Although Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934) was greeted by critics as a generally unsuccessful book, Némirovsky developed a thematic and formal network in this novel that was likely to lead to a ...generational meditation on the malaise of the post-war period. The story of Christophe Bohun, an anonymous clerk who hates his ordinary life, departs from the Russian-Jewish vein that had dominated Némirovsky’s novels up to that point and focuses instead on a French petty-bourgeoisie plagued by social and existential unhappiness. In this way, the hero's bleak inner landscape blends seamlessly into the picture of an age tormented by the assertion of a civilisation so intrusive that it disrupts the relationship between the subject and the world.
In this narrative, I trace several elements encased in a recent article entitled ¿Quien Soy Yo? These include issues connected with personal and collective identity, feelings of alienation, feminism, ...confidence, and assertion. There is also a deep implication that some higher education academies do not try hard enough to welcome new colleagues, especially from minorities, into their institutions.
Bien que Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934) soit accueilli par la critique comme un livre globalement raté, Némirovsky développe dans ce roman un réseau thématique et formel susceptible de renvoyer à une ...réflexion générationnelle sur le malaise de l’entre-deux-guerres. L’histoire de Christophe Bohun, employé anonyme qui déteste son existence ordinaire, s’écarte en effet de la veine russe-juive dominante jusqu’à ce moment-là dans la production romanesque de l’écrivaine pour mettre l’accent sur l’illustration d’une petite-bourgeoisie française rongée par un véritable malheur social et existentiel. Ainsi, le sombre paysage intérieur du héros se fond – sans solution de continuité – dans le tableau d’une époque tourmentée par l’affirmation d’une civilisation tellement intrusive qu’elle perturbe la relation entre le sujet et le monde.
Mediocrity as a concept in education has frequently been used by modern-day and historical actors to express discontent with the status quo of pedagogy and schooling. Despite its pervasiveness in ...discourse, however, the concept has largely evaded academic scrutiny, particularly in terms of its historical development in the years leading up to its appearance in the famous United States Government report, A Nation at Risk. This paper aims to construct a conceptual history of mediocrity in American education through the analysis of newspaper articles from The New York Times, to explore how the concept developed amidst the rise of neoliberalism and meritocratic discourse in education. This study finds that the concept of mediocrity between 1971 and 1983 had a number of nuanced conceptualisations and played a pivotal role in developing meritocratic discourse on natural talent and ability, as well as neoliberal and marketised narratives in public debates over educational equality, business approaches to education, and performance pay for teachers. These findings allow educational researchers to reflect meaningfully on the ways that language shapes, and is shaped by, historical developments in education, and provides layers of meaning and context to oft-used educational concepts that are crucial for the authentic evaluation of our modern education systems.
The memory of judgment and the Holocaust is of great interest in postmodernists’ writings. The relationship between postmodernism and the Holocaust is always paradoxically juxtaposed. William Gass, ...an American postmodern writer and critic, touches the topic of the Holocaust in his masterpiece
(2013). Gass tends to trivialize fascism to every man and every ordinary life, to disrespect the “sacred”. The novel has the skill in faking the identity or the details of its putative history. Is the Holocaust a subcategory of war crimes or the inhumanity of genocide? Is there any reliable way of establishing the reality of the Holocaust either through the memory of groups or individuals? Are genocide and occasional or no systematic atrocities the inevitability of a state? In this paper, we tend to explore the collective memory and individual memory of witnesses of the Holocaust presented in
and the puzzlement of judgment as a war crime or inhuman genocide, thus arguing the ethos of history and shock of mediocrity in our daily life.
US actor-manager Harry Watkins (1825–1894) was no one special. He yearned for fame, but merely skirted the edges of it. If Watkins has any “historical significance” at all, it is because he left ...behind a voluminous diary in which he chronicled his experiences during the years leading up to the US Civil War. When the author discovered the manuscript in 2008, Watkins’s lackluster became the subject of her research, focused on the question: what could this minor actor reveal about nineteenth-century US culture—a culture as obsessed with fame and achievement as today’s culture? The author argues that Watkins is significant precisely because of his ordinariness, his obscurity, his run-of-the-mill-ness. His experiences illuminate how “white mediocrity” (Koritha Mitchell) works and deepens our understanding of the insidious power of the American Dream. Watkins’s lack of visibility during his lifetime and subsequently suggests that mediocrity is a stigmatized state of being, a form of abjection. His cyclical highs and lows bring into focus the cultural forces that still shape the aspirations of today’s theater artists, and the triumphs and failures that define their (our) inexorably ordinary lives.
A meta-analysis conducted by Harris and Orth (2020) found positive prospective cross-lagged effects between quality of social relations and self-esteem in included longitudinal studies. Harris and ...Orth concluded that the link between self-esteem and quality of social relations is reciprocal and characterized by a positive feedback loop. However, meta-analytic effects were estimated while controlling for a prior measurement of the outcome and such effects are known to be susceptible to artifactual (i.e. spurious) effects due to correlations with measurement errors and reversion to mediocrity. We reanalyzed the same data and found paradoxical effects indicating, simultaneously, both increasing and decreasing effects between self-esteem and social relations. These findings suggest that prospective effects between self-esteem and quality of social relations are artifactual rather than due to a true reciprocal effect. Thus, these findings have important theoretical implications and challenge both the risk regulation model, which posits that self-esteem has a causal effect on quality of social relations, and the sociometer theory, which claims that quality of relations is the cause and self-esteem the effect. The present results prompt further investigation into the underlying mechanisms driving these artifactual associations. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of considering methodological limitations in future meta-analyses to improve the accuracy of causal inferences.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are critical for fostering growth, innovation, and collaboration in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). This ...article focuses on four key topics that have impacted many Black individuals in STEMM: know-your-place aggression, environmental microaggressions, peer mediocrity, and code-switching. We provide a comprehensive background on these issues, discuss current statistics, and provide references that support their existence, as well as offer solutions to recognize and address these problems in the STEMM which can be expanded to all historically underrepresented individuals.
In this essay, I defend sport as a (mere) hobby in contrast to sport as a 'mutual quest for excellence through challenge'. With the assistance of ideas found in the novel Don Quixote, I raise ...questions about the clarity, merit, and sufficiency of the quest-for-excellence apologetic. I employ arguments made by James and Dewey to support my alternate defense of sporting activity as a hobby, that is, as 'the gentle pursuit of a modest competence'. Based on the work of Wu, my defense stands as both a philosophic argument and a cultural critique.
The desire to improve institutional profile and students’ linguistic skills leads to the growth of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI). While studies regarding EMI have been sufficiently ...documented, little is known about Arabic as a Medium of Instruction (AMI) in the expanding circles. To fill in the gap, our study examines EMI and AMI at IIU University (Indonesian Islamic University) using semi-structured interviews with six alumni of the program. Data were analyzed through Phan’s (2017) conceptualization of adjusted desire and transformative mediocrity. The findings demonstrate that EMI and AMI are strategically employed to symbolically legitimize the “international” profile. In practice, both EMI and AMI likely result in below-mediocre quality education. However, the participants still hold the (limited) power of transformation, as they view their recent teaching position and recognition as having been impacted by their below-mediocre EMI and EMI programs.
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