University College

David John Lodge was born on January 28, 1935, in London’s lower-middle-class East End, the only son of a musician father and a staunchly Catholic mother. The family’s straitened economic situation, his conservative Catholic upbringing, and the dangers of wartime London left their mark on young David. He began his first novel (unpublished) at eighteen while still a student at University College, London, where he received his B. A. in English (with first honors) in 1955 and an M. A. in 1959.Between times Lodge performed what was then an obligatory National Service (1955-1957). Although the two years were in a sense wasted, his stint in the army did give him time to complete his first published novel, The Picturegoers , and material for his second, Ginger, You’re Barmy , as well as the impetus to continue his studies.In 1959 he married to Mary Frances Jacob; they had three children. After a year working as an assistant at the British Council, Lodge joined the facul ty at the University of Birmingham, where he completed his Ph. D. in 1969; he eventually attained the position of full professor of modern English literature in 1976. The mid-1960’s proved an especially important period in Lodge’s personal and professional life.He became close friends with fellow critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury (then also at Birmingham), under whose influence Lodge wrote his first comic novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down , for which the publisher, not so comically, forgot to distribute review copies; he was awarded a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship to study and travel in the United States for a year (1964-1965); he published his first critical study, the influential The Language of Fiction (1966); and he learned that his third child, Christopher, suffered from Down syndrome (a biographical fact that manifests itself obliquely at the end of Out of the Shelter and more overtly in one of the plots of How Far Can You Go? ).Lodge’s secon d trip to the United States, this time as visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, during the height of the Free Speech Movement and political unrest, played its part in the conceiving and writing of his second comic novel, Changing Places , as did the critical essays he was then writing and would later collect in The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971) and Working with Structuralism (1981). The cash award that went along with the Whitbread Prize for his next novel, How Far Can You Go? , enabled Lodge to reduce his teaching duties to half-year and to devote himself more fully to his writing.He transformed his participation in the Modern Language Association’s 1978 conference in New York, the 1979 James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, and a three-week world tour of conferences and British Council speaking engagements into his most commercially successful book, Small World , later adapted for British television. His reputation growing and his financial situation brightening, Lodge donated all royalties from his next book, Write On: Occasional Essays, ’65-’85 (1986), to CARE (Cottage and Rural Enterprises), which maintains communities for mentally handicapped adults. In 1987 he took advantage of early retirement (part of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s austerity plan for British universities) so that he could work full time as a writer. Lodge soon published Paradise News (1991) and Therapy (1995).He also published two collections of essays, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990) The Art of Fiction (1992), and a comedic play, The Writing Game (1991). Especially popular for his academic novels, Lodge enjoyed an increasingly strong critical reception in the 1990’s. The Writing Game was adapted for television in 1996, and Lodge was named a Fellow of Goldsmith’s College in London in 1992. In 1996 he published The Practice of Writing , a collection of seventeen essays on the creative process. In this text he treats fiction writers who have influenced him, from James Joyce to Anthony Burgess, and comments on the contemporary novelist and the world of publishing; the main focus, however, is on adapting his own work, as well as the work of Charles Dickens and Harold Pinter, for television.Lodge remained a supporter of CARE and other organizations supporting the mentally handicapped (the subject of mental handicaps appears briefly in Therapy in a reference to the central character’s sister’s dedication to a mentally handicapped son). He retained the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham. In addition to interests in television, theater, and film, Lodge maintained an interest in tennis that is sometimes reflected in the novels. Literary Forms Mediating between theory and practice, David Lodge has proved himself one of England’s ablest and most interesting literary critics. Among his influ ential critical books are The Language of Fiction (1966) and The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971).In addition to his novels and criticism, he has written short stories, television screenplays of some of his novels, and (in collaboration with Malcolm Bradbury and Jim Duckett) several satirical revues. Achievements As a novelist Lodge has made his mark in three seemingly distinct yet, in Lodge’s case, surprisingly congruent areas: as a writer of Catholic novels, of â€Å"campus fiction,† and of works that somehow manage to be at once realist and postmodern. The publication of Changing Places in 1975 and Small World nine years later brought Lodge to the attention of a much larger (especially American) audience. Changing Places won both the Yorkshire Post and Hawthornden prizes, How Far Can You