Impact Of Mobile Phone On Work Life

Impact Of Mobile Phone On Work Life Impact of mobile phone on work-life balance of field workers Abstract This research report is an exploratory study of impact of mobile phone on work performance, productivity and personal life of field workers. Are field workers able to take the advantage of mobile phone and related new technologies to improve their work life balance or they finding it difficult to manage their work and personal life due to use of mobile phone? This research is an attempt to understand the impact of mobile phone and related new technologies on their work life balance. Introduction The success of western economies is much more depends upon the efficiency and output of the field workers (Drucker, 1999). According to him field workers are also called as knowledge workers. A knowledge worker mainly works away from the desk and works in technical services and spend more time with clients and dealers whereas field workers also works away from desk and deals with the customers service. Many organisations provide equipped handy mobile devices to field workers which allow them to access the various applications and chance to communicate with the office workers and clients during field work. Work life balance is defined as creating a productive and fruitful work environment where tension between work and personal life is minimised (State service commission NZ, 2005). It means perfect combination of participation in paid work and unpaid work (personal life, social responsibilities and family work). Work life balance is all about implementation of policies which will helpful for workers and staff to maintain their healthy and satisfying lifestyle which will leads to improve performance and productivity of the worker. The main purpose of this study is to understand the impact of mobile phone on work life balance of field workers. This study is design to provide detail analysis of use of mobile phone during work time and off time and its impact on work and personal life of workers. Applying work life balance in organisation is very important to develop the productivity of workers. It is broadly consider that mobile phone and internet are distorting margins among workplace and personal life. Some researchers believe that mobile phone is threat to the modern life, whereas other considers it as a new opportunity to maintain work life and family life (Wajcman et al., 2008). No other device has been spread drastically amongst the people than mobile phone but its social and personal impact is not clearly known. This research report is base for assessing impact of mobile phone on work life balance of field workers. Mobile phones and field workers In 1990s, first time GE and CompuCom organisations provided mobile phones and laptops to their field workers and sales representatives and made them mobile workforce (Pepe, 1999). The main motive of these organisations of ‘going mobile was to make their field workers more productive and improve their ability to use dead time while traveling. As a result, field workers can check voice mails and can give call back in their spare time like waiting at airport, train stations. In the past few years mobile technology changed very dramatically. According to Jarvenpaa and Langs (2008) mobile technology is combination of communication, hardware and software handheld IT devices which includes PDAs, mobile phones and other integrated wireless devices enterprises like Blackberry. Mobile phone allows field workers for more bendable plans and gives independence to work from anywhere and anytime. Demand of work life balance is very sizzling topic amongst the various organisations to improve the productivity of workers. In 1980s the importance and need of females and field workers is recognised by organisations like Deloitte Touche and Merck. IBM started to change the policies like maternity leaves, EAPs (Employee Assistance Programme), home based work and child care policies to improve work life balance of female workers and field workers (Pepe, 1999). The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a survey in 2004 with more than 1500 field workers on mobile phone practices in field work (Belen, 2009). More than 75% field workers proposed that tools like email, text messages and voice calls help them to improve their productivity and availability on the job. They also described other benefits like faster decision making, real time information and flexibility. However flexibility on the field work means not an opportunity for the field workers to maintain their work life balance (Taylor 2003; Rood 2005). The Economic Intelligence Unit also found some disadvantages of the mobile phone practice amongst the field workers like trouble in managing their work home balance (Belen, 2009). According to Jarvenpaa and Langs (2008) mobile phone also brings some disadvantages to the life of field workers like â€Å"less personal time† and incapability to isolate themselves from the work during there off time. In other research by Schlosser (2002) where he interviewed with field workers and he found common disadvantage of being mobile leads to increase in expectation of availability. Increase in expectations indirectly increases workload and responsibility on the workers. They also feel compulsory to respond to the calls from their subordinates and managers (Davis, 2002). Due to more expectation of availability and quick response to work allied problems in weekends may indirectly affect the work life balance and may increase frustration amongst the workers (Jarvenpaa, Lang, et al 2003). Impact of mobile phone on work Lyytinen and Yoo (2002) published the research on work environment for organisations and individuals in which they proposed the impact of mobile phone and other wireless technology must have to be calculated by considering performance of team and output of the workers. There are many theories are available to measure the adoption of new technology and its impact on individuals. On the basis of TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) theory Breu, Hemingway and Ashurst (2005) conducted a research and they proposed some important aspect of impact of mobile phones on field workers. Improved job performance: Most of the interviewees explained that use of mobile phone helped them for quick communication process and better decision making while working on field which helped them to boost their job performance. Improved productivity: According to the 45% field workers mobile phone with the multiple function and internet access improved their productivity. Instead of waiting for client or customer they can use their dead time for other task like checking and sending emails, new updates and cold calling. They also described the benefit of real time information due to use of mobile phone as they can attained meeting with the latest and updated data and information. Faster task accomplishment:Use of mobile phone and new technological devices enables field workers to complete their task faster and in effective way. Rather than going back to the office or desk to complete task field workers get independence of physical location to complete the work (Breu, Hemingway and Ashurst, 2005). Greater work control:As per the field workers who spend more time with customers and clients agreed that mobile phone with internet gave them greater work control. Improved consulting process: As per the Breu, Hemingway and Ashurst, (2005) interviewees gave the reason that why they can meet more customers face to face on work fields, because these devices like mobile phone with internet facility enable them more responsive to the customers queries and communications. Improved collaboration:field workers agreedthat mobile phone reduced their communication gap with other team mates and improved their collaboration on consulting team. Other field workers propose that collaboration improved due to easy way of transferring private electronic files and personal work related documents. Make job easier:Not every fieldworker agreed on this statement that use of mobile phone make their job easier. Some found it easier to complete work but difficult to maintain their personal and family life and some found it as easy to maintain personal life but tough in field work. Recently, AMTA (Australian Mobile Telecommunication Association) published a survey in 2008 which was conducted within 2189 individuals in Australia on impact of mobile phone work life balance of Australian workers (Wajcman et al., 2007). They found some interesting things about impact of mobile phone on Australian workers. The key points are as follows, 20% field worker said that its impossible for them to work without mobile phone. 75% field workers feels secure on field job with mobile phone. Two third of the male field worker switch off their mobile phone on weekdays to avoid being disturbed by office work. More than half interviewees agreed that use of mobile phone increased their productivity. Impact of mobile phone on field workers Personal and family life:According toBreu, Hemingway and Ashurst (2005) half of the field workers agreed that use of mobile phones helps them to maintain their personal and family life. Mobile phone allowed them to become in touch with family during field work and they can easily communicate with the family members in emergency and normal cases. In contrast some field workers described that use of mobile phone impact negatively on their work life balance. Some workers found very difficult to balance their family and personal life with work life due to availability of mobile phone. Mental stress:Due toincrease in expectation of availability and instant response to the work related issues during personal time increases the mental stress on field workers which finally result in work life imbalance. 34% field workers said that it is very difficult to isolate them with work on off days due to the mobile phone which sometime increases their mental stress (Breu, Hemingway and Ashurst, 2005). Frustration: According totheEconomic Intelligence Unit survey, receiving calls on weekend and off time make workers frustrate mainly in case of women field workers (Belen, 2009). The author also proposed that women field workers are very specific about their work time and family time. Commitment and loyalty: State service commission NZ (2005) published a report on work life balance where it states that organisation provides various facilities to their workers like mobile phone, internet facility, increment, holiday pays. This kind of rewards and facilities increases the feeling of commitment in workers and it forced workers to responds quickly and even on off time. According to report workers also feel more pressurised due to their commitment and loyalty to the organisation. AMTA (Australian Mobile Telecommunication Association) found some interesting things about impact of mobile phone on Australian workers (Wajcman et al., 2007). The key finding of survey is as follows, 40% workers admitted that mobile increase their work load and 55% respond with neutral effect. More than 50% field workers respond that mobile phone helps their work life balance and very few workers said that negative impact of mobile phone on work life balance. As per the survey 60% male field workers has separate mobile phone for work and private use. 58% female field workers said that work calls on weekdays and off time disturbed them and increase their mental stress. As per the figure 1 and 2, Wajcman et al. (2007) described that around 20% male field workers found job difficult without having mobile phone. 30% male field workers found job very easy without mobile phone and even this percentage increases in female field workers up to 50%. Very few field workers said that their work life balance decrease a lot due to mobile phone. In contrast more than 50% workers said that there is no change in their work life balance. Around 40% field workers agreed that use of mobile phone somewhat increases their work life balance. Mobile phone and work family issues 1) Security of the children Most of the workers care about their childrens while work especially in case of female field workers. According to State service commission NZ (2005) survey 72% workers purchased mobile phone for their children to monitor their action. Mobile phone makes field workers more relax about childrens security on field because they know they can contact their children anytime anywhere (Breu, Hemingway and Ashurst, 2005). 2) In consistently separated couple relationship Field workers who lived consistently away from wife or family regarding job, mobile phone plays pivotal role in maintaining their relationship. In many cases where field workers are physically apart from their partner but with the help of mobile phone they can stay closer. According to the AMTA (Australian Mobile Telecommunication Association) survey 80% female field workers agreed that mobile phone plays very important role in their relationship when they are apart from each other (Wajcman et al., 2007). 3) Family household coordination Lowry Moskos (2005) proposed that mobile phone and new technology can bring better coordination in work and family of the field workers. As per AMTA survey all workers gave some important points on question that, how mobile phone assist family and household coordination? In reply workers said, get-together of family members, picnic planning, sending good and gifts, general information like when they will reach at home are some important things they can manage through mobile phone when they are on work and they can manage their family household coordination (Wajcman et al., 2007). Tethering effect of mobile phone on work life balance 1) Negative effect National Institute of Labour Studies, Australia published a research on tethering effect of mobile phone on work life balance. In this study they interviewed various filed workers depending upon occupation like electrician, estate agents, trade persons and ITC workers (Lowry Moskos, 2005). In this research all field workers explained their personal experience stating that how mobile phone impact their work life balance. Most of the ITC workers and estate agents said that there personal time were occupied due to mobile phone. Estate agents shared their personal experience and said that mobile phone interrupted his home life. For example, their mobile phone rung at midnight or early in the morning regarding property queries. One estate agent admitted that his wife hates his mobile phone when it rings in the night. He also proposed that his small childrens also get disturbed due to mobile phone in the night (Lowry Moskos, 2005). More than six electricians said that they have work based mobile phones and they can be fined on ignoring the work related calls. These penalties may include lost wages, and warnings from managers (Lowry Moskos, 2005). According to National Institute of Labour Studies not only field workers suffered from work related calls in night but their partners also get disturbed. One electrician said that he gets two or three work related calls in the night and he is tolerated to these calls. But his partner felt hard to sleep again after getting disturbed and lack of sleep affecting his job performance (Lowry Moskos, 2005). For all of the surveyed occupational groups mobile phone brings some emotional problems into their personal life. However no one agreed that mobile phone reduces their job performance and productivity. 2) Positive effect National Institute of Labour Studies also found some positive effects of mobile phone according to field workers. Some ITC workers described that they were beneficiated by mobile phone (Lowry Moskos, 2005). Some positive effects described in survey are as follows, Field workers can contact with their family even if they are on work. Some electrician said they can hide behind mobile phone like they can pretend that they are busy in meeting or they are driving a car. According to estate agent they can contact with many clients on mobile phone when it is impossible to meet them personally. All interviewees agreed that they can easily contact with their subordinates and managers while field work.

