This paper focuses on indirect means of verbalizing the phenomenon of pessimism in the texts of literary fairy tales from the point of view of Linguosemiotics. The study aims to determine the ...linguistic and semiotic means that create the pessimistic discourse of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales collection. Pessimistic discourse is a person-centred discourse type represented by a complex system of means showing the speaker’s pessimistic worldview and is characterized by its goals, style, and tenor. The study contributes to developing Linguosemiotics, Psycholinguistics, and discourse studies and enriches the knowledge about idiostyles. The study is based on the semantic and lingo-semiotic analysis of the ontological phenomenon of pessimism in fictional texts, applying the content analysis to ensure the results’ reliability and validity. Furthermore, the four-staged methodological procedure used in this research allows us to define a general literary context of the analyzed works, select the research material, establish the frequency characteristics of the symbols as lingo-semiotic means that create the pessimistic tonality and discourse of Oscar Wilde’s collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales. The research determines the symbols of nature (seasons, flowers), material world (colours, things of everyday use), distancing, and death (as an ontological category) as verbal triggers of the author’s pessimism implemented in the narration by the contextual markers of basic, adjacent, and related qualitative features of pessimism, which reflect its social, psychological and cognitive aspects. The suggested methodology of the given investigation is perspective within the scope of various genres.
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The main aim of this research was to examine the role of optimism-pessimism, general trust and belief in conspiracy theories, in COVID-19 related fears, preventive and hoarding behaviors. We also ...examined the role of different sources of information in these relations. The convenience sample was used (N = 412) and it consisted of individuals from Serbia (N = 292) and Latin-America (N = 120). Following instruments were used: The Life Orientation Test (Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994), Trust in people scale (Arbor, 1964), questions regarding fear, source of information, preventive behaviors and conspiracy constructed for the purposes of this research. The results suggest that fear of food shortage was the most pronounces one in both samples, followed by fear for oneself and finally by the fear for beloved others. Results suggest that optimists, those with high level of general trust and those who do not believe in conspiracy theories show lower level of fear and higher level of preventive behaviors. Pessimists on the other hand, show higher level of fear. Fear was related to all information sources suggesting that more information leads to higher intensity of fear – except information from the president which did not show any effect.
We propose that negative goal framing (i.e., defining a goal as a negative state to be avoided) can adversely affect performance. Study 1 (N = 133) revealed that negative goal framing predicted ...poorer future performance independent of goal level, expectancy, and earlier performance. Study 2 (N = 188) examined the relation between goal framing and performance at 2 times in the academic year, and with respect to individual differences in defensive pessimism. As predicted, the negative goal‐framing/poorer‐performance link was greater on a later exam (after receiving feedback) than an earlier one, and was greater for nondefensive pessimists than for defensive pessimists. The findings implicate self‐regulatory processes in understanding how goal framing affects performance.
Families without hope Brewer, Colin
BMJ (Online),
12/2012, Volume:
345, Issue:
dec12 1
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Furnishings were usually basic, dilapidated and inadequate, while priorities for spending were often given to luxury items, even when essentials were lacking." Families bought expensive chocolates ..."given inconsistently to their untrained children to placate their temper tantrums" or "spent a considerable portion of their assistance money on drink," but the main problems were attitudinal, not material.
This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler ...colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and the symbolic that forecloses not only an analysis of slavery, but also the constitution of settler colonialism itself. Through an immanent critique of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” we identify what animates their critique of metaphor, and drawing on scholarship in Black studies, we offer an alternative theorisation of slavery and settler colonialism.
I artiklen argumenteres der for, at Arthur Schopenhauers pessimistiske filosofi er det idemæssige grundstof, som Karl Gjellerups korte roman Pastor Mors (1894) er gjort af. Det bliver på denne ...baggrund også tydeliggjort, hvordan den i dag ukendte udgivelse er et eksemplarisk udtryk for den pessimistiske tendens i dansk litteratur, som var særligt fremtrædende i litteraturen i de sidste tiår af det 19. århundrede. Det er desuden hensigten med denne nærlæsning at vise, at den pessimistiske antropologi, som Gjellerup skriver frem i Pastor Mors, er udtryk for en trang til at revitalisere det religiøse i en ny form. I romanen skrives den kristne antropologi og det, Gjellerup mener er en fantasmagori af eksistentielle forhåbninger, som den kristne ontologi vækker i det troende menneske, over af en eurobuddhisme i bestræbelsen på at sætte Østens tilværelsesforståelse som den ene sandhed om livet.
The article argues that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer constitutes the ideological foundation of Karl Gjellerup’s novella Pastor Mors (1894). This premise also establishes how the now obscure publication is an exemplary expression of the pessimistic tendency in Danish literature, which was particularly prominent in the final decades of the 19th century. Further, the close reading intends to show that the pessimistic anthropology conveyed by Gjellerup in Pastor Mors is an expression of a desire to revitalize the religious aspect. In the novel, Christian anthropology – and what Gjellerup sees as a phantasmagoria of existential illusions in the religious individual inspired by Christian ontology – is substituted with Euro-Buddhism to establish the Eastern philosophy of life as the real truth of life.
Activists and scholars often describe environmental racism as an immoral and illegal dumping of toxic waste into poor, Black, and people of colour communities. Yet, the use of environmental habitats ...in (and with) which Black people are mutilated, concealed, and contained has gone under‐conceptualised as a mode of environmental racism. I propose an expansion of familiar understandings of environmental racism to include the use of environmental habitats to commit and conceal acts of anti‐Black violence. This proposition draws from an understanding that environmental racism includes the mutual devaluation of Black bodies and the spaces in which they inhabit. I ground this study in Afro‐Pessimist and Black geographies thought, research on environmental racism and cultural analyses of Black literary and performance art. Finally, I draw from the spatial and racial analyses imprinted within James Baldwin's immense catalogue to put forth Blackness as an alternate human ethic imbued with political possibilities, an ontological conceptualisation which may push activists and scholars to seek redress beyond the policy rationales and recommendations commonplace among today's struggles for environmental justice.
Air pollution is becoming a serious socio-environmental problem in many modern societies and poses significant economic threats to popular tourism destinations. Despite the documented consequences of ...air pollution on tourism demand, studies have seldom examined its impact on individuals’ psychological states, especially in the tourism context. Through a correlational study and two experiments, our findings indicate that tourists are more likely to be suspicious of local service providers when travelers perceive a destination as having heavy air pollution (vs. one without such pollution). This relationship presumably exists because tourists experience greater pessimism in an environment with high air pollution, which in turn influences their evaluations of service providers. Following this logic, we show that the effect diminishes when tourists are cognizant of (and thus rely less on) their pessimistic feelings when evaluating service providers. Finally, we offer theoretical and practical implications of this effect in tourism.
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