186,549 research outputs found
A. P. Hitchens
No full textHitchens is sitting at a lab bench with his right hand resting on a microscope.Inscriptions on image and/or album page: "#456/A.P. Hitchens/'23"Digitized by: MBLWHOI Libraryimage/jpg black and white image reformatted digitalPhotograph
Validation of a smart textile ECG device for use in racehorses during strenuous exercise
No full textA Kapusniak, L Nath, P Hitchens, S Bailey, P McCrae, S Frankli
Pleuropneumonia -- 1939-44 -- Other Diseases Researched, Miscellaneous -- letter, 1942-11-19
No full textLetter from Hitchens, A. P. to Sabin, Albert B. dated 1942-11-19.Sabin Collection Fair Use Policy</a
Samuel Johnson and the vocation of the author
No full textMuch has been written about Samuel Johnson as a Christian, and much about him as an author; this study is about where the two meet, in the idea of the literary vocation. Though Johnson only uses the word âvocationâ a handful of times, it holds both the quotidian sense of a job and the more exalted notion of a divine call, a tension which informs Johnsonâs thinking.
I begin with Johnsonâs development as a religious writer, influenced by William Lawâs contention that any form of life can be devout and holy, and by Bernard Mandevilleâs unsentimental candour. Johnsonâs writing bears the marks of both. He revised Irene, for instance, to make it less overtly Christian: a reminder that Johnsonâs religious convictions bring an invisible pressure to bear on apparently secular works. In his early years on the Gentlemanâs Magazine Johnson develops the principle that authorship, being a public act, carries great responsibilities.
It is, in fact, a vocation, and unpacking this concept takes up Chapter 2. Johnson sees writing as a potential form of public service, adding that a solitary writer ânaturally sinks from omission to forgetfulness of social dutiesâ. Too few commentators have grasped that Johnson sees morality in social terms â as a matter of answering the needs of others, according to oneâs place in an order overseen by divine providence. But again and again he refers to the human need âto seek from one another assistance and supportâ (Rambler 104). Instances of mutual help âby frequent reciprocations of beneficence unite mankind in society and friendshipâ. Johnsonâs well-known emphasis on friendship is only one expression of this deeper sense that society is held together by trust; and therefore, by the truth. Writersâ communication of truth defines their own social duties.
While Johnson can sound close to Shaftesbury when he writes of mankindâs sociability, there is really a significant gap between them, because Johnsonâs view of human nature is more jaded. He expects people to hurt each other for the same reasons they help each other; and he recognises a strong tendency towards pride and superiority â especially among writers, who are tempted to cut themselves off from society.
Chapter 3 deals in more depth with a writerâs social role, which is simply expressed as the ability to put the truth memorably. Borrowing from a tradition which stretches back to Seneca at least, Johnson believes that a writer becomes a âbenefactor of mankindâ by putting the useful, but readily forgotten, principles of the good life into memorable forms. Drawing on Lockeâs account of the memory, and deviating from Lockeâs account of moral action, he suggests that literature has a power to move the reason and the passions at once â hence his demand that poetry be both true and pleasurable. While this resembles the Horatian formula of dulce et utile, Johnson added to it a sense of writersâ and readersâ experience of the text: how âimpressionsâ are transferred from the world, via the writer, to the text, and so to the reader. Learning how to persuade the audience, however, necessitates first-hand acquaintance with the world.
Hence the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5, which are pride and humility respectively. Pride separates the author from the social world, making them ineffectual and unable to communicate truth. The âLivesâ of Swift and Milton establish this partly through their ridicule of the two subjects: though Johnson did not think ridicule established truth, it did restore a balance upset by an authorâs singularity.
âSingularityâ is the word Johnson uses to encapsulate Swiftâs faults: he was âfond of singularity, and desirous to make a mode of happiness for himself, different from the general course of things and order of Providenceâ. Milton, too, is condemned for his arrogance â but even more in order to correct the idolatry of his admirers. Johnson believes that Milton is being written about with absurd reverence, and so puts him back in his place â as just another member of society, with a role to fulfil.
Accepting that place involves a measure of humility. The question of the âdignity of literatureâ, a contested point during the nineteenth century, was alive in Johnsonâs time, and through his associations with what he himself called âGrub Streetâ, he lived and worked among many writers who might be thought undignified. Yet in the obscurity of the hacks Johnson found something to praise â an industrious, humble service opposed to the âletterâd arroganceâ of self-satisfied authors. â[T]he humble author of journals and gazettes must be considered as a liberal dispenser of beneficial knowledgeâ (Rambler 145). By stooping to be merely useful, journalists become great. Particularly in the Journey to the Western Islands, Johnson divests himself of authorial dignity, drawing attention to his own mistakes and omissions.
Such a humdrum view of the writerâs role, which placed the emphasis on the reader, put Johnson at odds with most of the prominent Romantics â and the scale of their revulsion from Johnson needs two chapters to be dealt with. Chapter 6 argues that their critique, especially that of Hazlitt and Coleridge, was above all about the question of the writerâs vocation: and for that reason, Shakespeare was the most contested ground â for Coleridge, Johnsonâs Shakespeare criticism was impertinent âfilthâ aimed at âthe greatest man that ever put on and put off mortalityâ. But that was exactly the kind of idolatrous view of authorship â what Hazlitt called approvingly âoverstrained enthusiasmâ â which Johnson wanted to challenge.
However, many of the Romanticsâ criticisms misrepresented Johnson; he was a more flexible thinker than they realised. In a final chapter, I look at the aftermath of the Romantics: how their accusation that Johnson was too narrow and bigoted to understand Shakespeare is echoed in Macaulay, and even in sympathetic readers like Matthew Arnold, and has dogged Johnson all the way to the present day. And I point out that the Romantic exaltation of the author has faced its own backlash, in ways that suggest Johnson might have seen more clearly than the Romantics thought.</p
Implementation of the EC directive on packaging and packaging waste and implications for the environmental performance and competitiveness of firms along the food industry supply chain
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
The Impact of Environmental Regulation on Competitiveness in the European Cement Industry - Results of a Matched Plant Comparison between Germany, Spain and the UK
No full textZementindustrie, Umweltauflage, Internationaler Wettbewerb, Vergleich, EU-Staaten, Großbritannien, Spanien, Deutschland, Cement industry, Environmental regulation, Global competition, Comparison, EU countries, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany
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