Go?received the Whitbread Award, and Nice Work was shortlisted for Great Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Literary Analysis In order to understand David Lodge’s no vels, it is necessary to place them in the context of postwar British literature—the â€Å"Movement† writers and â€Å"angry young men† of the 1950’s, whose attacks on the English class system had an obvious appeal to the author of The Picturegoers , the English Catholic novel and â€Å"campus novel† traditions, and finally the postmodernism to which British fiction (it is often claimed) has proved especially resistant. In addition, Lodge’s novels are significantly and doubly autobiographical. They draw not only on important events in the author’s life, but also on his work as a literary critic.In The Language of Fiction Lodge defends the aesthetic validity and continuing viabilty of realist writing on the basis of linguistic mastery rather than fidelity to life, and in The Novelist at the Crossroads he rejects Robert Scholes’s bifurcation of contemporary fiction into fabulistic and journalistic modes, positing the â€Å"probl ematic novel† in which the novelist innovatively builds his hesitation as to which mode to adopt into the novel. Lodge’s own novels are profoundly pluralistic yet manifest the author’s clear sense of aesthetic, social, and personal limitations as well as his awareness of working both within and against certain traditions and forms. The Picturegoers Set in a lower-middle-class area of London much like the one in which Lodge grew up, The Picturegoers is an interesting and even ambitious work marred by melodramatic excesses. As the plural of its title implies, The Picturegoers deals with a fairly large number of more or less main characters.Lodge’s title also is indicative of his narrative method: abrupt cinematic shifts between the different plots, use of a similarly shifting focalizing technique, and a stylizing of the narrative discourse in order to reflect features of an individual character’s verbal thought patterns. Of the seven main characters, Mark Underwood is the most important. A lapsed Catholic and aspiring writer, he arrives in London, rents a room in the home of a conservative Catholic family, the Mallorys, and falls in love with the daughter, Clare, formerly a Catholic novitiate. The affair will change them: Clare will become sexually awakened and then skeptical when Mark abandons her for the Catholicism from which she has begun to distance herself.Interestingly, his return to the Church seems selfish and insincere, an ironic sign not of his redemption but of his bad faith. Ginger, You’re Barmy Dismissed by its author as a work of â€Å"missed possibilities† and an â€Å"act of revenge† against Great Britain’s National Service, Ginger, You’re Barmy continues Lodge’s dual exploration of narrative technique and moral matters and largely succeeds on the basis of the solution Lodge found for the technical problem which the writing of the novel posed: how to write a novel about the tedium of military life without making the novel itself tedious to read. Lodge solved the problem by choosing to concentrate the action and double his narrator-protagonist Jonathan Browne’s story.Lodge focuses the story on the first few weeks of basic training, particularly Jonathan’s relationship with the altruistic and highly, though conservatively, principled Mike Brady, a poorly educated Irish Catholic, who soon runs afoul of the military authorities; on the accidental death or perhaps suicide of Percy Higgins; and on Jonathan’s last days before being mustered out two years later. Lodge then frames this already-doubled story with the tale of Jonathan’s telling, or writing, of these events three years later, with Jonathan now married (to Mike’s former girlfriend), having spent the past three years awaiting Mike’s release from prison. The novel’s frame structure suggests that Jonathan has improved morally from the self-centered agnostic he was to the selfless friend he has become, but his telling problematizes the issue of his development.Between Mike’s naive faith and Jonathan’s intellectual self-consciousness and perhaps self-serving confession there opens up an abyss of uncertainty for the reader. The British Museum Is Falling Down This moral questioning takes a very different form in Lodge’s next novel. The British Museum Is Falling Down is a parodic pastiche about a day in the highly literary and (sexually) very Catholic life of Adam Appleby, a twenty-five-year- old graduate student trying to complete his dissertation before his stipend is depleted and his growing family overwhelms his slender financial resources. Desperate but by no means in despair, Adam begins to confuse literature and life as each event in the wildly improbable series that makes up his day unfolds in its own uniquely parodied style.The parodies are fun but also have a semiserious purpose, the undermining of al l forms of authority, religious as well as literary. Parodic in form, The British Museum Is Falling Down is comic in intent in that Lodge wrote it in the expectation of change in the church’s position on birth control. The failure of this expectation would lead Lodge fifteen years later to turn the comedy inside out in his darker novel, How Far Can You Go? Out of the Shelter Published after The British Museum Is Falling Down but conceived earlier, Out of the Shelter is a more serious but also less successful novel. Modeled on a trip Lodge made to Germany when he was sixteen, Out of the Shelter attempts to combine the Bildungsroman and the Jamesian international novel.In three parts of increasing length, the novel traces the life of Timothy Young from his earliest years in the London blitz to the four weeks he spends in Heidelberg in the