A Report on Conversation Analysis Techniques

Conversation analysis, usually abridged as CA, is a general method to the review of dialogues. It is the evaluation of the discourse in communication in almost all aspects of discussions on a daily basis. In all of these, we can say that â€Å"talk makes things happen†. The CA commonly tries to depict the organization of composition and chronological arrangement of interaction. As we can notice in the transcription, it can be taken into account as a naturalized transcription, where statements are recorded in as much feature as viable, most frequently observed in conversation analysis investigation.In trying to understand this particular transcription, it is a fundamental approach of CA that the action, which the partakers articulates, will depend not only on its verbal communication manner, but also on its position in the series, on the framework, on the distinctiveness of the presenter, and many others. Recently, the CA techniques of sequential examination have been in work b y phoneticians to delve into the good phonetic aspect of speech. Some of the basic techniques and methods are the following: Turn-taking Organization This is a technique wherein a talk is made in and via turns.Turn-taking is a means by which interrelating people apportion the privilege or responsibility to take part in the diversion of an exchange of ideas. In accordance with CA, the turn-taking scheme is made up of two mechanisms which are the turn constructional component and the turn allocation component. These techniques for dialogues were recognized inductively during pragmatic study of copies of demonstrations where discourse members chat one by one. This can be observed in the quoted part of transcription in which the people conversing take their turns alternately.â€Å"1. R: Hello Julia! How are you? Long time no see. 2. J: Yeah! Hi! How are you Richard? 3. R: I am good. I am good. I've been away for a few weeks. I have been with my father at work† The turn constructi onal component illustrates principal elements which achieve identifiable common dealings. It can be remarked that not every factor types may exist in all languages. Besides, it is likely that there are parts in other vernaculars, such as units in Asian speech that may not be present in English, French, and many other languages.This may be identified by an alteration in the tone or loudness of the expression, the last part of a syntactic element of speech, a brief stillness or stop, or a few variety of body movement. Changeover linking the participants typically takes place at such a situation. However, this component is not applied in the transition since the two chatting participants have a common set of language. While the turn allocation component expresses how chances to speak are shared by the presenters in a discussion. This can be used by directing, referring to a name, applying eye contact, etc.; and is evident in the transcription since Julia addresses Richard through using his name. Sequence Organization This affects how events are arranged in discussion. This comprises adjacency pairs and pre-sequences. Adjacency pairs are described with chats that are inclined to come about in reactive pairs; though, they may be divided over a succession of turns. Participants talk about a switch over of views and compliments because a lot of spoken deeds entitle a specific sort of vocal reaction as an immediate reply.Other dealings appeal for a dissimilar kind of accomplishment such as requests with approvals or refusals. Pre-sequences, on the other hand, employ chains of conversation prior to resolute chat. They arise when certain initial act is taken ahead of starting the primary element of an adjacency pair. Prior to uttering a demand, for example, it regularly creates meaning to make sure whether the other character has the thing one desires. In the transcription, a question-answer pair can be cited which sets up a request-approval.â€Å"52. R: Ok I will have to come down and visit you then = 53. J: = Of course! =† Preference organization This technique coincides with the sequence organization technique since it also involves preferences for a number of act categories in the channel of communication over other dealings. The modes in which the two classes of collective actions are fulfilled successively are referred to as preferred and dispreferred. The idea of predilection of communicators induces their understanding of spoken acts.A hush in response to an appeal, as an example, may be taken as substantiation of a possible imminent unfavored answer or a disclaimer. However, this technique is not applied in the transcription since there is no request that was approved or rejected. Alignment For a discourse to flow easily and efficiently, the orderliness of exchanges must be directed well and must follow a particular trajectory. The reaction to a remark normally offers a form of explanation of the previous statement and so signifies the alignment.Appraisals such as â€Å"That’s good†, inscriptions such as â€Å"Oh, wow! †, formulations like providing the general idea of what has been said, and two-way final points of the presenter’s statements, all supply confirmations of how the dialogue of the conversing persons is being comprehended. Repairs are used to mend a failure of discussion and reinstate alignment. Failures can be misinterpretations like â€Å"What did you say? â€Å"; â€Å"What do you mean? † as well as discords like â€Å"I think you’re wrong†, denunciation such as â€Å"No, I won’t† and other complexity.Revisions may occur when the speaker can anticipate that trouble is likely and reformulates talk accordingly. Alignment is especially important at the openings and closings of conversation. â€Å"13. R: I am so glad i am not having any busy= 15. J: =Ohhh†¦. hehehe†¦. I do not think so†¦. I hate exams (laughs)† Response Tokens Like spontaneous verbal communication, there are other units of language that, while not fairly terms, are nonetheless type of speech. Yet in this case, they are on purpose. Among the more ordinary of these are Hm, Ok, Ah, Yeah,Um, Uh, and Uh huh or Nuh uh.Words such as Ok, or Uh huh are utilized to document conformity with the presenter. Acknowledgements in another view, such as Mm and Yeah, express concurrence or awareness between the conversing persons like in this quote from the transcription â€Å"140. R: Yeah, I understand enough 141. J: Ah, Ok. † And another is a repair, such as Huh, that ask the presenter to repeat or to put in another way a thought or an inquiry. In several state of affairs, tokens function to tote up more facet and feeling to what the presenter is aiming to convey. Speech actsIn using this method, words do not basically subsist; but are brought into play to carry out points. Forming a claim is plainly one idea that can be undertaken by speech. A wide-ranging assumption of sense must be founded on the knowledge of these meanings and their circumstances of practice. This speech acts become more and more helpful in substance detection and classification of contribution of dialogues through verbal communication and content they are composed of five groups namely the commissives, directives, assertives, expressives, and declarations.Commisives are used to entrust the presenter to different strategies such as a assurance like â€Å"I will not impart to anyone what you have just found out†, proposal like â€Å"91. J: eh (. ) Could you say that again? † or hand over a guarantee such as in the transcript â€Å"19. J: †¦ but when I finish I will go out. † Directives, conversely, try to make the addressee get something done such as a demand like â€Å"Please tell me more†, an instruction like â€Å"Tell me about that†, a suggestion like â€Å"122. R: I suggest you to go to the Nort h, it is very beautiful†, a permission like â€Å"You can share that if you wish.†, and a query like in the transcription â€Å"50. R: Will you be with your family in the south? †.On the contrary, assertives try to show the addresser’s principle of the firm subject matter of the statement such as stating and describing like â€Å"97. J: But I want to look for a job but not in Spain, in another country to improve my skills†, predicting like â€Å"It will surely rain tomorrow†, and speculating like â€Å"I wonder whether it will rain tomorrow† as referred to in the transcription. Next are expressives which try to put across the addresser’s mental state such as a compliment like â€Å"268.R: Oh perfect!†¦ †, an apology like â€Å"228. J: Ah! Sorry sorry on Saturday†, a welcome like â€Å"215. R: It's nice to see you again†, gratitude like â€Å"Thanks very much! â€Å", and greetings like â€Å"245. M: Hello Richard Hello Julia†¦Ã¢â‚¬  as recorded. And lastly are declarations which are executed by an aptly authoritative addresser such as dismissing like â€Å"You are now fired! †, settling on like â€Å"You are liable on this from this day forward† and condemning like â€Å"I sentence you to six years in prison†; although these declarations are not present in the transcription. PragmaticsIn linguistics and semiotics, this is involved in connecting the descriptive difference between sentence gist and the presenter’s denotation. The analysis of how the milieu affects the version is in this case imperative. In this setting, the perspective stands for any feature as linguistic, factual, or personal that influences the real construal of symbols and terminologies. Pragmatics is concerned for the most part in utterances, typically in the structure of discussions, and a peculiarity is incorporated in it between sentence meaning and presenters’ way of articulating their thoughts and feelings.Additionally, it is considered as one of the most thought-provoking facets for communication novices to be able to ascertain and gain knowledge of, but it is believed that one can only actually master it with acquiring knowledge with experience. Sentence meaning is the verbatim sense of the sentence, while the speaker gist is the bits and pieces of details or facts that the presenters are making an effort to convey. In the transcription, the speakers made use of a readily understandable language, with the use of direct words and statements, and without having any symbolisms or codes.But there are some kinds of omissions or shortcuts of the speakers’ sentences and some repetition of statements for emphasis. But in spite of those things, both presenters have the aptitude to comprehend what the addresser means to say. Overlaps This method expresses findings of coinciding and intersecting views, with beginning and end of overlapping rem arks. The addressee eventually gets the main idea conveyed by the initial speaker right away, even if the speaker is not able to finish or complete his or her sentence, so overlapping of statements occurs.This can be seen in this quote from the transcription. â€Å"52. R: Ok I will have to come down and visit you then = 53. J: = Of course! =† In this case, the benefit of this columnar format over the more ordinary type of transcription is that it illustrates how communicational symmetries or asymmetries are present between conversational participants. As a conclusion, we can deduce that transcription is indeed an influential act of representation. This account can impinge on how the information is conceptualized.The transcription procedure must be integrated more thoroughly into qualitative study frameworks and techniques. Phases of contemplation at fundamental patterns and performance details of dialogues may generate an important training and implementation in marking of bo th the course of action of study and partakers’ speech a distinction. The goal of translating examiners is to figure out and communicate the manner by which the members appreciate their dealings that brings into being the occurrence of social actuality.Complementary to other philosophies, the conversation analysis techniques which are applied to the transcription barely appraise natural discourse. The investigation upholds that it is feasible to interpret a talk based on the record alone. Even if we had been taking notes while it was happening, we can't be sure we'd got things down accurately, and we'd probably have missed quite a lot. And if we hadn't been taking notes, then relying on later recall is doubly risky. We'd be battling against the everyday mistakes of memory as well.

