the essential ingredients were already present. My personal experiences provided the basic elements of plot, character, and setting, yet I discovered new challenges as I attempted to present these experiences in a way that moved beyond mere memories and reflections and towards a larger meaning that would matter to others as well. I became sointrigued by this process of creating cohesive narratives through the editing and shaping of memories that I decided to focus completely on nonfiction for my thesis work and write a collection of essays about my time abroad.

Government Influence and the Failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

In 2008 two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were placed into conservatorship due to insolvency. The financial bailout of the two publically traded corporations came at the expense of the American tax payer. This study investigates the relationship between direct and indirect government influence and the increasing risk taking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the late 1990’s through their conservatorship in 2008. As government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have many special advantages that other publically traded companies did not possess. These advantages allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their profitability. Theoretical literature regarding Congress and the bureaucracy suggests that the actions of bureaucrats can be linked to the preferences of Congressional members because bureaucrats are responsive to potential threats or perceived threats from the legislature. This theory is applicable to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and is used to explain why the government was able to directly and indirectly influence the government-sponsored enterprises. Overall this investigation has determined that the United States government pursued a clear mission that determined to increase the availability of housing to all Americans, specifically to low-income and under-served individuals, through the use of the government-sponsored enterprises. Despite this link there is no conclusive data to show that the pursuit of this housing mission led Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to operate in riskier business segments. This study has also found that motivation regarding profit-seeking and compensation structure provide a more plausible explanation for why the government-sponsored enterprises began to engage in riskier business practices that led to their insolvency.

The Effect of Weight on the Perception of Political Candidates

Chris Christie recently visited the famous “Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem, Israel, during his first trip abroad as governor of New Jersey. The New York Post reported on his trip with the headline “The Whale at the Wall” (Campanile 2012). Given headlines like this, it is easy to see anecdotal evidence of the stigmatization that surrounds obesity within contemporary American society. What’s more important is that these social stigmas that Americans are faced with every day are not merely surface level jokes bantered about for a cheap laugh. They are often prejudices that permeate every aspect of human life. Whether it comes to finding a date, looking for a job, or trying to be taken serious by one’s peers, weight is always a topic of concern. In an effort to understand how far entrenched these biases are in society, this thesis studies the ramifications of obesity in politics. In this thesis, I attempt to understand to what extent, if any, obesity matters in regard to candidate appearance, voters' choices, and political behavior.

Rates Of Obesity And Incidence Of Diabetes In Hispanics In The United States: An Examination Of The Epidemiological Paradox

Using pooled data from the 2008-2011 National Health Interview Survey and employing multinomial and binomial logistic regression methods, this research examines disparities in rates of obesity and incidence of diabetes between individual Hispanic subgroups in comparison to non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Immigration status(including nativity, duration in the United States, and citizenship status) is hypothesized to play a central role in rates and obesity and incidence of diabetes. Unlike Cuban-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other Hispanics were more likely to be overweight as well as obese when compared to non-Hispanic whites. Mexican-Americans had the only significance in prevalence of type 2 diabetes in comparison to non-Hispanic whites. Both of these health outcomes are strongly associated with the various immigration variables.

Where Stories Collide : Montage and the Short Story Cycle

This thesis uses Sergei Eisenstein’s filmic theories of montage to examine the modernist American short story cycle, a genre of independent short stories that work together to create a larger and interrelated whole. Similar to the shot-by-shot editing process of montage, the story cycle builds its intertextual meaning story-by-story from an aggregate of abrupt narrative transitions and juxtapositions. Eisenstein famously felt that montage, the editing together of film fragments, was not a process of linkage, but of collision –each radically different shot in a film should crash into the next shot, until audience members were intellectually provoked into synthesizing these collisions through dialectical processes. I offer montage as an interpretive strategy for negotiating the narrative collisions in story cycles such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples. For Go Down, Moses, I argue that Eisenstein’s politically rendered “montage of attractions” provides a template for investigating the shock tactics behind Faulkner’s chronologically and racially entangled stories of whites and African Americans. For The Golden Apples, I consider the opposites and doubles in Welty’s fiction with Eisenstein’s similar belief in the “opposing passions” of the world. Not only, then, do I suggest that the modernist story cycle bears a cinematic influence, but I also offer Eisenstein’s theories of montage and collision as a heuristic for formal, thematic, and even political patterns in a genre infamous for its resistance to definition and classification.

