Empowerment And Participation Essays - Human Resource Management

Empowerment And Participation Empowerment and Participation It is interesting how the word communication can change life at home and at work. When everyone is aware of what is going on around him or her, they can function better. What a concept! All of the readings I have done taught communicating is the key. We read about ridding the stigma of upper management, getting their hands dirty, understanding their position, and why it is important to the rest of the company. This chapter takes it one step further and says talk about the company finances as well. It is important for employees to understand the business in its entirety. That includes the finances of the job. All of the readings in this chapter had something to offer. I feel taking a bit from each will provide a work place of splendor. Finances include a variety of things: From hiring a new employee to purchasing a new tool to make the job easier. It is those decisions we make which can make difference of saving, spending and making money. It is these decisions that can make or break a company. The old school tells us not to share finances with anyone else in the company but those directly on top. The new school is saying that this philosophy is all wrong. If one want an employee to do the best he or she can do, and feel important, give them the company information. Let all the employees know what role they play. Allow them to make decisions that will make their job easier. As implied before, who betters know the job than the employee performing the job? The reading, Zapp! The Lightening of Empowerment suggests managers help their employees take ownership of their jobs. This requires trust, listening to the workers, and giving feedback. The novel concept here is to treat people like humans. Like any relationship, one needs these qualities to survive. If one gives positive reinforcements people tend to respect them. Employers hire people everyday with the hopes and trust they will do their job. But when people do not understand the role they really play in the company, they may not give their full effort. Hence, we have Saps, people who lack the main ingredients of relationships discussed earlier. We must let the employees know we trust them to make good positive decisions. Give them the empowerment by letting them know they are valued, and commending them on jobs well done. Open Book Management suggests we share our finances with the other employees no matter what their status, and give them a stake in the company. After all, this is a good suggestion, why work if one can't reap the benefits of their work? It also suggests that many employees are business illiterate, and if we want them to understand business we need to teach it to them. In conclusion, all of the readings I have done so far make management more then just problem solvers. They have become part of the problem. To solve their own problems managers need to be teachers, coaches, and a wealth of knowledge to be shared. Businesses need to be a team, and to this they need to share every aspect of the team. When the business succeeds all should have a share in the profit, and when it fails all are responsible. Bibliography Pierce, Jon L. John W. Newstrom. The Manager's Bookshelf. 5th ed. Prenticw Hall: 2000, 1996.129-173.

Event Management Proposal †Business Management Paper

Event Management Proposal – Business Management Paper Free Online Research Papers Event Management Proposal Business Management Paper The SUNYAC men’s basketball tournament and championship game will be held at New Paltz in Elting Gym. Amseshem Foluke- Henderson will be the Head of Affairs and will have groups of professionals that will make this event run smoothly. The three major departments are Finance, Advertising and Marketing, and Security. Each department have different tasks. The finance department is in charge of payroll, ticket sales, and creating a budget. Advertising and marketing department basically will attract public attention towards this tournament. Lastly, the Security Department will protect the inner and outer area of Elting Gym. The temperature will be in the upper 60’s for most of the weekend event. However, there will be a 10 percent precipitation. That means on Sunday afternoon we will have showers off and on. The bad weather that we will receive the afternoon is a disadvantage that we will face. However, we have scheduled the game around the time when the rain would possibly come. The tournament will begin on April 16 and the last game will be played on April 18, 2004. There will be four games played on Friday April 16, 2004. Two games will be played on Saturday and the championship game will be played on Sunday. There are 8 teams that will play in this tournament. All of these teams and all their managers will stay in the Super 8 Motel. The Super 8 Motel is located 2 miles from Elting Gym. It is close and convenient. We will create revenue by opening a concession stand and sell apparel. We will sell soda, hotdogs, popcorn and all types of candy. We will assign prices to all of our products. Tickets will be sold at 5 dollars a ticket. All of the different schools sweatshirts will be sold there also. The profit that is created will go to the New Paltz Athletic Departments. We believe in Excellence and will strive for nothing less, this is why our event will be a success. Research Papers on Event Management Proposal - Business Management PaperThe Hockey GameMarketing of Lifeboy Soap A Unilever ProductNever Been Kicked Out of a Place This NiceThe Project Managment Office SystemDefinition of Export QuotasWhere Wild and West MeetAnalysis of Ebay Expanding into AsiaLifes What IfsMoral and Ethical Issues in Hiring New EmployeesAppeasement Policy Towards the Outbreak of World War 2

Strategic Sourcing within DoD at the Operational Level Thesis