The Article Wild Mushrooms On The Winter - 855 Words

Tamales In the article â€Å"Wild mushrooms in the winter,† tells a story about food and how the process of cooking makes her remember some people that are not alive. She makes the point that flavors and smells are not just that, flavors sometimes have tehe ability to transport you to memories. My own experience with flavors, odor, and taste yields a point that is similar. What I take away from my own experience with food is that even the smell of a certain food can transport you to the most significant occasion. As a result, I found that certain foods have the power to transport to a special moment, some of them even make me feel the sensation of nostalgia. Food is most of the times cataloged as a simple object that reliefs the emptiness of our stomach. And it is, but it ´s not only that, food is the biggest pleasure humans have. Food has the power to transport to moments in the past, the most special ones. In my case, tamales are my favorite; I could eat them in any season of the year, but they would not taste the same. In my family, it is a tradition to prepare them the day before â€Å"noche buena,† which in Mexico is celebrated the 24 of December. I prepare them with my mom, sisters, and sometimes some of my aunts. The process to prepare them is easy, the hard part is to get all the ingredients in that season of the year. Just as hard as it is to get my sisters and me together for Christmas. The most essential and original thing about tamales are the corn leaves.Show MoreRelatedProspects of Mushroom Farming at Savar Upazila in Dhaka5745 Words   |  23 PagesAssignment on PROSPECTS OF MUSHROOM FARMING AT SAVAR UPAZILA IN DHAKA A term paper submitted in fulfillment of the requirements in the course of Bangladesh Studies Submitted by Mir Arman, 0822BBA00938 Md. Rakebul Hasan, 0822BBA00904 Mostafizar Rahman, 0822BBA00946 Md. Ashikur Rahman, 0822BBA00950 Course code: GED 202 Course Title: Bangladesh Studies Summer Semester, 2009 Under the Supervision Of Md. Abu Hassan Faruk Lecturer in Bangladesh Studies Department of Business Administration ManaratRead MoreNutrition During Pregnancy1417 Words   |  6 PagesNutrition during Pregnancy by Amy V. Haas [Editors Note: This article first appeared in Having a Baby Today Issue 5, Spring 2002.] Photos by Jennifer Rosenberg The single most important thing that you can do for your baby is to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet. A well-balanced diet is one that includes foods from all food groups in appropriate amounts, so as to ensure proper nutrition. Proper nutrition ensures that all essential nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals andRead MoreNew Product Development Process9775 Words   |  40 PagesJERUSALEM ARTICHOKE TRUFFLES button mushroom puree, black trumpet soil, fried oyster root 10â‚ ¬ CRISPY RAPPAHANNOCK OYSTERS hay smoked grits, goot essa sharp cheddar cheese, bbq sauce 11â‚ ¬ ROASTED WHITE BEETS champagne pomegranate glaze, aged balsamico, sweet grass dairy camembert 6â‚ ¬ PATOWMACK FARM WINTER BLEND crunchy head lettuce, winter radish, farm egg mimosa, french dressing, garlic toast 6â‚ ¬ SWEET POTATO GNOCCHI pork fatback, black trumpet mushrooms, baby spinach, apple consommà © 8â‚ ¬ Read MoreJews Without Money2111 Words   |  9 Pageshalf-rotten bananas. We find out Mike’s mother is the central figure in the family. She supports them by working in a cafeteria and cleaning various apartments. After and before work, she takes care of her ill husband and children. On a terribly snowy winter day, Mike’s younger sister, Esther, goes out into the streets to collect wood for the stove where she is run over by a truck and dies. A lawyer comes to their home and says that if the mother and father sign a paper, he will get them a thousand dollarsRead MoreSample Resume : Regional Cuisine6414 Words   |  26 Pageswhich is mainly characterized by warm winters, hot summer with minor snow fall, frost and abundance of rainfall. Spring and autumn seasons considered being best seasons for travelling in Guangdong but sometimes humid and hot weather can be very tired for tourists. Normally Guangdong spring is in-between February till March, summer April till September, autumn October till November Autumn which is basically sunny and cool. Guangdong got quite short time of winter December to January. [TravelChinaGuideRead MoreMy Research On Culinary Products2739 Words   |  11 Pageson culinary products. I have chosen this TOPIC because this is the basic ingredients from where many warm dish start, so I think it is good start. So, I want to learn more about onion. it is presumed that our ancestors discovered and started eating wild onions very early long before farming or even before writting was invented, so in my research I didn’t find exact time it comes in lime light, This humble vegetable was key food in the prehistoric diet. It is a most popular and versatile vegetablesRead MoreThe Epithet in the Novel Jane Eyre18849 Words   |  76 Pagesmeadows, white snow, round table, blue skies, pale complexion, lofty mountains, and the like, the adjectiv es ar more logical attribute than epithets. They indicate those qualities of the objects which may be regarded as generally recognized. But in wild wind, loud ocean, remorseless dash of billows, formidable waves, heart-burning smile, the adjectives do not point to inherent qualities of the object described. They are subjectively evaluative. The epithet makes a strong impact on the readerRead MoreNutrition Assignment 412450 Words   |  50 Pageskale and Brussels sprouts) 250 mg * Fruit Complex (from oranges, lemons, tangerines, grapefruits limes) 250 mg * Spirulina 250 mg * Citrus Bioflavonoids 75 mg * Acidophilus 25 mg * Sopy Isoflavones (40% Complex) 25 mg * Mushroom Complex (from shitake, reishi, and maitake) 30 mg * para-aminobenzoic acid 50 mg * Hesperidin Complex 25 mg * Rutin (buck wheat) 25 mg * Quercetin Dihydrate 5 mg * RNA/DNA Complex 10 mg * Choline Bitartrate 50 mg * Read MoreConfucianism in Journey to the West31834 Words   |  128 PagesUniversity, [available at: http://philosophy.lander.edu/ oriental/main.html, last visited 21-05-2012]. Chan, Adrian (1993), â€Å"Confucianism and Deng’s China† in: Lee, Mabel Syrokomla-Stefanowska, A.D. [eds.], Modernization of the Chinese Past, Broadway: Wild Peony, 16-24. Craig, Timothy J. King, Richard [eds.] (2002), Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, Vancouver Toronto: UBC Press. Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk Keane, Michael (2002), â€Å"Media in China: new convergences, new approaches† in:Read MoreComparative Study of Pakistan Chinese Cultures13385 Words   |  54 Pagessauce and yellow bean sauce. Spices and seasonings such as fresh root ginger, garlic, spring onion, white pepper, and sesame oil are and cloves are also used. To provide extra flavors to dishes, many Chinese cuisines also contain dried Chinese mushrooms, dried baby shrimps, dried tangerine peel, and dried Sichuan chillies as well. widely used in many regional cuisines. Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon, fennel, Desserts meals or at the end of meals in Chinese cuisine. Bings are baked

The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis - 1056 Words

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† and Jamaica Kincaid’s â€Å"Girl,† both tell us that some women have a lack of independence because of being told what to do, having limitations put on their abilities, and having a family member being an authoritarian figure in their life. Both stories are very similar when discussing the lack of independence that women may have. Women are always being belittled or controlled somewhere. In â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† the protagonist is told what to do. She did not have an option as to where she goes and what she does. She has a mental issue, and her husband believed it was best to put her into a type of facility to confine her. Her husband, John, is a well-known physician. He did not realize that†¦show more content†¦Her husband hates her to have to write. In the story, she says â€Å"[t]here comes John, and I must put this away—he hates to have me write a word† (Gilman 474). It is evident how John feels about her writing. Although, it makes her feel relieved to be able to write. In the story, she says â€Å"†¦I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!† I would hate to not be able to do something that I love so much, especially when it is as simple as writing. The fact that the protagonist in â€Å"Girl† is being told what to do and how to do it shows that limitations are put on her abilities. I feel that when people are told what to do constantly, they do not have room to be able to do what they truly want. They are not able to express themselves fully and learn about themselves and what they are capable of. The mother is clearly doing what she thinks is best to protect her daughter from the evil in the world. She is also putting limitations on what her daughter does. There are many sayings of â€Å"this is how to†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and â€Å"always† in this story. I think that that is something that makes women rebellious when it comes to rules. Women may sometimes feel that they do not have any control over what they do, so they go the extra mile to make sure others know that they can and will do what they want. In â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† and â€Å"Girl,† it does not seem that the protagonists are able to do what they want, or what they are able to do. They are both told whatShow MoreRelatedThe Yellow Wallpaper Analysis1164 Words   |  5 PagesThe Yellow Wallpaper Analysis As I started reading this short story, it clearly introduced who the characters are and where it took place. The narrator is a woman; she has no name, remains anonymous throughout the story. She lives with her husband John in a house. This house is isolated from society, since the short story indicates that it is far from village, roads or any means of communication. It also contains locks and gates throughout. The woman is ill and this illness has placed her inRead MoreAnalysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper1727 Words   |  7 Pages Analysis of the Short Story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Originally published in January 1892 issue of New England Magazine. Charlotte Perkins Gilman s short story The Yellow Wallpaper was personal to her own struggles with anxiety and depression after the birth of her daughter with her first husband and S. Weir Mitchell s resting cure treatment she received. The Yellow Wallpaper describes, from the patients point of view, the fall into madness of a woman who is creativelyRead MoreThe Yellow-Wallpaper Analysis1393 Words   |  6 PagesThe Yellow Wall-Paper Literary Analysis Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story â€Å"The Yellow Wall-Paper† to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story â€Å"The Yellow Wall-Paper† and shows how it changes one’s life forever. TheRead MoreAnalysis of The Yellow Wallpaper2376 Words   |  10 PagesCHARLOTEE PERKINS GILLMAN THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (1892) The cult of true womanhood defined women as â€Å"ladies†(pure, diligent). When we talk about American woman, we have to specify their religion, sexual orientation, race, social class (it is therefore essentialist to talk about â€Å"women† in general. Depending on the group which they are in, certain coordinates are applicable. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a white, protestant, heterosexual woman at the end of the 19th century in the higher middleRead MoreFeminist Analysis of Yellow Wallpaper1326 Words   |  6 PagesA Woman Trapped: A Feminist Analysis of the Yellow Wallpaper The short story, the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be analyzed in depth by both the psycho-analytic theory and the feminist theory. On one hand the reader witnesses the mind of a woman who travels the road from sanity to insanity to suicide â€Å"caused† by the wallpaper she grows to despise in her bedroom. On the other hand, the reader gets a vivid picture of a woman’s place in 1911 and how she was treated when dealingRead MoreLiterary Analysis : The Yellow Wallpaper992 Words   |  4 PagesLiterary Analysis: The Yellow Wallpaper In the story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman she writes of a woman severely oppressed in her marriage. The women in the story is an open mind individual. John; her husband is a psychologist and thinks that his wife has a mental disorder because of all the free thinking and puts her through the rest cure. Through analysis of the story, we can see that this story displays a creepy tone in order to depict a serious matter at a time when women’sRead MoreThe Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Paper1245 Words   |  5 Pagesupholding women’s rights, such as viewing a woman as a respectable, free-willed human being, are the essential truths established in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper.† Through the development of the narrator Gilman uses symbolism and imagery to awaken the reader to the reality of what a woman’s life was like in the 1800’s. Analysis of the symbolism throughout the story reveals that the author was no t only testifying to the social status of the women in society but specifically giving insightRead MoreCritical Analysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper1496 Words   |  6 PagesCharlotte Perkins Gillam uses her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper as a weapon to help break down the walls surrounding women, society has put up. This story depicts the life of a young woman struggling with postpartum depression, whose serious illness is overlooked, by her physician husband, because of her gender. Gillman s writing expresses the feelings of isolation, disregarded, and unworthiness the main character Jane feels regularly. This analysis will dive into the daily struggles women faceRead MoreFeminist Analysis : The Yellow Wallpaper 2184 Words   |  9 PagesJoe Purcaro English 155 Literary Analysis 04/17/2016 Feminism in the Yellow Wallpaper Everyone experiences life, whether it be happy times, bad times; it’s one big circle every human being goes through. In the story, â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a feminist story that portrays the terror of the rest cure which is a period spent in inactivity or leisure with the intention of improving one s physical or mental health. Women especially, as it opposes manyRead MoreCritical Analysis : The Yellow Wallpaper993 Words   |  4 PagesCritical Analysis: â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† â€Å"Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.† –Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior During the late 19th century women, as history demonstrates, were to remain confined to their societal expectations and roles. Women were thought of as the weaker sex, emotional, and fully dependent on their male counterparts, child-like. She was to be a pious

It 320 Hw 1.1 Essay - 1155 Words

John McGee IT 320 HW assignment 1.1 Vocabulary Exercise: Matching on page 3 1. Wide Area Network (WAN): A network that spans a large geographic area. 2. Router: Connects LAN’s to WAN’s 3. Default Gateway: If a device does not know how to get to a destination, it sends data to this device. 4. Leased Line: A WAN link contracted for use by the customer. 5. Telephone Company: A WAN service provider. 6. Serial Cable: Connects a router to a CSU/DSU. 7. Channel service unit/ Data service unit (CSU/DSU): Equipment that is located in the customer’s wiring closet and provides a clocking signal to the router. 8. Data circuit terminating equipment (DCE): When referring to clocking, the CSU/DSU is this†¦show more content†¦Out of Band management: A communications linkthat is outside the normal IP network, like a console cable or a phone call between two modems and aux port. Concept Questions on pages 4-5 1. What is the most important function of a router? To route packets to and from networks and computers. 2. Define default gateway: When a computer needs to send a packet to another subnet, it sends the packet to its default gateway, which is also known as the default router. 3. In three of four sentences, explain the purpose of DCE and DTE in WAN links: DCE and DTE are on the circuit ends of leased lines of Telco. DCEs is normally a CSU/DSU that receives information and sets the clocking speed to the DTE. The DTEs are normally routers that send information through the WAN at the rate set by the DCE. 4. Explain what a router is and what it does: A router is a network device, typically connected to a variety of LAN and WAN interfaces, that forwards packets based on their destination IP addresses. Vocabulary Exercise: Components of a Router on pages 5-6 The main purpose of a Router is to forward packets. A router, like a typical PC, has a CPU and memory components. It also has specialized software, which in Cisco routers is called the Cisco IOS. The software provides the basic routing logic. The router also has RAM, just like pc’s, which holds basic diagnostic software that runs when the router is first booted. All of these basic components are found inShow MoreRelatedMarketing Mix of Haeir18481 Words   |  74 Pages|    |    |    | Delicate Wash |    --- |    --- |    |    | Basket Material |    Plastic |    Plastic |    --- |    --- | Voltage (Volts) |    240 |    220-240 |    220 |    220 | Power Consumption (Wash Motor - Cold) (Watts) |    340 |    320 |    --- |    240 | Power Consumption (Spin Motor) (Watts) |   150 |    --- |    --- |    140 | Exteriors |    |    |    |    | | | | | | Exterior Body Type |    Pre-Painted Steel |    Rust free fiber body |    --- |    Galvanized sheet | Read MoreDesigning A New Type Of Internal Combustion Engine10284 Words   |  42 Pagescombustion. The duration of the after-burning phase may correspond to 70-80 degrees of crank travel from TDC and the total heat evolved by the end of entire combustion process is 95 to 97% and 3 to 5% of heat goes as unburnt fuel from exhaust. Fig 1.1 Stages of CI Engine 1.4 BENIFITS OF DIESEL ENGINE Diesel engines have advantages over other I.C. engines: They burn less fuel than a petrol engine performing the same work, due to the engines higher temperature of combustion and greater expansionRead MoreHsc General Math Textbook with Answers153542 Words   |  615 PagesUniversity Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. Student CD-ROM licence Please see the file ‘licence.txt’ on the Student CD-ROM that is packed with this book. . Introduction vii Ackno ledgements Acknowledgements Chapter 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 viii iii 1 Credit and borrowing Flat-rate loans 1 Home loan repayments 8 Comparing loans Comparing loans 13 Credit cards 17 Reducing balance loans 22 Chapter summary t 29 Multiple choice questions ultiple-choice questions 30Read MoreMonte Carlo Simulation218872 Words   |  876 Pagesclasses of students helped uncover errors in the lecture notes from which this book evolved. Paul Glasserman New York, 2003 Contents 1 Foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Principles of Monte Carlo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2 First Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Read MoreA Concise Guide to Market Research Using Spss71933 Words   |  288 PagesResearch? 5 making decisions is likely to be concluded after the decisions have already been made. Who Provides Market Research? Many organizations have people, departments, or other companies working for them to provide market research. In Fig. 1.1, we show who these providers of market research are. Most market research is provided internally through specialized market research departments or people tasked with this function. It appears that about 75% of organizations have at least one person

Place Free Essays

string(43) " often had a bed made up for me in winter\." The kitchen holds a lot of memories in our lives. From the time our parents nested us a home, mother and father had cooked or dined with the family in the kitchen. The walls of the kitchen have many stories to tell and memories to keep. We will write a custom essay sample on Place or any similar topic only for you Order Now If only it could talk about the memories from the heating stove, the clay jar of water, the plates, the sink, the table, and all the meals. Truly, the kitchen is a cherished place. When I was younger, I remember my two widowed aunts tidying up the kitchen. They lived in the province with their brother, my widowed grandfather. When we visited them, we ate in their simple kitchen built with bamboo floors. They came wearing traditional Filipino dresses. They looked so beautiful for me (in their old age and single blessedness), and the kitchen smelled like fresh flowers. The other kitchen I can remember is the kitchen of my grandmother in a far remote place, along the Pacific Ocean. My grandmother’s kitchen is a big kitchen built of wood. Imagine how old houses looked. There was firewood, big cooking utensils, as if they’re always serving 100 people everyday. There were sacks of rice piled on top of the other. Chickens were roaming in the backyard, down the back kitchen door. I don’t know why I can always remember kitchens, even when I go to other homes, in different places. I love that kitchen part of the house. Many people say â€Å"The kitchen and the toilet are very important rooms in the house. They must be kept clean and orderly at all times. † Now, I have my own kitchen where I raised my kids. And as they’re grown ups, I like to work and write here. When I read Afred Kazin’s â€Å"The Kitchen,† it delighted me by what Kazin saw in the life of her mother. He focused on the kitchen room as the largest room and the center of the house. It was in the kitchen where his mother worked all day long as home dressmaker and where they ate all meals. He writes: â€Å"The kitchen gave a special character to our lives; my mother’s character. All the memories of that kitchen were the memories of my mother. † In his essay, Alfred Kazin remembers how her mother said, â€Å"How sad it is! It grips me! † though after a while, her mother has drawn him one single line of sentence, â€Å"Alfred, see how beautiful! † Article Source: http://EzineArticles. om/4722428 This sentence-combining exercise has been adapted from â€Å"The Kitchen,† an excerpt from Alfred Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City (published in 1951 and reprinted by Harvest Books in 1969). In â€Å"The Kitchen,† Kazin recalls his childhood in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood which in the 1920s had a largely Jewish population. His focus is on the room in which his mother spent much of her time working on the sewing she took in to make extra money. To get a feel for Kazin’s descriptive style, begin by reading the opening