early 1950’s with his sister, who works for the American army of occupation. With the help of those he meets, Timothy begins the proce ss of coming out of the shelter of home, conservative Catholicism, unambitious lower-middle-class parents, provincial, impoverished England, and sexual immaturity into a world of abundance as well as ambiguity. Lodge’s Joycean stylization of Timothy’s maturing outlook proves much less successful than his portrayal of Timothy’s life as a series of transitions in which the desire for freedom is offset by a desire for shelter, the desire to participate by the desire to observe.Even in the epilogue, Timothy, now thirty, married, and in the United States on a study grant, finds himself dissatisfied (even though he has clearly done better than any of the novel’s other characters) and afraid of the future. Changing Places Lodge translates that fear into a quite different key in Changing Places. Here Lodge’s genius for combining opposites becomes fully evident as the serious Timothy Young gives way to the hapless English liberal-humanist Philip Swallow, wh o leaves the shelter of the University of Rummidge for the expansive pleasures of the State University of Euphoria in Plotinus (Berkeley). Swallow is half of Lodge’s faculty and narrative exchange program; the other is Morris Zapp, also forty, an academic Norman Mailer, arrogant and ambitious.Cartoonish as his characters—or rather caricatures—may be, Lodge makes them and their complementary as well as parallel misadventures in foreign parts humanly interesting. The real energy of Changing Places lies, however, in the intersecting plots and styles of this â€Å"duplex† novel. The first two chapters, â€Å"Flying† and â€Å"Settling,† get the novel off to a self-consciously omniscient but otherwise conventional start. â€Å"Corresponding,† however, switches to the epistolary mode, and â€Å"Reading† furthers the action (and the virtuosic display) by offering a series of newspaper items, press releases, flysheets, and the like. â €Å"Changing† reverts to conventional narration (but in a highly stylized way), and â€Å"Ending† takes the form of a filmscript.Set at a time of political activism and literary innovation, Changing Places is clearly a â€Å"problematic novel† written by a â€Å"novelist at the crossroads,† aware of the means at his disposal but unwilling to privilege any one over any or all of the others. How Far Can You Go? Lodge puts the postmodern plays of Changing Places to a more overtly serious purpose in How Far Can You Go? It is a work more insistently referential than any of Lodge’s other novels but also paradoxically more self-questioning: a fiction about the verifiably real world that nevertheless radically insists upon its own status as fiction. The novel switches back and forth between the sometimes discrete, yet always ultimately related stories of its ten main characters as freely as it does between the mimetic levels of the story and its narration. The parts make up an interconnected yet highly discontinuous whole, tracing the lives of its ten characters from 1952 (when nine are university students and members of a Catholic study group led by the tenth, Father Brierly) through the religious, sexual, and sociopolitical changes of the 1960’s and 1970’s to the deaths of two popes, the installation of the conservative John Paul II, and the writing of the novel How Far Can You Go? in 1978. The authorial narrator’s attitude toward his characters is at once distant and familiar, condescending and compassionate. Their religious doubts and moral questions strike the reader as quaintly naive, the result of a narrowly Catholic upbringing. Yet the lives of reader and characters as well as authorial narrator are also strangely parallel in that (to borrow Lodge’s own metaphor) each is involved in a game of Snakes and Ladders, moving narratively, psychologically, socially, and religiously ahead one moment, only to fall suddenly behind the next.The characters stumble into sexual maturity, marry, have children, have affairs, get divorced, declare their homosexuality, suffer illnesses, breakdowns, and crises of faith, convert to other religions, and join to form Catholics for an Open Church. All the while the authorial narrator of this most postmodern of post- Vatican II novels proceeds with self-conscious caution, possessed of his own set of doubts, as he moves toward the open novel. Exploring various lives, plots, voices, and styles, Lodge’s artfully wrought yet ultimately provisional narrative keeps circling back to the question that troubles his characters: â€Å"How far can you go? † in the search for what is vital in the living of a life and the writing (or reading) of a novel. Small WorldLodge goes still further, geographically as well as narratively speaking, in his next novel. A campus fiction for the age of the â€Å"global campus,† Small World begins at a decided ly provincial meeting in Rummidge in 1978 and ends at a mammoth Modern Language Association conference in New York one year later, with numerous international stops in between as Lodge recycles characters and invents a host of intersecting stories (or narrative flight paths). The pace is frenetic and thematically exhaustive but, for the delighted reader, never exhausting. The basic plot upon which Lodge plays his add-on variations begins when Persse McGarrigle—poet and â€Å"conference virgin†Ã¢â‚¬â€meets the elusive Angelica Pabst.As Angelica pursues literary theory at a number of international conferences, Persse pursues her, occasionally glimpsing her sister, a pornographic actress, Lily Papps, whom he mistakes for Angelica. Meanwhile, characters from earlier Lodge novels reappear to engage in affairs and rivalries, all in the international academic milieu. A parody of (among other things) the medieval quest, Lodge’s highly allusive novel proves at once ente rtaining and instructive as it combines literary modes, transforms the traditional novel’s world of characters into semiotics’ world of signs, and turns the tables on contemporary literary theory’s celebrated demystifications by demystifying it. At novel’s end, Lodge makes a guest appearance, and Persse makes an exit, in pursuit of another object of his chaste desire.The quest continues, but that narrative fact does not mean that the novel necessarily endorses the kind of extreme open-endedness or inconclusiveness that characterizes certain contemporary literary theories. Rather, the novel seems to side with the reconstructed Morris Zapp, who has lost his faith in deconstruction, claiming that although the deferral of meaning may be endless, the individual is not: â€Å"Death is the one concept you can’t deconstruct. Work back from there and you end up with the old idea of an autonomous self. † Nice Work Zapp’s reduced expectations ty pify Lodge’s eighth novel, Nice Work , set almost entirely in Rummidge but also—as in How Far Can You Go? —evidencing his interest in bringing purely literary and academic matters to bear on larger social issues.The essential doubleness of this geographically circumscribed novel manifests itself in a series of contrasts: between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literature and life, the Industrial Midlands and Margaret Thatcher’s economically thriving (but morally bankrupt) London, male and female, and the novel’s two main characters. Vic Wilcox, age forty-six, managing director of a family-named but conglomerate-owned foundry, rather ironically embodies the male qualities his name implies. Robyn Penrose is everything Vic Wilcox is not: young, attractive, intellectual, cosmopolitan, idealistic, politically aware, sexually liberated, as androgynous as her name, and, as temporary lecturer in women’s studies and the nineteenth century nov el, ill-paid. The differences between the two are evident even in the narrative language, as Lodge takes pains to unobtrusively adjust discourse to character.The sections devoted to Vic, â€Å"a phallic sort of bloke,† are appropriately straightforward, whereas those dealing with Robyn, a character who â€Å"doesn’t believe in character,† reflect her high degree of self-awareness. In order to bring the two characters and their quite different worlds together, Lodge invents an Industry Year Shadow Scheme that involves Robyn’s following Vic around one workday per week for a semester. Both are at first reluctant participants. Displeasure slowly turns into dialogue, and dialogue eventually leads to bed, with sexual roles reversed. Along the way Lodge smuggles in a considerable amount of literary theory as Vic and Robyn enter each other’s worlds and words: the phallo and logocentric literalmindedness of the one coming up against the feminist-semiotic aw areness of the other.Each comes to understand, even appreciate, the other. Lodge does not stop there. His ending is implausible, in fact flatly unconvincing, but deliberately so—a parody of the only solutions that, as Robyn points out to her students, the Victorian novelists were able or willing to offer to â€Å"the problems of industrial capitalism: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death. † Robyn will receive two proposals of marriage, a lucrative job offer, and an inheritance that will enable her to finance the small company Vic, recently fired, will found and direct and also enable her to stay on at Rummidge to try to make her utopian dream of an educated, classless English society a reality.The impossibly happy ending suggests just how slim her chances for success are, but the very existence of Lodge’s novel seems to undermine this irony, leaving Nice Work and its reader on the border between aspiration and limitation, belief and skepticism, the romance of how things should be and the reality, or realism, of how things are—a border area that is one of the hallmarks of Lodge’s fiction. Paradise News Paradise News centers on the quest motif and the conflicts of a postmodern English Catholic. Bernard Walsh, a â€Å"sceptical theologican,† was formerly a priest but now teaches theology at the University of Rummidge. Summoned, along with his father, to see his aunt, who left England after World War II and is now dying in Hawaii, Walsh signs up for a package tour to save money. The rumpled son and his curmudgeon father join a comic assortment of honeymooners, disgruntled families, and other eccentrics; Lodge calls an airport scene â€Å"carnivalesque.† When the father breaks his leg on the first morning, Bernard must negotiate to bring his father and his aunt together so that his aunt can finally reveal and overcome the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood. Bernard’s journey to Hawaii becomes a journe y of discovery in his sexual initiation with Yolande, who gently leads him to know himself and his body. A major theme, as the title suggests, is â€Å"paradise. † Hawaii is the false paradise—paradise lost, fallen, or packaged by the tourist industry—yet a beautiful, natural backdrop is there, however worn and sullied. Paradise emerges from within the individuals who learn to talk to one another. The â€Å"news† from paradise includes Bernard’s long letter to himself, which he secretly delivers to Yolande, and letters home from members of the tour group.As with Lodge’s other novels, prominent themes are desire and repression in English Catholic families and a naive academic’s quest for self. In a complex tangle of human vignettes, Bernard moves from innocence and repression to an awakening of both body and spirit—an existential journey that is both comic and poignant. Therapy