Strategic Sourcing within DoD at the Operational Level - Thesis Example But, it so happens that when hard workers develop great amenities, the fellow nations tries to copy those technologies either in a friendly or in a forceful manner. However, the nation which has toiled so hard to develop those technologies knows the effort which it has put in for gaining those utilities and as such would not be ready to forego that advantage for any friendly gesture. The resultant would be a war. As such, the nation with great amenities should always be watchful of this dilemma and be on its toes to avoid such war situations so as to safeguard its best technologies. This is the main reason that all the nations around the world maintain their own defense departments to create a fear of loss to their neighboring countries. This fear could be maintained only when secrecy of the technology developed is maintained. The same is the case with the Department of Defense (DoD) of U.S.A. with its headquarters in Pentagon. The main purpose of DoD is to maintain and supply forces of military in order to avoid situations of war and safeguard the nation. In this journey, it is forced to develop sophisticated technology for which a lot of resources have to be procured including the precious human effort thereby stretching itself to find out ways and means of fulfilling its mission of nation’s security. Along with such development, care should be taken to safeguard that technology so that, in the game between two nations, enemy nations do not become conversant with those inventions. Hence, ultimate secrecy has to be maintained at every point thereby impeding the commercialization of the unique inventions which were developed for defense purposes. It so happens that during such inventions, an off shoot of those inventions stands to be of immense help to the common man that if known its utility, their commercial value could be established with no doubt. For instance: Rayban sunglasses, were originally developed for air force pilots to ban the

Cause and Effect of Race on Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Cause and Effect of Race on My Life - Essay Example It is not essential that everybody has to face certain problems in association with these characteristics but for me, the situation was on the negative side. I belong to the Middle East and I chose to pursue my studies in the United States with the prospect of achieving a better future. Though it is believed by many that racism is not a major factor which affects the living of a person in today’s world but in my case, my life was very much affected by my race. I was one of the very few people in my college in the United States who came from the Middle East. My race was one of the major reasons why not many people in my class wanted to befriend me. I was new in the country and an international student and it was a period when I actually needed help and support. It was very difficult on my part to communicate with people because I perceived that most of them did not want to engage in conversations with or assist me in getting used to the place. I still remember the time when I a sked a college mate to give me his notes to which he flatly refused and did not even speak any further. The concept that I actually realized was that the whites preferred sticking to their own groups. This was the beginning but with time things did change and we got on better terms after a few months. The level of trust was not very high but I actually communicate with them. We were colleagues but not friends who would actually go out or attend parties together. It cannot be denied that my race did assist me in many matters. I formed a very strong bond and actually made really good friends with people who belonged to different races and were international students like me.

Journal for Small group communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Journal for Small group communication - Essay Example We have team strength of 15 members whereby all of us are competent enough in our specified sport i.e. soccer. However, not all of us are equally skilled. A few of us are still learning to play volleyball in a proper format. Nevertheless, somehow we have managed to set our standards to a much higher level. We have always focused on playing cohesively and in this process have been able to fulfill the facets associated with task orientation. Furthermore, all of us in due course have got the opportunity to exercise our relational orientation skills that in turn have helped in deriving improvements in our group communication process as well. Our cohesive existence and sports training provided great aid in the development of the communication competence among ourselves. It has been able to create all round impact in improving our communication process so that we are able to lucidly convey our strategies with each other. It has resulted in the creation of all round improvement in maintaini ng a flow proper flow of the feedback mechanism process (Rothwell 1-381). Groups as Systems Week Two Month†¦Year†¦ We represent a diverse team with efficient skills specialized in volleyball. Together we make a very strong group consisting of 15 members. Throughout the period of our co-existence, all of us have been able to maintain high extent of cooperation among all the group members and we are also able to know our own strengths and weaknesses because of the countless hours that we spend together. Throughout our co-existence, we have been able to learn many new things in the second week which is considered to be relatively better as compared to the previous week. I have realized that alike any other field, learning is a continuous process in sporting arena as well where in order to develop one’s own skills feedbacks of others are of extreme importance wherein communication can play a decisive role. It has been learnt that the both the aspects i.e. task along wit h relational orientation resulted in high amount of effectiveness. These factors can be provided with weightage as we are very much focused