paragraph of the selection, reprinted below. Next, reconstruct paragraph two by combining the sentences in each of the 13 sets that follow. Several of the sets–though not all–require coordination of words, phrases, and clauses. If you run into any problems, you may find it helpful to review our Introduction to Sentence Combining. As with any sentence-combining exercise, feel free to combine sets (to create a longer sentence) or to make two or more sentences out of one set (to create shorter sentences). You may rearrange the sentences in any fashion that strikes you as appropriate and effective. Note that there are two unusually long sets in this exercise, #8 and #10. In the original paragraph, both sentences are structured as lists. If you favor shorter sentences, you may choose to separate the items in either (or both) of these lists. After completing the exercise, compare your paragraph with Kazin’s original on page two. But keep in mind that many combinations are possible. The Kitchen* In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a â€Å"home† dressmaker, had her workshop in the kitchen. She told me once that she had begun dressmaking in Poland at thirteen; as far back as I can remember, she was always making dresses for the local women. She had an innate sense of design, a quick eye for all the subtleties in the latest fashions, even when she despised them, and great boldness. For three or four dollars she would study the fashion magazines with a customer, go with the customer to the remnants store on Belmont Avenue to pick out the material, argue the owner down–all remnants stores, for some reason, were supposed to be shady, as if the owners dealt in stolen goods–and then for days would patiently fit and aste and sew and fit again. Our apartment was always full of women in their housedresses sitting around the kitchen table waiting for a fitting. My little bedroom next to the kitchen was the fitting room. The sewing machine, an old nut-brown Singer with golden scrolls painted along the black arm and engraved along the two tiers of little drawers masse d with needles and thread on each side of the treadle, stood next to the window and the great coal-black stove which up to my last year in college was our main source of heat. By December the two outer bed-rooms were closed off, and used to chill bottles of milk and cream, cold borscht, and jellied calves’ feet. Paragraph Two: 1. The kitchen held our lives together. 2. My mother worked in it. She worked all day long. We ate almost all meals in it. We did not have the Passover seder in there. I did my homework at the kitchen table. I did my first writing there. I often had a bed made up for me in winter. You read "Place" in category "Essay examples" The bed was on three kitchen chairs. The chairs were near the stove. 3. A mirror hung on the wall. The mirror hung just over the table. The mirror was long. The mirror was horizontal. The mirror sloped to a ship’s prow at each end. The mirror was lined in cherry wood. 4. It took the whole wall. It drew every object in the kitchen to itself. 5. The walls were a whitewash. The whitewash was fiercely stippled. My father often rewhitened it. He did this in slack seasons. He did this so often that the paint looked as if it had been squeezed and cracked into the walls. 6. There was an electric bulb. It was large. It hung down at the end of a chain. The chain had been hooked into the ceiling. The old gas ring and key still jutted out of the wall like antlers. 7. The sink was in the corner. The sink was next to the toilet. We washed at the sink. The tub was also in the corner. My mother did our clothes in the tub. 8. There were many things above the tub. These things were tacked to a shelf. Sugar and spice jars were ranged on the shelf. The jars were white. The jars were square. The jars had blue borders. The jars were ranged pleasantly. Calendars hung there. They were from the Public National Bank on Pitkin Avenue. They were from the Minsker Branch of the Workman’s Circle. Receipts were there. The receipts were for the payment of insurance premiums. Household bills were there. The bills were on a spindle. Two little boxes were there. The boxes were engraved with Hebrew letters. 9. One of the boxes was for the poor. The other was to buy back the Land of Israel. 10. A little man would appear. The man had a beard. He appeared every spring. He appeared in our kitchen. He would salute with a Hebrew blessing. The blessing was hurried. He would empty the boxes. Sometimes he would do this with a sideways look of disdain. He would do this if the boxes were not full. He would bless us again hurriedly. He would bless us for remembering our Jewish brothers and sisters. Our brothers and sisters were less fortunate. He would take his departure until the next spring. He would try to persuade my mother to take still another box. He tried in vain. 11. We dropped coins in the boxes. Occasionally we remembered to do this. Usually we did this on the morning of â€Å"mid-terms† and final examinations. My mother thought it would bring me luck. 12. She was extremely superstitious. She was embarrassed about it. She counseled me to leave the house on my right foot. She did this on the morning of an examination. She always laughed at herself whenever she did this. 13. â€Å"I know it’s silly, but what harm can it do? It may calm God down. † Her smile seemed to say this. v John d. hazlett Repossessing the Past: Discontinuity and History In Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City Critics of Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951)1 have almost always abstracted from it the story of a young man who feels excluded from the world outside his immediate ethnic neighborhood, and who eventually attempts to find, through writing, a means of entry into that world. It would be very easy to imagine from what these critics have said that the book was written in the same form as countless other autobiographies of adolescence and rites-of-passage. One thinks imme- diately, for instance, of a tradition stretching from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son to Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, as well as fictional auto- biographical works such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We are encouraged in this view by the publishers, Har- court, Brace World, who tell us on the cover that â€Å"A Walker in the City is a book about an American walking into the world, learning on his skin what it is like. The American is Alfred Kazin as a young man. † Even the most thorough of Kazin’s critics, John Paul Eakin, writes of A Walker that the young Kazin’s â€Å"outward journey to America †¦ is the heart of the book. â€Å"2 One of the few reviewers who noticed those elements that distin- guish this memoir from others of its kind was the well known Ameri- can historian, Oscar Handlin. Unfortunately, Mr. Handlin also found the book unintelligible: â€Å"If some system of inner logic holds these sec- tions together it is clear only to the author. It is not only that chronol- ogy is abandoned so there is never any certainty of the sequence of events; but a pervasive ambiguity of perspective leaves the reader often in doubt as to whether it was the walker who saw then, or the writer who sees now, or the writer recalling what the walker saw then. Epi- 326 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 sodic, without the appearance of form or order, there is a day-dreamy quality to the organization, as if it were a product of casual reminis- cence. 3 Handlin’s charge that the memoir lacks a â€Å"system of inner logic† is incorrect, but he does identify a number of qualities that dis- tinguish A Walker from other coming-of-age autobiographies. One option that is not apparently available to autobiographers, as it is to novelists, is the removal of the author’s presence from the narra- tive. And yet autobiographers do manage to achieve something like this removal by recreating themselves as characters. That is, we can distinguish between the author as author and the author as character (an earlier self). In some autobiographies of childhood, where the nar- ration ends before the character develops into what we might imagine to be the autobiographer’s present self, the writer may never appear (as writer) in the narrative at all. The earlier selves in such autobio- graphies remain as characters. Where the autobiographer appears as both character and writer, however, the distinction is by no means always clear. If the autobiographer actually follows the progress of his earlier self to the narrative present, then the distinction disappears somewhere en route. One can, in fact, distinguish between types of autobiographies according to the strategies they employ to achieve this obliteration of distance between earlier self (as character) and present self (as writer). Kazin has complicated this aspect of his autobiography by recreat- ing two distinct earlier selves: his child self and an adult self, the titu- lar walker. It is this aspect of his memoir that sets it apart from other coming-of-age autobiographies. In none of the conventional works in this sub-genre is the present narrative â€Å"I† so conspicuous a figure (not only as a voice, but as an active character) as it is in Kazin’s book, and in none of them is the chronological reconstruction of the past so pur- posefully avoided. His memoir, unlike most autobiographies of adoles- cence, is just as much about the efforts of the adult walker to recapture his past self as it is about his earlier attempts to go beyond that self. By granting his present self equal status with the re-creation of his child- hood, he has produced a hybrid form. The central characteristic of that form is the parallel relationship between the quest of the young Kazin to achieve selfhood by identify- ing himself with an American place and a portion of its history, and the quest of the older Kazin to resolve some present unrest about who he is by recovering his younger self and the locale of his own past. The former quest is that story hich critics say the memoir is â€Å"about,† but the latter is located in the memoir on at least two levels. Like the Hazlett repossessing the past 327 child’s quest, it is narrated, in that Kazin actually tells us of his return, as an adult, to Brownsville, but its significance is manifest only on an implicit level; we must infer why the quest was undertaken. 