Therapy centers on another spiritual and existentia l quest. Lawrence (Tubby) Passmore, successful writer of television comedies, is troubled by knee pains and by anxiety that leads him, after reading the works of Soren Kierkegaard, to consider himself the â€Å"unhappiest man. † Seeking psychotherapy, aromatherapy, massage therapy, and acupuncture, Tubby moves through a haze of guilt and anxiety.When his wife of thirty years asks for a divorce, he seeks solace with a series of women, with each quest ending in comic failure. Obsessed with Kierkegaard’s unrequited love, Tubby launches a quest for the sweetheart whom he feels he wronged in adolescence. Lodge’s concern with the blurring of literary forms is evident in Tubby’s preoccupation with writing in his journal, sometimes writing Browningesque monologues for other characters. Opening with an epigraph from Graham Greene asserting that writing itself is â€Å"therapy,† Lodge takes Tubby through a quest for self through writing that coincides with a literal pilgrimage when he joins his former sweetheart, Maureen, on a hiking pilgrimage in Spain.When Tubby at last finds Maureen, her recollections of their teenage romance minimize his guilt, and his troubles seem trivial in comparison with her losing a son and surviving breast cancer. At the end, Tubby is planning a trip (a pilgrimage) to Kierkegaard’s home with Maureen and her husband. Tubby’s real therapy has been self-discovery through writing in his journal; other therapies and journeys have failed. Intertwined with existential angst, Tubby’s physical and psychological journeys are both comic and sad, with an underlying sense of the power of human goodness and the need to overcome repressions. Findings and discussion Conclusion References

Morning Quotes to Inspire You to Enjoy the Gift of Life

Morning Quotes to Inspire You to Enjoy the Gift of Life Most of us have heard the adage Rise and shine - the early bird gets the worm, but do you really know the meaning behind these words? Its widely believed that early risers have more time to achieve their goals. If youre an early riser, you know how blissful mornings can be. At dawn, the first rays of the sun gently caress the earth, like a mother gently waking her child up. From then on, it is a flurry of activity, with a soundtrack of birds chirping enthusiastically. Theres not much better than catching the morning rays of the sun on your face and basking in the warm golden rays. Take a brisk walk in the fresh air, and enjoy the gentle morning breeze on your face. Inspirational Morning Quotes Here are some inspiring morning quotes to motivate you to jumpstart your day and achieve your goals. Share these morning quotes and encourage others to rise early with you. Maya AngelouIf you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Dont be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers. Samuel GoldwynI had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it. Cary GrantMy formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. Mohandas GandhiPrayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening. Marcus AureliusWhen you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. Mark TwainIf its your job to eat a frog, its best to do it first thing in the morning. And if its your job to eat two frogs, its best to eat the biggest one first. Author UnknownIf people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters. Emily DickinsonMorning without you is a dwindled dawn. Bertrand RussellIve always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel. Rabindranath TagoreDo not say, It is morning, and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name. E. B. WhiteI arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. William BlakeThink in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. Salvador DaliEach morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali. Elbert HubbardBe pleasant until ten oclock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself. Ogden NashThe bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. Kahlil GibranIn the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. Billy WilderYou have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning. Jeb DickersonMorning is when the wick is lit. A flame ignited, the day delighted with heat and light, we start the fight for something more than before. Monica BaldwinI have always felt that the moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesnt, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there. Rig VedaBy getting up early in the morning one also gets more time at his disposal for work as compared to late-risers. Scholar and thinkers get up early in the morning and contemplate. Ralph Waldo EmersonHow cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Marcus AureliusThe breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. Eleanor RooseveltProbably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday. Henry David ThoreauIn my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. Arthur SchopenhauerEach day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death. Aldous HuxleyIt was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous. Jesse JamesI knew, however, that the next morning after the fight I would have to get away, and I did just in time, for a full company came early to look for me and were furious because I had escaped them. Quentin TarantinoI always do an all-night horror marathon on Saturdays where we start at seven and go until five in the morning. Van MorrisonA famous person to themselves, they don’t get up in the morning and think, I’m famous. I’m not famous to me. Famous is a perception. Jonas SalkIt is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner. Samuel Taylor ColeridgeHow like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them. Franz SchubertEvery night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief. Friedrich Max MullerThe morning hour has gold at the mouth. Ambrose BierceDawn: When men of reason go to bed. Thomas JeffersonWhether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun. Richard WhatelyLose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it. Josh BillingsNever work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.