on the task in hand i.e. to excel in the concerned sport i.e. volleyball that we have chosen. Moreover, it can also be highlighted that we were following a much cooperative approach as we had strong mutual understandings with each other. I felt that most of the members in my team needed volleyball training as we were little weak in this particular sport. I learnt that we were operating in a very much systematic manner as we knew our strengths along with the weaknesses. Groups as systems represent a dynamic entity that intends to excel in any activities that are undertaken. Similarly, group sport or team sport lends an invaluable opportunity for an individual to share space with individuals of different skills being in a system. In such an activity, the prevailing barriers related to learning and skill development can be efficiently mitigated. I have also been able to ascertain greater group dynamics that has been the critical success factor for the athletic team (Rothwell 1-381). Group Development Week Three Month†¦Year†¦ During the course of week three, we have been able to learn a lot from each other. The best part about our team is that we are small in number. It has allowed all of us to

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape Title: ‘Travel constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape’ (M. Auge, â€Å"Non-Places,† 1995; p86). Does this statement seem to you to express a central insight about landscape and travel in the 20th century? Please discuss in relation to the work of Andy Goldsworthy. The Earthworks art of Andy Goldsworthy challenges, firstly, a classical art-historical conception of the landscape, and can also be implicitly responsive to the ‘supermodern’ sense of landscape and place, theorised by Marc Auge, in which â€Å"Vocabulary†¦ educates the gaze, informs the landscape[1].†. Goldsworthy captures the essence of place through texture, allusion to process and a mutual dependability on nature, as if to transform both the materials of the objects and the meaning of their often banal contexts. It is immediately evident that Goldsworthy’s works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a tactile expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. â€Å"For me, looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins[2].† This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product. This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further evoked through the use of text. For example, in a photograph of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not only in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities: â€Å"Stacked ice – sound of cracking.[3]† The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks[4] symbolizes its sensual form in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process: â€Å"The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes below and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies[5].† Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectator’s newness of vision: in Auge’s words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is â€Å"the first journey of birth†¦the primal experience of differentiation[6].†While Auge asserts that non-places â€Å" exist only through the words that evoke them,[7]† AG’s words work to clarify the gaze rather than condense it to a unified vision. But what constitutes this gaze? When we refer to his earthworks, are we referring only to the symbolic object, or the whole space inside the photo frame? Like a travel writer, a heightened perception or rediscovery of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthy’s working process: â€Å"Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper- a relationship made in layers over a long time.[8]† There is a suggestion by AG that site or context affects and, to an extent, has a significant role in generating the features of his objects: When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it†¦The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within[9] While the train, for Auge, is one of the greatest culprits behind the spectator’s fleeting vision of space, Goldsworthy’s immobilization and transposition of the train track and its practical function to a snaking †¦in the Lambton earthworks?, is a way for AG to recapture the essence of the landscape, to shift its perceptual status from non-place to place: â€Å"Staying in one place makes me more aware of change[10].† However, part of this awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming according to environmental ‘whim,’ and that the photograph merely represents a certain moment in a process. His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as well as his own sense of navigation, is significant because he is able to evoke the history of the object through capturing a synchronic moment in its processes. If we look at several of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole[11], we sense their impermanence and a foreboding decay from seeing their present formal cohesion. A Cambridge earthwork with leaves is accompanied by this awareness in text, where a materialistic description of the object is transformed into a narrative of it: â€Å"Torn Hole/horse chestnut leaves stitched with stalks around the rim/moving in the wind[12].† Perhaps more than these smaller-scale earthworks, the earthworks in County Durham most forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the movement of travel, not only through their obvious association with trains, but through the movement implied by the object, as â€Å" ripples from a thrown stone[13]†. Freezing these processes is a way of reawakening the senses, by both seeing the object statically without moving too fast and by being aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being driven by the â€Å"perpetual series of presents[14]† of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gursky’s digital photos . According to Auge, the language of signposts etc. does not heighten the spectator’s perception of a place, but merely substitutes their relationship to it as a mere passing acknowledgement.