4 Kazin emphasizes the symmetry of these two quests by describing each of them in phrases that echo the other. In the first chapter of the memoir, the adult Kazin, walking through the streets of the Browns- ville neighborhood in which he grew up, describes what it means to him: â€Å"Brownsville is that road which every other road in my life has had to cross† (p. 8). By going back and walking once again â€Å"those familiarly choked streets at dusk† (p. 6), he is reviewing his own his- tory in an attempt to settle some old doubts about the relationship between his past and present selves. In similar language, Kazin describes at the very end of the memoir how the boy’s search for an American identity finally expressed itself in a fascination with Ameri- can history, and in particular with the â€Å"dusk at the end of the nine- teenth century† which was, he thought, â€Å"that fork in the road where all American lives cross† (p. 171). The parallels that we find in language are repeated in the means by which the young boy finds access to America and the adult finds access to his younger selfA—by walking and by immersing himself in the his- torical ambiance of an earlier period. I could never walk across Roe- bling’s bridge,† he says of himself as a boy, â€Å"or pass the hotel on Uni- versity Place named Albeit, in Ryder’s honor, or stop in front of the garbage cans at Fulton and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn at the place where Whitman had himself printed Leaves of Grass, without thinking that I had at last opened the grea t trunk of forgotten time in New York in which I, too, I thought, would someday find the source of my unrest† (p. 72). The young Kazin initially found his way out of Brownsville and into the America of the nineteenth century by walk- ing into an historical locale. It is again by walking, by going â€Å"over the whole route† (p. 8), that the adult Kazin sets out to rediscover his child self in the streets of Brownsville. One may detect, however, an ironic tension between these two quests. The child’s search is the immigrant scion’s search for an Amer- ican identity. It is, in part, the psychological extension of the parents’ literal search for America, and, in part, the result of his parents’ ambivalence about their own place in the New World. The most sig- nificant frustration of the young Kazin’s life was over the apparently unbridgeable discontinuity between â€Å"them and us, Gentiles and us, alrightniks and us. . . . The line . . . had been drawn for all time† (p. 99). This discontinuity represented to him the impossibility of choos- 328 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 ing a way of being in the world. Eventually, it takes on larger meaning in the child’s mind to include the distance between the immigrant’s past in Russia and the late nineteenth century America of Teddy Roosevelt, between poverty and † ‘making out’ all right,† between, finally, a Brownsville identity and an American identity. In the child’s quest, these â€Å"petty distinctions I had so long made in loneliness† (p. 173) are overcome through a vision of the Brooklyn Bridge that allowed him to see how he might span the discontinuities that left him â€Å"outside all that† (p. 72); and through the discovery of a model for himself as a â€Å"solitary singer† in the tradition of â€Å"Blake, my Yeshua, my Beethoven, my Newman† and a long line of nineteenth century Americans (p. 172). The final element of his victory over â€Å"them and us,† however, was the substitution of America’s history for his own Brownsville history and his fam ily’s vague East-European his- tory. His parents’ past, he said, bewildered him as a child: â€Å"it made me long constantly to get at some past nearer my own New York life, my having to live with all those running wounds of a world I had never seen† (p. 9). To resolve this longing, he says, â€Å"I read as if books would fill my every gap, legitimize my strange quest for the American past, remedy my every flaw, let me in at last into the great world that was anything just out of Brownsville† (p. 172). The adult walker, on the other hand, is searching for the child he once was and for the world in which he grew up; his intention is to re- create his old awareness of the adolescent’s â€Å"gaps† so that he might resolve them. By the time Kazin begins his retrogression to childhood, ten years have elapsed since his final departure from Brownsville (p. ) and (assuming that the narrative present is also the writer’s present) some twenty y ears have elapsed since the final scene of the book. Dur- ing that period, the writer has undergone a peculiar transformation. The adolescent’s â€Å"strange quest† for an American identity through the substitution of America’s past for his own has culminated outside the frame of A Walker in the writing of On Native Grounds,5 a book that is obsessively and authoritatively alive with American history. The young boy has grown up to become one of America’s established literary spokesmen; he has become one of â€Å"them. † In becoming the man, the child has not, however, closed the gaps; he has simply crossed over them to the other side. As a child, Kazin thought of himself as a solitary, â€Å"standing outside of America† (p. 172); as an adult autobiographer, he stands outside of his own past. The adult’s attempt to imagine his own history, there- fore, begins with the significant perception of his alienation from his Hazlett repossessing the past 329 wn child self and from the time and place in which that self lived. Brownsville is not a part of his present sense of himself, it must be â€Å"given back† (p. 6) to him; and â€Å"going back† reveals a disturbing dis- continuity. The return to Brownsville fills him with an â€Å"an instant rage . . . mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness† (p. 5). He senses again, he says, â₠¬Å"the old foreboding that all of my life would be like this† (p. 6) and â€Å"I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep. I keep bumping awake at harsh intervals, then fall back into my trance again† (p. 7). The extent of his alienation from his former self is attested to in the last of Kazin’s memoirs, New York Jew, where he writes that A Walker was not begun as an autobiography at all, but simply as an exploration of the city. Dissatisfied with the â€Å"barren, smart, soulless†6 quality of what he was writing, Kazin kept attempting to put more of himself into the book. Finally, he says, â€Å"I saw that a few pages on ‘The Old Neighborhood’ in the middle of the book, which I had dreamily tossed off in the midst of my struggles with the city as something alien to me, became the real book on growing up in New York that I had wanted to write without knowing I did. â€Å"7 There is, naturally, a good deal of irony in this, as well as some pathos, for although Kazin does not expressly acknowledge the rela- tionship between the two quests, it seems clear that the young boy’s search for an American identity entailed the denial of his own cultural past. Ultimately, this denial necessitated the writing of the book, for the adult’s search is for the self he lost in his effort to become an Amer- ican. The adult’s problem is not resolved within the narrative, how- ever, but by the narrative itself. It is the writer who establishes the con- nection between his earlier, lost self and his adult self. In doing this, he completes the bridge to America. The writer in this sense may be distinguished from the adult walker who is, like the young Kazin, merely a character, a former self, within the memoir. In formal terms, the two quests that comprise the narra- tive material of the memoir make up its fabula; the resolution of both quests is to be found only in the coexistence of these two selves in the narrative as narrative. The resolution, in other words, is accomplished by formal, literary means. It is enacted by the memoir’s sujet. Given these two quests as the key to the memoir’s form, the general structure of the book may be schematized as follows: Chapter I: The walker returns literally to his childhood neighbor- hood and imaginatively to childhood itself. Chapter II: The walker stops and the autobiographer (distinguished 330 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 here from the walker) contemplates the psychological/symbolic cen- ter of childhood, the kitchen. Chapter III: The walker literally returns to the scenes of his adoles- cence and imaginatively to adolescence. Chapter IV: The walker stops and the autobiographer (again, distin- guished from walker) contemplates the psychological/symbolic cen- ter of adolescence, the rites of passage. The use of this structure naturally gives rise to some difficulties of perspective. Mr. Handlin’s observation that there are at least three dif- ferent points of view: â€Å"the walker who saw then, or the writer who sees now, or the writer recalling what the walker saw then† was apt, even though he could not see that the complexity of perspectives fol- lowed a fairly careful pattern. An analysis of what those points of view are, and how they work together, must begin with the recognition that all earlier perspectives, both the walker’s and the child’s, are recreated in the writer’s voice, which mimics them in a very complex form of lit- erary ventriloquism. Given this, one may recognize that within the narrative the writer, the single informing point-of-view, speaks in three different voices: his own as writer, the voice of the adult walker, and the voice of the child. Each of these voices gives rise to variations in narrative technique. In chapters one and three, the writer uses a fictive device to create the illusion that no recollection of the adult walker’s perspective is neces- sary in the act of transferring his â€Å"walking thoughts† to the written word. The voice of the adult walker, an earlier self who made the trip, is identified with that of the writer by the frequent use of the present tense: â€Å"The smell of damp out of the rotten hallways accompanies me all the way to Blake Avenue† (p. 7). In these chapters, the walker’s memories of childhood are emphasized as memories because his physi- cal presence and voice call attention to the context and the mechanics of remembering. Thus, from the moment the walker alights from the train at Rockaway Avenue in chapter one, the text is sprinkled with reminders that this is the story of the adult walker pursuing the past through cues from the present: â€Å"Everything seems so small here now† (p. 7), â€Å"the place as I have it in my mind †¦ I never knew then† (p. 11), â€Å"they have built a housing project† (p. 12), â€Å"I miss all these ratty wooden tenements† (p. 13). Similarly, in chapter three, after Kazin steps away from the more disembodied memory of his mother’s kitchen: â€Å"the whole block is now thick with second hand furniture stores †¦ I have to fight maple love seats bulging out of the doors† (p. 78), â€Å"I see the barbershop through the steam† (p. 79). Hazlett repossessing the past 331 In both of these chapters, the writer/walker’s imagination seizes upon and transforms the landmarks of an earlier period of his life. The literal journey back to Brownsville becomes a metaphorical journey backward in time so that the locale of the past becomes by degrees the past itself: â€Å"Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. †¦ It is over ten years since I left to live in ‘the city’A— everything just out of Brownsville was always ‘the city. Actually I did not go very far; it was enough that I could leave Brownsville. Yet as I walk those familiarly choked streets at dusk and see the old women sit- ting in front of the tenements, past and present become each other’s faces; I am back where I began† (pp. 5-6). This is, in fact, wha t gives the book that quality of â€Å"casual reminis- cence† that Mr. Handlin found so unsatisfactory. Kazin’s technique in chapters one and three is much like that of a person rummaging through an attic full of memorabilia. Each street, each shop serves to spark a particular memory. There is, of course, a danger in this kind of writing. It teeters constantly on the brink of random sentimentalism. The walker always presents the past in a hypermediated form, never through the coolly objective (and hidden) eyes of the â€Å"impartial† self- historian that characterize most conventional autobiographies. This is particularly true when he indulges in nostalgia, as he does when the walker inspects that part of his neighborhood which has been rebuilt as a housing project. There he subjects us to a series of iterated