Introduction to the Structure of U.S. Government

Introduction to the Structure of U.S. Government For all that it is and does, the United States federal government is based on a very simple system: Three functional branches with powers separated and limited by constitutionally declared checks and balances. The executive, legislative and judicial branches represent the constitutional framework envisioned by the Founding Fathers for our nations government. Together, they function to provide a system of lawmaking and enforcement based on checks and balances, and separation of powers intended to ensure that no individual or body of government ever becomes too powerful. For example: Congress (legislative branch) can pass laws, but the president (executive branch) can veto them.Congress can override the presidents veto.The Supreme Court (judicial branch) can declare a law approved by Congress and the president unconstitutional.The president can appoint judges to the Supreme Court, but Congress must approve them. Is the system perfect? Are powers ever abused? Of course, but as governments go, ours has been working quite well since Sept. 17, 1787. As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison remind us in Federalist 51, If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Recognizing the inherent moral paradox posed by a society in which mere mortals govern other mere mortals, Hamilton and Madison went on to write, In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place The Executive Branch The executive branch of the federal government ensures that the laws of the United States are obeyed. In carrying out this duty, the President of the United States is assisted by the Vice President, department heads – called Cabinet Secretaries – and the heads of the several independent agencies.   The executive branch consists of the president, the vice president and 15 Cabinet-level executive departments. The President The President of the United States is the elected leader of the country. As the head of state, the president is the leader of the federal government, and Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Elected according to the Electoral College process, the president serves a four-year term and is limited to serving no more than two terms. The Vice President The Vice President of the United States supports and advises the president. Under the process of presidential succession, the vice president becomes president if the president becomes unable to serve. The vice president can be elected and serve an unlimited number of four-year terms, even under multiple presidents. The Cabinet The members of the president’s cabinet serve as advisors to the president. The cabinet members include the vice president, heads or â€Å"secretaries† of the executive departments, and other high-ranking government officials. The heads of the executive departments are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by a simple majority vote of the Senate. Legislative Powers of the PresidentRequirements to Serve as PresidentPresidents Pay and Compensation The Legislative Branch The legislative branch, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate, has the sole constitutional authority to enact laws, declare war and conduct special investigations. In addition, the Senate has the right to confirm or reject many presidential appointments.   The Senate There are a total of 100 elected Senators- two from each of the 50 states. Senators may serve an unlimited number of six-year terms. The House of Representatives ï » ¿There are currently 435 elected Representatives, according to the constitutional process of apportionment, the 435 Representatives are divided among the 50 states in proportion to their total population as reported by the most recent decennial U.S. Census. In addition, there are non-voting delegates who represent the District of Columbia and the territories in the House of Representatives. Representatives may serve an unlimited number of two-year terms. The Powers of CongressRequirements to be a U.S. RepresentativeRequirements to be a U.S. SenatorSalaries and Benefits of U.S. Congress MembersHow Bills Become LawsWhy We Have a House and SenateThe Great Compromise: How Congress was Created The Judicial Branch Composed of federal judges and courts, the judicial branch interprets the laws enacted by Congress and when required, decides actual cases in which someone has been harmed. Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are not elected. Instead, they are appointed by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. Once confirmed, federal judges serve for life unless they resign, die, or are impeached. The U.S. Supreme Court sits atop the judicial branch and federal court hierarchy and has the final say on all cases appealed to it by the lower courts. There are currently nine members of the Supreme Court- a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices. A quorum of six Justices is required to decide a case. In the event of tie vote by an even number of Justices, the decision of the lower court stands.   The 13 U.S. District Courts of Appeals sit just below the Supreme Court and hear cases appealed to them by the 94 regional U.S. District Courts which handle most federal cases.