[15] Goldsworthy’s works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the immediacy of the commercial product[16], including the signs that describe and name features and punctuations in the land, trying to give it a sense of place. Challenging the prescriptions of discourse on our subjectivity, however, has always been a preoccupation in landscape art. Constable’s landscape paintings, for example, could represent a different challenge to the supermodern construction of landscape into a fleeting ‘non-place,’ through his holistic, static, formalist and panoramic vision of the land. While Goldsworthy reconfigures the landscape’s gaze beyond the static to an awareness of its morphology, materiality, unpredictability and precariousness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun simultaneously and consciously at different periods and freezing the movement of the Hay wain into a stance.[17] In Goldsworthy’s work, therefore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent. Throughout the earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, two main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the dislocation through the â€Å"non-place:† organic nature and Goldsworthy, who is simultaneously a conscious manipulator of nature’s autonomous processes as well as driven by the manipulations of nature itself. The larger scope of his County Durham Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, encourages a more structural and slightly cartographic gaze. A disused railway track becomes the site for a snaking sand track photographed aerially alongside rows of monotonous houses. Their juxtaposition, their mutual encroachment on one another and the snaking imprint’s echo of movement, in one sense seem to re-establish the inter-dependency of urban structures and nature, and the similarities in the way we perceive them despite serving different functions. In this sense, it allows greater insight to its organic qualities by its association. In a technical sense, it could be argued that there is a tension between Goldsworthy’s organic creations and their technological control by the intrinsic features of the photograph. However, any hint of the artist’s exploitation, evoked in works such as â€Å"Snowball in trees†[18] or in references to the name of the excavator driver in the Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, is balanced out, in exchange, by their precarious existence in nature, where a rock could be precariously balanced on a boulder.[19] This relationship between nature and its manipulations is significant because it represents a reappropriation of our relationship with those places, designated by the artist’s symbols rather than the symbols of industry with which â€Å"individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral entities’ or institutions[20]†. Goldsworthy navigates and finds his non-prescribed place, by being led by climactic and environmental factors rather than such ‘moral entities.[21] Auge defines non-place in detail against the anthropological concept of place, where the traveller occupies a non-communicative, solitary space with the language of ticket machines and train timetables.[22] Accordingly, these public facilities and structures give the spectator an image of their individuality, or a ‘distanced’ simulated familiarity,[23] by discursively framing and displacing the ‘gaze’ and the individual ‘essence’ towards a simultaneous collective individuality, through the â€Å"individualization of references[24].† In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a unique result on each object, each of the processes in the Earthworks produces individual objects, which, not over-prescribed by images and signs, evolve in partial autonomy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Auge, Marc, Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. Baudrillard, Jean, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 Goldsworthy, Andy, Andy Goldsworthy, London: Penguin Group, 1990. Hand to Earth, Ed. Andy Goldsworthy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Rosenthal, Michael, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 Rosenthal, Michael, â€Å"The Victorians and Beyond,† British Landscape Painting, Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1982 Footnotes [1]Marc Auge, Non-Places:introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, 1995: Verso, London , p108 [2]Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy, 1990:Penguin Group, London , p1 [3]Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Stacked ice sound of cracking,† Hampstead Heath, 28 December 1985 [4] Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Leadgate and Lambton earthworks,† County Durham, Winter-Spring 1988-9 [5] Goldsworthy, p3 [6] Auge, p84 [7] opcit, p95 [8] Goldsworthy, p1 [9] ibid [10] ibid [11] For example, â€Å"Bracken,† Borrowdale, Cumbria, 13 February 1988; â€Å"Slate,† Stonewood, Dumfriesshire, Summer 1987, â€Å"Plane Leaves,† Castres, France, 19 October 1988. [12] Cambridge, 24 July 19886 [13] AG, p4 [14] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. [15] Auges, p97 [16] Jean Baudrillard, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 [17]Michael Rosenthal, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 [18] [19] Rock on boulder work [20] Auge, p96 [21] AG, p1 [22] Auge, p107-8 [23] Auge, p106 [24] Auge, p109