fondnesses, each beginning with the nostalgic â€Å"I miss† (p. 3). But in spite of this flirtation with sentimentality, the walker’s presence is not merely an occasion for self-indulgence. In the context of the whole memoir, it clearly serves instead to highlight the drama being played out between the quest of the child and the quest of the adult. As the walker nears the two significant centers of childhood and adolescence, in chapters two and four respectively, he undergoes a transformation. The mediatory presence of the walker disappears, leaving only the disembodied autobiographical voice of conventional memoirs. Unlike the first and third chapters, in which each memory was sparked by actual relics from the past, these chapters take place entirely in the autobiographer’s imagination. To mark this change, chapter two opens with the writer’s memory of a previous memory of his mother’s kitchen which he compares with his present recollection of it: â€Å"the last time I saw our kitchen this clearly was one afternoon in London at the end of the war, when I waited out the rain in the entrance to a music store. A radio was playing into the street, and standing there I heard a broadcast of the first Sabbath service from 332 biography Vol. , No. 4 Belsen Concentration Camp† (p. 51). This is the voice, not of a rum- maging memory, but of pure disembodied memory. The vision of the kitchen is not sparked by another visit there. In fact, at the opening of chapter two we lose sight of the walker for the first time. The adult Kazin’s presence is signalled in chapters two a nd four, not by reference to his present surroundings, but by verb tense alone: â€Å"It was from the El on its way to Coney Island that I caught my first full breath of the city in the open air† (p. 37); although at times, he intrudes into the narrative by referring to his present feelings: â€Å"I think now with a special joy of those long afternoons of mildew and quiet- ness in the school courtyard† (p. 136). The adult walker, however, does not appear in these chapters at all. This transformation, from walker to disembodied memorial voice, draws the reader along the path followed by the adult quester: from the streets of the walker’s Brownsville to the streets of the child’s Brownsville. As the quester nears his goal, the present Brownsville fades from view. The narrative strategy of A Walker recreates the adult’s quest by revealing the increasing clarity and intensity of his perception of the child’s world. The walker’s mediatory presence, initially so conspicu- ous, deliquesces at crucial points so that memory becomes a direct act of identification between rememberer and remembered. The present tense of the walker’s observations becomes the past tense of the walker’s recollections which becomes the past tense of the writer’s memory which, finally, becomes the present tense of the child’s world. The final identification of writer and child occurs in the two most intense moments of the memoir: at the end of â€Å"The Kitchen† (chapter two) and toward the end of â€Å"Summer: The Way to Highland Park† (chapter four). The first instance follows immediately upon the writer’s recollec- tion of the power of literature to bridge the gaps between himself and another world. He recalls the child reading an Alexander Kuprin story which takes place in the Crimea. In the story, an old man and a boy are wandering up a road. The old man says, â€Å"Hoo! hoo! my son! how it is hot! † (p. 73). Kazin recalls how completely he, as a young boy, had identified with them: when they stopped to eat by a cold spring, â€Å"I could taste that bread, that salt, those tomatoes, that icy spring† (p. 73). In the next and final paragraph of the chapter, the writer slips into the present tense: Now the light begins to die. Twilight is also the mind’s grazing time. Twilight is the bottom of that arc down which we have fallen the whole Hazlett repossessing the past 333 long day, but where I now sit at our cousin’s window in some strange silence of attention, watching the pigeons go round and round to the leafy smell of soupgreens from the stove. In the cool ofthat first evening hour, as I sit at the table waiting for supper and my father and the New York World, everything is so rich to overflowing, I hardly know where to begin, (p. 73) The place and the vision in this curious passage are the child’s, but the voice is clearly the adult’s. Just as the child once tasted the bread, salt and tomatoes of his literary heroes, so now the adult writer achieves an intense identification with his own literary creation: his child self. He sees with the child’s eyes, smells with the child’s nose, feels the child’s expectant emotions, but renders all these perceptions with the adult’s iterary sophistication. The intensity of expectation which the writer attributes to the child is amplified by the intensity of the writer’s expectation that the forthcoming â€Å"richness† is as much his as it is the child’s. The child’s expectations are, ultimately, of that â€Å"New Yor k world† which he discovers in the following chapter. The writer’s expectations are of a completion of identity which can be accom- plished only through the mediation of form. Twilight and the New York World have become formal touchstones in the literary recreation of his self. The second instance takes place toward the end of the memoir and like the first, it immediately precedes a significant â€Å"passage through† to a world beyond the kitchen. Like the first, it also is a recollection of his home, at twilight, in the summer. And to emphasize its signifi- cance as a literary act, the writer echoes the Kuprin passage here: The kitchen is quiet under the fatigue blown in from the parched streetsA—so quiet that in this strangely drawn-out light, the sun hot on our backs, we seem to be eating hand in hand. How hot it is still! How hot still! † The silence and calm press on me with a painful joy. I cannot wait to get out into the streets tonight, I cannot wait. Each unnatural moment of silence says that something is going on outside. Something is about to happen, (p. 164) The pages which follow this merging of writer and child, and which end the book, complete the child’s emerging vision of his â€Å"bridge† to America. In th ese pages; the writer employs a new method of recap- turing and re-entering the past. The walk to Highland Park is under- taken by the adolescent and is recalled by the adult in the past tense, but it is given immediacy by the frequent interjection of the adverbial pointers â€Å"now† and â€Å"here†: â€Å"Ahead of me now the black web of the 334 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 Fulton Street El† (p. 168). â€Å"Everything ahead of me now was of a dif- ferent order . . . Every image I had of peace, of quiet shaded streets in some old small-town America . . . now came back to me . . . Here were the truly American streets; here was where they lived† (p. 169). The effect is peculiar, but appropriate. By using the adverbial pointers, ‘here’ and ‘now,’ together with the adult’s past tense, Kazin is able to convey the eerie impression that he is, finally, both here, in the adult’s present, and there, in the child’s past. The bridge between them is complete. The complexity of perspective and structure in Kazin’s memoir caused Mr. Handlin to observe that â€Å"chronology is abandoned so there is never any certainty of the sequence of events. † In most autobio- graphies, the inevitable discontinuities between present and past selves are overcome by the construction of a continuous, causally developed, and therefore â€Å"meaningful,† story. By purposefully avoid- ing such a reconstruction with its solid assumptions of the reality of the selfs history and the ability of language to convey that reality with- out serious mediatory consequences, Kazin refocuses our attention on the autobiographer/historianA—not the past as it was, but history as recreated by the imagination. Self-history in A Walker is not continu- ous and linear, but spatial; the past is not a time, but a place. For the youth, it was a place from which he wanted to escape. For the adult, it is a place to which he fears to return (â€Å"the old foreboding that all my life would be like this†) and to which he feels he must return in order to complete and renew himself. The child’s world seems timeless; it is frozen in a tableau, like a wax museum, in which the adult can explore, in a curiously literal manner, his own past. That some of the figures are missing or that the present may actually have vandalized the arrangement of props, only intensifies its apparent isolation from adult, historical life. This difference between the timelessness of childhood, as we per- ceive it in the memoir, and the adult’s implied immersion in history may illuminate the nature of the quest upon which the autobiographer has embarked. We can see, for instance, that the motivation which lies behind the quest for identity is grounded upon assumptions about the nature of life in history. The discontinuity felt by both the child and the adult is not simply between a Brownsville identity and an Ameri- can identity, but between the Timelessness which childhood repre- sents and History. Burton Pike, writing from a pyschoanalytic perspective, has sug- gested that autobiographies of childhood in general reveal a fascination Hazlett repossessing the past 335 with states of timelessness: â€Å"the device of dwelling on childhood may also serve two other functions: It may be a way of blocking the ticking of the clock toward death, of which the adult is acutely aware, and it may also represent a deep fascination with death itself, the ultimately timeless state. 9 The adult’s return to Brownsville becomes, in this view, a journey motivated not simply by a desire for completion of identity, but also by a desire to escape the exigencies of historical life- death, as Pike asserts, and, perhaps more obviously, guilt. The writing of A Walker, Kazin says in New York Jew, â€Å"was a clutch at my old innocence† and â€Å"the boy I remembered . . . was a necessary fiction, he was so virtuous. â€Å"10 What is of particular interest in Kazin’s memoir, howeve r, is the manifest content of the child’s quest which offers a counterpoint to Pike’s useful analysis. The â€Å"fascination† in A Walker, works both ways: the adult longs for the child’s timeless world and the child longs for the adult’s sense of history. Moreover, as the adolescent â€Å"stands outside of America,† he longs not only to possess a history of his own, but to enter history. The child is never interested in the past for its own sake; he wishes to be one of the crowd, to be swept along in the irrevocable onward rush of political and social events. Entering history for him is the clearest and most satisfying form of belonging. Kazin’s memoir is not, therefore, reducible to a psychoanalytical model. Since he always handles the issue of life in history consciously, it is difficult to approach the relationship between the autobiographer and â€Å"time† as though the writer were himself unaware of the implica- tions of his subject matter. His â€Å"escape† from history through the recovery of childhood was, at least on one level, a very conscious rejec- tion of the autobiographical form dictated by Marxist historicism and chosen by many leftist writers during the 30s, the period of his own coming-of-age. Writers in this older generation felt that successful self re-creation, both autobiographical and actual, could be accomplished only by determining one’s position vis A vis a cosmic historical force. 