The Problem of Plagiarism Essay - 1729 Words

Problem As American education enters a time when the ability to use technology becomes imperative, a time when students will become expected to communicate and work via the Internet, and a time when students will need to be able to find and interpret information efficiently and correctly, secondary school teachers are searching for ways to provide their students with assessments that mirror the expectations those students will face in the workforce. One way to do this is to have students research topics and create position papers, presentations, and various other forms of written expression that require students to synthesize and analyze information. However, in the midst of researching topics and sharing ideas, these same students are†¦show more content†¦Instead, according to the results of a Rutgers University survey reported by Slobogin (2002), over 50% of students surveyed have plagiarized all or part of an essay and 50% do not believe that copying answers on a test is cheating . When asked for their reasoning, these students attribute their lack of morality on the subject to the pressure to get good grades and the lack of guidance from an adult world that appears to condone a dearth of ethical behavior (Slobogin, 2002). This is especially evident in one student’s comment that reads, â€Å"I actually think cheating is good. A person who has an entirely honest life cant succeed these days (Slobogin, 2002, sidebar). What students may not realize when they are plagiarizing material is that they are not only cheating themselves out of knowledge and cheating their teachers out of seeing what they’re truly able to do, but they are also participating in what could be illegal activity. Villano (2006) reminds students that any time material is used without proper citation, the perpetrator could face legal trouble. These problems typically do not stem simply from plagiarism, but from potential copyright infringement, which occurs when students  "copy large sections of someone elses copyrighted work without permission, even if [they] give the original author credit† (Hom, 2006, para. 11). Students of any age are only allowed to borrow material through fair use, which indicates that only a small portionShow MoreRelatedPlagiarism : The Problem Of Plagiarism1381 Words   |  6 Pagesâ€Å"Plagiarism† was the label given to me at age of sixteen. I was accused of plagiarism, but felt like a fraud to me. For me my paper was not the reason why I was a fraud, it felt like it was me being judged. â€Å"Dishonest, criminal, and unprincipled† were the terms that were being placed with my name by others in my high school where people believed the untruthful act was performed. My teachers, administrators, and fellow classmates were creating an untruthful image in their minds as they stopped interactingRead MoreThe Real Problem of Plagiarism1168 Words   |  5 PagesPlagiarism In academic settings, there are systems in place which dictate how administration expects the students to behave. These codes can be different based upon the specific rules of the institution in question. Some have clothing rules, others rules about alcohol or drug use, but there are certain rules which are more universal and are found in almost all schools. Many schools have rules which dictate that students must behave in ways which the institution considers to be honorable. These honorRead More The Problems of Plagiarism Essay1199 Words   |  5 PagesPlagiarism is an academic misconduct in which students use someone’s ideas or information in their work without proper referencing. While western culture insists that sources of words, ideas, images, sounds be documented for academic purposes, â€Å"plagiarism is now recognized as a serious problem especially in university where students are just copying words from web sites or someone else’s work† (The Owl At P urdue, 2007 ). According to East (2006, p.16), â€Å"many Australian universities are now developingRead MorePlagiarism Problems for Educators1365 Words   |  6 Pagesit is come to plagiarism, university writing educators are pessimistic about successfully eradicating this problem. It is difficult for them to find ways of promoting academic integrity so as to prevent university students from committing this academic fraud. Moreover, most of them just end up employing punitive enforcement or merely punishing students who plagiarize. Scott Jaschik, an editor of Inside Higher Ed, addresses this issue in Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism. This articleRead MorePlagiarism: a Social Problem1696 Words   |  7 PagesPLAGIARISM: A SOCIAL PROBLEM Its four in the morning, and youre just one page into a 15-page term paper thats due at ten, and the professor isnt giving extensions. A few years ago, that would have been it: You would have passed in the paper late, if at all, and dealt with the consequences. But this is 2007, and so, in your most desperate hour, you try a desperate ploy. You log on to the internetÂ… enter term papers into the search engine, and find your way to www.al-termpaper.com. There, youRead MoreThe Problem Of Cheating And Plagiarism819 Words   |  4 Pageswritten assignments. It doesn’t stop there, as ICAI Director Teresa Fishman claims, â€Å"We have reason to believe that students who cheat might also lie about cheating†. The problem lies when educators are only addressing which students are cheating over what caused them to cheat in the first place. Although the issue of cheating and plagiarism is not clearly black or white, I believe there are moments created within school systems whe re those actions seem like the clearest way out. Many of the older generationRead MoreThe Problem of Plagiarism Literature Review2696 Words   |  11 PagesThe Problem of Plagiarism: Literature Review Selection Melinda â€Å"Mindy† L. Boucher Lower Columbia College The Problem Students routinely hand in papers in which the writing is so complex and the vocabulary so sophisticated that there is doubt that they were written in the students’ own words. When samples of the writing are typed into a Google search engine, sentences and whole paragraphs are found to be a match. Students are confronted with the plagiarism and given informationRead More The Problem of Internet Plagiarism Essay1275 Words   |  6 PagesThe Problem of Internet Plagiarism In November 2001, CNN reported a case of alleged rampant plagiarism at the University of Virginia involving 72 cases and 148 students. What happened at the University of Virginia is only one of many cases of plagiarism faced everyday all over the world. Plagiarism itself is not a new problem, but the Internet has made a difficult situation even more complex. According to Ryan: Plagiarized work used to be generated through frat house recycling efforts, purchasedRead More Plagiarism - An Ever-increasing Problem Essays1097 Words   |  5 PagesPlagiarism - An Ever-increasing Problem Plagiarism has been a problem to academic institutions for centuries. Plagiarism basically means taking credit for somebody else’s work. The technical definition of plagiarism, as used by State University, is presenting work done (in whole or in part) by someone else as if it were ones own. Dishonest practices that go hand in hand with plagiarism include faking or falsification of data, cheating, or the uttering of false statements by a student inRead MoreEssay on Ways to Help Remedy the Plagiarism Problem614 Words   |  3 PagesPlagiarism is a word that should be well known to anyone who has attended school. To plagiarize, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, is â€Å"to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as ones own; use (anothers production) without crediting the source; to commit literary theft; present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.† While it would seem obvious that this would be a bad thing to do and, therefore, easy to avoid, many students and