Service Use and Mental Impairment Among the Elderly: Arguments for Consultation and Education

Compared the service use patterns of older adults with varying levels of mental impairment, and assessed the effects of services received on their mental health status over a 1-yr period. Data were obtained from a US General Accounting Office (1977, 1979) study of 531 elderly persons (mean age 76.1 yrs), which included administration of a modified version of the Older Americans Resources and Services Multidimensional Functional Assessment Questionnaire. Ss were interviewed twice, 1 yr apart. 174 Ss were classified as having a mild psychiatric impairment, and 118 Ss had a severe psychiatric impairment. The existence of mental impairment was related to marital status, race, and level of education. Usage of mental health services was low, although mentally impaired Ss were more likely than unimpaired Ss to use social and medical services. Results also suggest that such services can have an important effect on the mental health of older persons.

The Resilience of Self-Esteem in Late Adulthood

OBJECTIVE: The authors examined the resilience of self-esteem after loss in the lives of older adults. Specifically, the authors investigated the relationship between loss and change in self-esteem during a 3-year period. METHOD: A subsample of older adults (n = 1,278) from the Americans' Changing Lives Study was used to examine loss in the domains of health, financial security, or work and career and self-esteem before and after the loss. RESULTS: There was a small but significant decrease in self-esteem between Wave I and Wave II of the study. Loss in one of the domains explained less than 1% of the variance in self-esteem change. DISCUSSION: The low incidence of loss and small change in high levels of self-esteem are further evidence of resilience in older adults' psychological well-being. The implications for older adults' use of cognitive strategies to manage losses and promote gains are discussed.

Mental Health and Aging at the 2005 White House Conference on Aging: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Success! At the 2005 White House Conference on Aging, three-quarters of the 1,200 national delegates voted to improve “recognition, assessment, and treatment of mental illness and depression among older Americans.” This resulted in mental health being ranked as #8 of the final 50 WHCoA policy resolutions resulting from the conference. Joining this resolution in the “top ten” were two resolutions intimately tied to hopes for addressing the mental health needs of older adults—at #6 “Support Geriatric Education and Training for Health Care Professionals, Paraprofessionals, Health Profession Students and Direct Care Workers,” and #9 “Attain Adequate Numbers of Healthcare Personnel in All Professions Who are Skilled, Culturally Competent, and Specialized in Geriatrics.”

Literature in Bosnia and Hercegovina till 19th Century in South Slav Context

Mr. Gajevic traced the development of literacy and literature in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 12th to the 19th in relation to other south Slavic literatures and civilisations, studying their interrelations, links and influences. From the 12th to the 15th centuries, literature in this area developed under strong influence from the neighbouring South Slavic countries, which were directly connected with more developed foreign cultures and civilisations. The literatures of these countries had differing religious and cultural backgrounds, some developing under Byzantine and Orthodox influence and others as a part of Latin civilisation and the Catholic religion. This led to different and sometimes contradictory literary, religious and other influences on Bosnia and Herzegovina, making spiritual and religious unity for the country virtually impossible. Under the influence of the Bosnian state and church, however, there were signs of a search for compromise, leading to some mixing of the difference traditions. Following the Turkish conquest, however, three denominational communities (Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim) developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and this became the general framework for life, including literature. This led to three separate literary traditions - Serb-Orthodox, Croat-Catholic and Bosniac-Islamic. This internal disintegration of Bosnian literature did however facilitate the process of integration of some of its denominational traditions with similar traditions in other countries. The third aspect considered in the research was the genesis and expansion of vernacular and folk literature from Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the South Slavic areas and its contribution to the language and literature integration of four peoples - Serbs, Croats, Bosniacs and Montenegrins. Of special interest here were the aspirations of the Catholic church to establish the Bosnian language as the common South Slavic literary language for its religious and propaganda activities, and the contribution of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic to the effort to establish the "Bosnian language" as the common literary language of the South Slavic peoples.