11 Kazin’s choice of autobiographical form was partly a response to the effect that this philosophy had had on him as a young man. In his sec- ond memoir, Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin recalls, with disillu- sionment, the sense of exhilaration that accompanied his own histori- cism during the Great Depression: â€Å"History was going our way, and in our need was the very life-blood of history . . . The unmistakable and surging march of history might yet pass through me. There seemed to be no division between my efforts at personal liberation and the appar- ent effort of humanity to deliver itself. â€Å"12 One might argue, of course, that as an autobiography of childhood, 336 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 A Walker does not deal with the â€Å"historical† world, and therefore can- not address the problems of historicism. But to do so would be to ignore the overwhelming importance which Kazin places upon the relationship between the individual and history in all of his writings, and in particular in his autobiographical work. By emphasizing the adult’s role in the reconstruction of the child, and by creating a paral- lel between the older man’s reconstruction of his childhood and the child’s reconstruction of the American past, Kazin locates the source of historical meaning, whether personal or collective, in the historian and undermines historicism’s claim that the past possesses meaning independent of human creation. Kazin does not, however, advocate a view of identity divorced from collective history, nor does he value the personal over the collective past. More than most autobiographers of childhood, Kazin has the sensibilities of a public man, a writer very much in and of the world. As we descend with him into the vortex of his reconstructed past, the larger world that he is â€Å"leaving† is always present or implied. More- over, Kazin’s return to his lost innocence provides more than a mere â€Å"escape† from history because the childhood he reconstructs was full of a longing for history, as we have seen. The child’s Whitmanesque dream that he could become an American by assimilating America’s past was born of a belief that the collective past might somehow deliver him from â€Å"us and them,† from the feeling that as isolated indi- viduals (outside of history) we are meaningless. By 1951, when he wrote A Walker, he had indeed been delivered by his dream out of iso- lation, but the post-War, post-Holocaust America in which he found himself was not the one which â€Å"his† history had promised. It is in this context that the return to childhood must be read. The young Kazin had dreamed that collective history would be the salvation of the self; the older Kazin, even while remaining committed to collective history, realized that history, far from providing our salvation, was the very thing from which we must be saved. The power of A Walker ulti- mately derives from the tension between this commitment to our col- lective fate and the belief that our only salvation from that fate lies in a consciousness of the past. The adult walker’s reconstruction of his childhood may have begun as an effort of the historical self to connect with an apparently ahistorical self, but the ironic achievement of that effort was the discovery that the earlier self had, in fact, been firmly grounded in history, the history of first generation immigrant Jews. The peculiar intensity with which Kazin identifies his personal past with the collective past raises questions about the relationship of both Hazlett repossessing the past 337 o the larger question of life in history and makes A Walker an interest- ing example of the options available to contemporary American auto- biographers. A Walker rejects the historicism of the 30s and the forms of the self that such historicism produced, but nevertheless maintains the belief that the self is never fully realized until it has defined its rela- tionship to the issues of the times; that is, to â€Å"historical† issues. It is precisely this belief which distingui shes Kazin’s autobiography from other coming-of-age memoirs. On the surface, it appears to appeal to a private and psychological explanation of the self, but finally it relies firmly upon the belief that only the determination of our relationship to collective experience can provide our private selves with worth. This belief provides the motivation for the two quests discussed in the first half of this essay. In a Commentary article published in 1979, Kazin wrote that the â€Å"most lasting autobiographies tend to be case histories limited to the self as its own history to begin with, then the self as the history of a particular moment and crisis in human history . . â€Å"13 In its presenta- tion of the latter, A Walker reflects not only the struggle of a first-gen- eration immigrant son to become an American, but also the struggle of the modern imagination, which has lost faith in either a divine or a cosmic ordering of history, to recreate a meaningful past. â€Å"The life of mere experience,† Kazin says in that article, â€Å"and especially of history as the supposedly total experience we ridiculously claim to know, can seem an inexplicable series of unrelated moments. In A Walker, the child and the adult are both motivated by the autobiographical belief that history still constitutes meaning and identity; both yearn for con- tinuity. But by focusing on the context in which the past is reclaimed, Kazin emphasizes the difficulties and limitations of his task and places it on the insecure basis which attends every human effort to create meaning. Such an approach to the relationship between history and the self demands finally that the walker be able to tread a tightrope between the â€Å"reality† of the past and the solipsism toward which a reliance on imagination and language tends. Burton Pike has stated that â€Å"as the twentieth century began, belief in History as a sustaining external principle collapsed,† and suggests that the term ‘autobiography’ cannot accurately be said to apply to twentieth century forms of self-writing since it â€Å"might best be regarded as a historical term, applicable only to a period roughly corre- sponding to the nineteenth century; that period when, in European thought, an integrity of personal identity corresponded to a belief in the integrity of cultural conventions. 14 By using as his examples 338 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 authors who had come to autobiography from the Modernist move- ment (he mentions Musil, Stein, Rilke, Mailer), Pike has certainly overestimated the impact of Modernism (which â€Å"relativized† and â€Å"internalized† time) on our basic conception of history. Even within the literary community (and particularly among those, like Kazin, who were raised in a leftist political tradition), there was widespread resis- tance to ideas of time that impinged upon the nineteenth century notions of history. The weakest point in Pike’s argument is, in fact, his failure to acknowledge the strength of the Marxist legacy in twentieth century thought, and in particular the effect of historicism on modern autobiographies. Even Kazin’s A Walker, in spite of its rejection of ideological historicism and its attention to the subjectivity of the self- writer, retains a belief in history as fate. Perhaps the significance of Kazin’s book lies in its revelation of one man’s response to the dilemma of his generation: their vision of the self, which was shaped and sustained by historicism, collapsed just when they were about to enter upon the stage of history. Confronted with the collapse of this â€Å"sustaining external principle† autobio- graphers committed to the idea of life in history were faced with the difficult task of defining anew how one might transcend the â€Å"inexplic- able series of unrelated moments† that constitute our daily experience. Kazin’s return to childhood in A Walker is one answer. Other autobio- graphers are still trying, with varying degrees of success, to find sub- stantial historical movements and directions with which to structure the past, give meaning to the present, and help predict the future. Even a cursory glance at contemporary autobiographical writing reveals that there are many ways to do this; most clearly it can be seen in the increasing numbers of autobiographies written by members of newly self-conscious groupsA—Blacks, women, gays, a generation. The belief held by each of these groups that â€Å"their time† has come is a form of historicism (frequently unconscious) that allows the individual autobiographer to transcend â€Å"mere experience† by identifying him/herself with the historical realization of the group’s identity. They provide ample evidence that autobiographies, even at this late post- Modernist date, remain both a literary and a historical form. 15 University of Iowa NOTES 1. A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1951). AU subsequent references to this book will be given in the body of the text. Hazlett repossessing the past 339 2. John Paul Eakin, â€Å"Kazin’s Bridge to America,† South Atlantic Quarterly, 77 (Win- ter 1978), 43. This article provides an excellent summary and discussion of the coming-of-age aspect of the memoir. Readers interested in a thorough reading of the memoir are referred to Sherman Paul, â€Å"Alfred Kazin,† Repossessing and Renewing: Essays in The Green American Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. , 1976), pp. 236-62. 3. Oscar Handlin, rev. f A Walker in the City, Saturday Review of Literature, 17 November 1951, p. 14. 4. One might add that most autobiographies are structured in this way: on the one hand, the explicit â€Å"journey† of the youthful â€Å"I† toward manhood, and, ulti- mately, toward a complete identification with the narrative â€Å"I;† on the other hand, the implicit journey of the adult, narrative  "I† backward in time to find an earlier self, Kazin’s memoir is distinguished by the way in which it makes this second journey such an important and explicit aspect of the narrative. . (New York: Harvest, 1942). 6. New York Jew, (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 313. 7. New York Jew, p. 320. 8. Kazin’s â€Å"loss† of his childhood is reflected indirectly in On Native Grounds, the monumental literary history that culminated his search for an American past. That work conspicuously omits any discussion of the contribution of Jews to American literature. Thus, Robert Towers remarks in â€Å"Tales of Manhattan† (New York Review of Books, May 18, 1978, p. 2): â€Å"The great immigration of East European Jews passes unnoticed, as though it had never happened †¦ as though it had not deposited Alfred Kazin’s bewildered parents on the Lower East side. So powerful has been the subsequent impact of Jewish writing upon our consciousness that it seems in credible that Kazin should have found noth- ing to say about its early manifestations in a history so inclusive as On Native Grounds. † 9. Time in Autobiography,† Comparative Literature, 28 (Fall 1976), 335. 10. New York Jew, pp. 232 and 321 respectively. The return to childhood as renewal through reconnection with an earlier, innocent self is common to many auto- biographies and most eloquently expressed in William Wordsworth’s The Prel- ude: â€Å"There are in our existence spots of time,/That with distinct pre-emi- nence retain/A renovating virtue, whence . . . our How to cite Place, Essay examples