The Effect Of Music On Short Term Memory Essay - 998 Words

The Effect of Music on Short Term Memory Jessie Eddins 12/12/16 Abstract. This experiment was tested to see whether music had an effect on short term memory. Listening to music while looking at objects will potentially distract the brain, no longer allowing it to hold the information viewed in short term memory. This experiment found that listening to music while taking in the information and listening to the same music while trying to recall the information hinders the brains ability to remember more objects versus recalling information after listening to no music at all. I. Introduction Short term memory has three components to it; capacity, duration, and encoding. The human brain can only hold up to seven items (plus or minus two) in short term memory according to Miller (1956). Short term memory only lasts around fifteen to thirty seconds (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1971). Rehearsal, repeating the objects seen, has been proven to help the objects stay short term memory and without it, the information will not stay in short term memory. Short term memory deals with things lasting from memories that happened just seconds ago to a couple of days ago. Long term memory deals with distant memories from months, years and even decades ago. Brain regions that aid in healthy memory function are the temporal lobe and hippocampus. The hippocampus is where the formation of new memories is formed and works alongside of the temporal lobe to transform the newShow MoreRelatedThe Effect Of Background Music On Short Term Memory1393 Words   |  6 Pages The Effect of Background Music on Short Term Memory Jiayi Shi Arizona State University Abstract The intention of this study was to examine the relationship between the different types of background music and people’s abilities to memorize and retain information. There are 18 participants in the experiment. 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An Image of Africa Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ Free Essays