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape Title: ‘Travel constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape’ (M. Auge, â€Å"Non-Places,† 1995; p86). Does this statement seem to you to express a central insight about landscape and travel in the 20th century? Please discuss in relation to the work of Andy Goldsworthy. The Earthworks art of Andy Goldsworthy challenges, firstly, a classical art-historical conception of the landscape, and can also be implicitly responsive to the ‘supermodern’ sense of landscape and place, theorised by Marc Auge, in which â€Å"Vocabulary†¦ educates the gaze, informs the landscape[1].†. Goldsworthy captures the essence of place through texture, allusion to process and a mutual dependability on nature, as if to transform both the materials of the objects and the meaning of their often banal contexts. It is immediately evident that Goldsworthy’s works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a tactile expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. â€Å"For me, looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins[2].† This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product. This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further evoked through the use of text. For example, in a photograph of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not only in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities: â€Å"Stacked ice – sound of cracking.[3]† The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks[4] symbolizes its sensual form in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process: â€Å"The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes below and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies[5].† Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectator’s newness of vision: in Auge’s words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is â€Å"the first journey of birth†¦the primal experience of differentiation[6].†While Auge asserts that non-places â€Å" exist only through the words that evoke them,[7]† AG’s words work to clarify the gaze rather than condense it to a unified vision. But what constitutes this gaze? When we refer to his earthworks, are we referring only to the symbolic object, or the whole space inside the photo frame? Like a travel writer, a heightened perception or rediscovery of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthy’s working process: â€Å"Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper- a relationship made in layers over a long time.[8]† There is a suggestion by AG that site or context affects and, to an extent, has a significant role in generating the features of his objects: When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it†¦The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within[9] While the train, for Auge, is one of the greatest culprits behind the spectator’s fleeting vision of space, Goldsworthy’s immobilization and transposition of the train track and its practical function to a snaking †¦in the Lambton earthworks?, is a way for AG to recapture the essence of the landscape, to shift its perceptual status from non-place to place: â€Å"Staying in one place makes me more aware of change[10].† However, part of this awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming according to environmental ‘whim,’ and that the photograph merely represents a certain moment in a process. His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as well as his own sense of navigation, is significant because he is able to evoke the history of the object through capturing a synchronic moment in its processes. If we look at several of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole[11], we sense their impermanence and a foreboding decay from seeing their present formal cohesion. A Cambridge earthwork with leaves is accompanied by this awareness in text, where a materialistic description of the object is transformed into a narrative of it: â€Å"Torn Hole/horse chestnut leaves stitched with stalks around the rim/moving in the wind[12].† Perhaps more than these smaller-scale earthworks, the earthworks in County Durham most forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the movement of travel, not only through their obvious association with trains, but through the movement implied by the object, as â€Å" ripples from a thrown stone[13]†. Freezing these processes is a way of reawakening the senses, by both seeing the object statically without moving too fast and by being aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being driven by the â€Å"perpetual series of presents[14]† of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gursky’s digital photos . According to Auge, the language of signposts etc. does not heighten the spectator’s perception of a place, but merely substitutes their relationship to it as a mere passing acknowledgement.[15] Goldsworthy’s works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the immediacy of the commercial product[16], including the signs that describe and name features and punctuations in the land, trying to give it a sense of place. Challenging the prescriptions of discourse on our subjectivity, however, has always been a preoccupation in landscape art. Constable’s landscape paintings, for example, could represent a different challenge to the supermodern construction of landscape into a fleeting ‘non-place,’ through his holistic, static, formalist and panoramic vision of the land. While Goldsworthy reconfigures the landscape’s gaze beyond the static to an awareness of its morphology, materiality, unpredictability and precariousness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun simultaneously and consciously at different periods and freezing the movement of the Hay wain into a stance.