My Leadership Action Plan Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

My Leadership Action Plan - Essay Example Do you love the work you do? Are you driven by your purpose? Is there a connection to your top priorities and your leadership approaches? Do you enjoy your time in helping others be successful? What is your legacy to the world? My main purpose as a Leader: My main purpose as a leader is leading as well as developing the process team at the same time taking total accountability for the quality as well as delivering accomplished by the team. I am also responsible for assisting and guiding development of proposals consisting complex pricing as well as contractual dealings. My last significant role involves liaising and communicating with customers (Poscente, 2004). My areas to strengthen and grow: In need to improve my understanding and knowledge about the organization, I require to improve my skills and my ability to communicate effectively to the team members of the organization. I require improving team work with other people since I cannot work alone. Moreover, I require providing a vision for the organization’s future. I require taking risks in New ideas and be innovative. Lastly, I require valuing others through recognizing and encouraging them (Poscente, 2004).

Criminal Law-Offences against the person (LLB) Essay

Criminal Law-Offences against the person (LLB) - Essay Example America has enacted specific laws to criminalise the activity of those that spread the disease, whilst the UK relies on existing laws to prefer charges. At present within the UK those deliberately or recklessly infecting others in the manner described above are likely to find themselves charged with offences covered by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. To date those who have been found guilty have been convicted under s20 of this Act. Under this section the charge preferred is one of recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm. The cases of R v Konzani1 and R v Dica2 are examples where the courts applied section 2 of the OAPA where the defendants recklessly infected others with HIV. When deliberating on what charges can be brought against those who infect others with HIV the courts will look for proof that the person is aware of their condition that they know the risk of transmission, and they are aware that it passes through sex. People in these circumstances have been found guilty of recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm. In the case of Dica the court of appeal accepted a submission from the defence that the infected person had consented to the risk of transmission overruling the previous decision of the court where Dica had been found guilty of infecting the injured party. The case of Konzani followed a similar line on consent with the Court of Appeal clarifying how consent should be determined3. In this case, the court of appeal stated that they would only accept that the injured party had consented to the risk, if the defendant can prove that the injured party had been fully informed of their condition, and had made a conscious decision based on that knowledge. Agreeing to unprotected sex could not be viewed as consent to the risk of contracting HIV. The current guidelines on charges that can be brought against

The economy of U.S.A Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The economy of U.S.A - Essay Example It outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches that the country seeks to use in economic recovery process, asserting relative data sources and the theoretical perspective on the data’s view. The analytical approach of US economic policies The U.S.A needs to set an analytical approach to the economic issues and establish fiscal policies to stimulate growth, control amount of money in supply, dictate inflationary rates and of the dollar, and subsequently reduce the unemployment levels. The government should be certain of the factors that would help it achieve economic stability to the desired level. The United States should be observant on the whether the factors will positively or negatively affect the country at the long run (Gwartney and James, 250). The U.S.A engages in diverse economic prospectus criteria, ranging from macro to micro variables of forecasting for economic propulsion. The United States observes on the psychological impacts that a given policy would reflect from the economy. Therefore, the economy practices scientific theoretical approaches on the immediate factors of production, for example, the demand and supply variables, interests, and capital basis of the economy and labor. Theoretical and methodological approaches to the US economy The Keynesian theory as an approach to the economy of the United States would propel economic growth if well practiced. The theory stipulates that, during the short run period, productivity of the economy shape up in accordance to change in demand. The theory declares that the supply may not increase during an increase in the level of demand but may instead remain constant thus leading to an increase in prices, which consequently results to high costs of living, demand for salary increments, increased unemployment, and