string(78) " of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy\." Achebe, Chinua. â€Å"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness'† Massachusetts Review. 18. We will write a custom essay sample on An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ or any similar topic only for you Order Now 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co. , 1988, pp. 251-261 In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain Community College not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. Oh well,† I heard him say finally, behind me: â€Å"I guess I have to take your course to find out. † A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who — bless their teacher — had just read Things Fall Apart . One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe. I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters ra ther heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them. But only, I hope, at first sight. The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things. The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I believe that something more willful than a mere lack of information was at work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist? If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire — one might indeed say the need — in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest. This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class — permanent literature — read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it â€Å"among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language. I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise. Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as â€Å"the other world,† the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and re finement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully â€Å"at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks. But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that â€Å"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. † Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too â€Å"has been one of the dark places of the earth. It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terr ible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings. These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad’s famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness . In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. You read "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’" in category "Papers" We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc. , etc. The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad’s â€Å"adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery. That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at sta ke than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well — one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths. The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to quote almost a whole page from about the middle of the stop/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were †¦. No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend. Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: â€Å"What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours †¦. Ugly. † Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes: And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity — and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance. â€Å"Fine fellows — cannibals –in their place,† he tells us pointedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between the policeman and the baker to like a peep into the heart of darkness. Before the story likes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice little vignette as an example of things in their place: Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks — these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and hue as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure: She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent †¦. She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons. First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story: She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning †¦. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, â€Å"I had heard you were coming. â€Å"†¦ She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subfile ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the â€Å"rudimentary souls† of Africa. In place of speech they made â€Å"a violent babble of uncouth sounds. † They â€Å"exchanged short grunting phrases† even among themselves. But most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them: â€Å"Catch ‘im,† he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth — â€Å"catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us. † â€Å"To you, eh? † I asked; â€Å"what would you do with them? â€Å"Eat ‘im! † he said curtly. . . . The other occasion was the famous announcement:†Mistah Kurtz — he dead. † At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults. In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad’s purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz’s death by the â€Å"insolent black head in the doorway† what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and â€Å"taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land† than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined? It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete confidence — a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever. Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these: They were dying slowly — it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says: â€Å"The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother. And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being. Naturally he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious mir acle in Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest. Conrad’s liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer’s, though. He would not use the word brother however qualified; the farthest he would go was kinship. When Marlow’s African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives his white master one final disquieting look. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory — like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, â€Å"†¦ he thought of their humanity — like yours †¦. Ugly. † The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestat ions go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad’s great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments: The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile water to bar the way for our return. Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last fifty years. His obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was! Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing: A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description: A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms. . . . as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He calls him â€Å"my unforgettable Englishman† and describes him in the following manner: â€Å"(his) calves exposed to the public gaze . . . dazzled the beholder by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. . . . The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men. . . illumined his face. . . and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth. . . his white calves twinkled sturdily. Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M. D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad’s antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer’s mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria. Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as â€Å"among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language. † And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities. There are two probable grounds on which what I have aid so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms. How could I stand up more than fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any traveler’s tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evidence even off man’s very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s. And we also happen to know that Conrad was, in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, â€Å"notoriously inaccurate in the rendering of his own history. † But more important by far is the abundant testimony about Conrad’s savages which we could gather if we were so inclined from other sources and which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations besides erging into the evil forest or materializing out of it simply to plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad had written his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art historian, describes it: Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act of turning to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was ‘speechless’ and ‘stunned’ when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze. . . The revolution of twentieth century art was under way! The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of Conrad’s River Congo. They have a name too: the Fang people, and are without a doubt among the world’s greatest masters of the sculptured form. The event Frank Willett is referring to marks the beginning of cubism and the infusion of new life into European art, which had run completely out of strength. The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad’s picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopold’s lnternational Association for the Civilization of Central Africa. Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. But even those not blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing blind. Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid travelers of all time, Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled Description of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two extraordinary omissions in his account. He said nothing about the art of printing, unknown as yet in Europe but in full flower in China. He either did not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it. Whatever the reason, Europe had to wait another hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polo’s omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles long and already more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the moon! Indeed travelers can be blind. As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray — a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man’s jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! he darkness found him out. In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but qui te simply as a continent of people — not angels, but not rudimentary souls either — just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart; when I thought of the West’s television and cinema and newspapers, about books read in its schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible. And there was, in any case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in return for its good opinion of Africa. Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward. Although I have used the word willful a few times here to characterize the West’s view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this stage is more akin to reflex action than calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more but less hopeful. The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this: In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language. I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically erroneous in the context is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad’s withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialects! In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt. Surely the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our writer means something else — something appropriate to the sounds Indians and Africans make! Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad. How to cite An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, Papers

Kennedy In Presidential Library And Museum -Myassignmenthelp.Com

Question: Discuss About The Kennedy In Presidential Library And Museum? Answer: Introduction In the year 1961, about 1400 Cuban exiles launched an invasion ate the Bay of Pigs located at the south coast of Cuba. The main goal of the Bay of Pigs invasion was to remove Castro (who overthrew Cuban dictator) and establish a non-communist government. The invasion took place on 17th April, 1961 when Cuban exile force landed at the Bay of Pigs. It was a failed invasion as the Cuban exile force known as Brigade 2506 were defeated by Castro within 3 days. Some escaped by sea and Castro killed or imprisoned the others who could not escape. 1200 members had to surrender and about 100 were killed (Jfklibrary.org, 2018). The Bay of Pigs invasion was planned to topple Fidel Castro, who had removed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and came to power in Cuba after an armed revolt in 1959. This plan was made by Central Intelligence Agency and briefings related to the invasion were given to John F. Kennedy to train Cuban exiles for invading their homeland (Juan et al., 2014). Groupthink is a psychology phenomenon where group of people coming together for harmony make irrational decision and fail to critically evaluate a decision. The Bay of Pigs invasion can also be regarded as example of Group think because Kennedy took a flawed decision. He failed to communicate to the Cuban exiles regarding the accountability of all members for the success of their plan and he failed to critically analyze the consequences of a heterogeneous team. No role was specified to the members and this resulted in failure of the invasion despite the large size of the team. The key lessons that the Bay of Pigs invasion has taught me is that while working and planning any objective with a large group, critical evaluation of decision is necessary to promote the success of group work. It is very important to analyze the objective as well as consequence of each action. Each members of the team should be effectively briefed about their role and feedback should also be taken from each member regarding their perception about any strategic plan or activity. To counteract influence of group think, I will focus on participation of each member in decision making. All members will be encouraged to give their feedback on the decision. This will help members to feel valued and feelings biased leadership will not exist in such group. This strategy will ensure that sound decision making takes place in the team. Reference Janis, I. L. (2015). Groupthink: The desperate drive for consensus at any cost.Classics of organization theory, 161-168. Jfklibrary.org. (2018). The Bay of Pigs - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Museum. management 2 February 2018, from https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pigs.aspx Juan, F. C. J. R. F., Guevara, A. B. C., Ameijeiras, E., Kennedy, J. F., Romn, P., Oliva, marketing. (2014). Bay of Pigs Invasion.False Flags, Covert Operations, Propaganda, 52.