[17] In Goldsworthy’s work, therefore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent. Throughout the earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, two main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the dislocation through the â€Å"non-place:† organic nature and Goldsworthy, who is simultaneously a conscious manipulator of nature’s autonomous processes as well as driven by the manipulations of nature itself. The larger scope of his County Durham Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, encourages a more structural and slightly cartographic gaze. A disused railway track becomes the site for a snaking sand track photographed aerially alongside rows of monotonous houses. Their juxtaposition, their mutual encroachment on one another and the snaking imprint’s echo of movement, in one sense seem to re-establish the inter-dependency of urban structures and nature, and the similarities in the way we perceive them despite serving different functions. In this sense, it allows greater insight to its organic qualities by its association. In a technical sense, it could be argued that there is a tension between Goldsworthy’s organic creations and their technological control by the intrinsic features of the photograph. However, any hint of the artist’s exploitation, evoked in works such as â€Å"Snowball in trees†[18] or in references to the name of the excavator driver in the Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, is balanced out, in exchange, by their precarious existence in nature, where a rock could be precariously balanced on a boulder.[19] This relationship between nature and its manipulations is significant because it represents a reappropriation of our relationship with those places, designated by the artist’s symbols rather than the symbols of industry with which â€Å"individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral entities’ or institutions[20]†. Goldsworthy navigates and finds his non-prescribed place, by being led by climactic and environmental factors rather than such ‘moral entities.[21] Auge defines non-place in detail against the anthropological concept of place, where the traveller occupies a non-communicative, solitary space with the language of ticket machines and train timetables.[22] Accordingly, these public facilities and structures give the spectator an image of their individuality, or a ‘distanced’ simulated familiarity,[23] by discursively framing and displacing the ‘gaze’ and the individual ‘essence’ towards a simultaneous collective individuality, through the â€Å"individualization of references[24].† In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a unique result on each object, each of the processes in the Earthworks produces individual objects, which, not over-prescribed by images and signs, evolve in partial autonomy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Auge, Marc, Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. Baudrillard, Jean, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 Goldsworthy, Andy, Andy Goldsworthy, London: Penguin Group, 1990. Hand to Earth, Ed. Andy Goldsworthy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Rosenthal, Michael, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 Rosenthal, Michael, â€Å"The Victorians and Beyond,† British Landscape Painting, Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1982 Footnotes [1]Marc Auge, Non-Places:introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, 1995: Verso, London , p108 [2]Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy, 1990:Penguin Group, London , p1 [3]Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Stacked ice sound of cracking,† Hampstead Heath, 28 December 1985 [4] Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Leadgate and Lambton earthworks,† County Durham, Winter-Spring 1988-9 [5] Goldsworthy, p3 [6] Auge, p84 [7] opcit, p95 [8] Goldsworthy, p1 [9] ibid [10] ibid [11] For example, â€Å"Bracken,† Borrowdale, Cumbria, 13 February 1988; â€Å"Slate,† Stonewood, Dumfriesshire, Summer 1987, â€Å"Plane Leaves,† Castres, France, 19 October 1988. [12] Cambridge, 24 July 19886 [13] AG, p4 [14] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. [15] Auges, p97 [16] Jean Baudrillard, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 [17]Michael Rosenthal, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 [18] [19] Rock on boulder work [20] Auge, p96 [21] AG, p1 [22] Auge, p107-8 [23] Auge, p106 [24] Auge, p109

Heroic epic :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  A heroic epic is an extended narrative poem, celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero. Beowulf exemplifies the traits admired by his people, and personifies Anglo-Saxon values. Strength, Skill in battle, Courage, Fame, loyalty, and Generosity are the Anglo-Saxon values that Beowulf embodies and demonstrates throughout the story.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  As the poem begins, King Hrothgar of Denmark and his entire kingdom is being terrorized by a monster named Grendel. The Danes suffer for twelve years at the hands of Grendel. Eventually, Beowulf and a fourteen men come to rescue Hrothgar, determined to defeat Grendel. Beowulf fights him unarmed, proving that he is stronger than the demon. Beowulf tears the monster’s arm off and Grendel eventually dies. The arm is brought back as a trophy of victory. Grendel’s mother seeking revenge comes to Heorot and kills one of Hrothgar’s favorite men, Aeschere. Beowulf and company travel to the swamp, where she lives, Beowulf dives in the water and fights her in her underwater lair demonstrating his skill in battle.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Beowulf’s courage, strength, and skill in battle was greatly appreciated by the Danes who now were able to live peacefully and â€Å"monster-less.† His fame has now spread throughout Denmark. After departing, Beowulf returns to Geatland and is reunited with his King and Queen. Beowulf tells of his actions in Denmark thereby earning even more fame and gives most of the treasure he received to his king Hygelac to whom he is truly loyal.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  During Beowulf’s reign as King of the Geats, and as death is approaching a dragon unleashes fury on Geatland. Once again Beowulf demonstrates his courage. Beowulf and his nephew Wiglaf kill the dragon together, but Beowulf no longer as young or strong, is severely wounded. The dragon has bit him and its venom kills Beowulf moments later. Beowulf demonstrating his generosity gives dragon’s treasure to his people.