subsequent increase in inflation (Barfield and Claude, 314). The United States could adapt to the theoretical approach, which further inhibits the express authority of capitalists. America practices a free market enterprise whereby the investors make decisions on prices depending on the changes in market variables. The United States of America suffered economic crisis between the year 2007-2009 and eventually resulted to poor exchange value of the dollar against other currencies in the world (Majmundar and Malay, 43). America suffered intensely during the crisis due to the increased rate of unemployment, which implied negatively on the gross domestic product (GDP) because of the reduction of per capita income. America could view this aspect of fall back from another perspective, mainly by imposing controls on pricing whenever the demand of products increases with constant maintenance in supply. America’s approach of forecasting the futu re through leading economic indicators could also help the country realize economic prowess again. The index criterion is a methodological approach that eyes on the bank lending rates and the possible changes in the economy. The Keynesian approach emphasizes that federal bank should restrict on the amount of money in supply (a monetary policy) to ensure that the country does not suffer from inflation. The country should focus on the theoretical approach since, reduction of the amount of money in supply would press the economy to operate on the available balance of payment, and the country’

The Use of Psychobabbles in Psychology Essay Example for Free

The Use of Psychobabbles in Psychology Essay The word psychobabble was coined and first used by R. D. Rosen, a journalist and an author, in 1975. The New Times Magazine then used the term as title of the cover story Psychobabble: The New Language of Candor. It was in 1977 though when the term gained popularity through the book entitled Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling published by Rosen. The book looks at the explosion of terminologies and treatments in psychology, whether in professional or non-professional scenes. Psychobabble is defined in the book as a derogatory word signifying a technical jargon in psychology that is being used outside its original purpose. Some people might use a specific psychological term in a different context and without really knowing the word’s real meaning. In that case, a psychobabble is formed. This situation would just denote the speaker’s incapability of understanding the proper use of a certain psychological word or term. However, in other cases, psychobabbles are perceived as jargon words denoting meanings beyond what scholars and trained practitioners accept. The frequent use of such psychobabbles can lead to the widespread exploitation of some psychological terms. Laypersons might use them to describe a thing inappropriate for the meaning of a psychological word. Worse, they might describe a non-clinical situation as a medical one, even if it is not. Today, psychobabbles are rampant in motivational seminars, management training, and popular psychology. Examples of Psychobabbles Synergy The word synergy means the event that happens when two or more agents are combined and created an effect greater than what was expected. A person who knows and understand the effects of each agent can better predict their synergy. An example of this is drug synergism, where two or more drugs combined interact to augment the characteristics of their effects. In Psychology, synergy in drugs is often used. However, the word becomes a psychobabble when applied to humans. In human synergy, two or more people interact to accomplish a bigger and greater goal. For example, if two carpenters combined their strengths, they will be able to finish a house bigger in a faster rate. Although synergy is not used in this manner frequently, still the word is becoming a layman’s term. Holistic The term refers to the thought that all components of a certain scheme or system should be taken as a whole thing and not separated from each other. In psychology, holistic approach is being observed in psychosomatic medicine, where multiple factors are used to devise a systematic model for the psyche and the soma. Nowadays, the psyche and the soma are not seen as two separated entities but more of two interlinked units. In this manner, holistic approach is also commonly used in the context outside its original scientific meaning. Holistic is also being used in as part of the English vocabulary pertaining to a kind of systematized living where all aspects are connected: biological, psychological, and social way of living. Abnormality In psychology, the term abnormality is often used to describe a condition that is perceived as rare and dysfunctional. Abnormal behaviors are given constant attention and study in the field of abnormal psychology. The criteria for abnormality are being subjected to studies based on scientific approach. Although the term purely connotes a psychological meaning, still abnormality becomes a layman’s term used to pertain to any unusual or strange characteristic of a person, a thing, an animal, or a situation or condition.