Unhappy Consciousness: Recognition and Reification in Victorian Fiction

Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero's self-discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: "She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron." The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless "master plot" or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx's analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misrecognition of the self, insofar as the heroes misrecognize themselves in forms of commodity fetishism. The thing is so often the subject herself insofar as "barred," dispersed among retrospective or delayed object identifications. I respond to the historical contextualization in Victorian cultural studies of "commodity culture," insisting that the economic structure of the commodity is not only a topic for realist notation, but makes up the inner logic of the novel form. Unhappy Consciousness urges a return to questions of novel theory which were perhaps set aside during New Historicism, arguing for a particularly novelistic mode of "objectification" (the form of the hero's activity) seen in interaction with the historical mode of objectification found in the capitalist value-form. I advance this argument through studies of several canonical Victorian works. Chapter One looks at the tension in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit between the ideological closure attained in the "family romance" plot of buried wills and restored parents, and the dead-end of interpretation and retrospection found in the plot of financial crisis and stock swindles. Chapter Two argues that, in Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, the tautological nature of interest rate is not confined to the urban financial plot but is displaced and affectively diffused over the provincial mystery plot. Chapter Three is a study of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I read the detective as an exaggerated portrait of the subjective effects of capitalist alienation, a monad whose only intervention in the world is to link predictive results with opaque processes, to "produce" recognition scenes (the solutions to each case) as a salable commodity. He is a machine for retrospection who has no personal past. In Chapter Four, I read Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a critique of the fetishizing of autonomous consciousness, using Marx's definition of fetishism as the misrecognition of a social form as the content of a thing. Isabel's mistake is to misconstrue the structure of the male gaze that constitutes her "freedom" as the inherent property of her individuality--until it is unmasked as a trap. As so often in the Victorian novel, fetishism is a mode of self-knowledge

The Lived Experience of Female Doctor Shoppers

Prescription drug abuse is a significant problem in the United States with huge societal and financial cost. The 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicated that in 2009 there were 12.4 million non-medical users of prescription opioids, indicating a 10% increase from 2002. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the financial cost of prescription drug diversion is approximately $72 billion per year. According to the Department of Justice, doctor shopping is the primary method of diversion of prescription drugs. Doctor shopping occurs when patients visit numerous prescribers and pharmacies to obtain prescriptions for controlled drugs for illicit use, such as opiates, stimulants and benzodiazepines for illicit use or sale. In many cases females are noted to be doctor shoppers, perhaps because they are perceived more sympathetically by prescribers. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of female doctor shoppers through a phenomenological study guided by the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Participants were recruited through a flyer placed at a location where a Narcotics Anonymous group met, as well as by personal invitation of the researcher. The sample included 14 women ranging in age from 27 to 51. Participants were asked to share their experience of doctor shopping. Data from the interviews was coded and thematically analyzed. A thematic structure of the meaning of doctor shopping was developed which encompassed four themes: (1) “feeding the addiction” (2) “networking with addicts” (3) “playing the system” and (4) ”baiting the doctors.” Recommendations for future research include instrument development to measure doctor shopping and prescribing behaviors, intervention development for the treatment and support of women who engage in doctor shopping and interventions to increase responsible prescribing. Recommendations for systematic changes include improved methods to determine patients identity and insurance status, eliminating cash payments for controlled drug prescriptions and visits, advanced use of the prescription drug monitoring system, developing advanced assessment instruments and tests, and an external auditing program to ensure responsible prescribing

Human Vision Models of Perceptual Image Distortions

Digital media's prevalence in today's society is placing an increasing strain on the technology to provide, transmit and store these contents. The demand for higher quality content in digital media has led to drastic increase in storage requirements over the past three decades. To meet the challenge of storing and securing digital media, this thesis proposes an insight into how the human vision system (HVS) can be characterized to determine thresholds of visibility of visual distortions. The use of these results can increase the amount of watermarking information applied to an image as well as applications in quantization error detection. In this thesis, we first propose a framework for predicting the regions of natural images that visually disguise distortions created as a result of modification of wavelet domain coefficients. The visual error perception algorithm adaptively predicts the visual perceptibility threshold of spread spectrum watermarking added in the wavelet subband. Spatial statistical feature maps combined with ground truth data from psychophysical experiments enabled the generation of an activity scaling parameter that evaluates the masking thresholds of image regions. We also demonstrate the correlation with an image quality assessment algorithm to the detectability of distortions in an image. Subsequently the algorithm is combined with a compression scheme to yield compressed images of higher visual quality. Secondly, we presents the results of another psychophysical experiment designed to investigate the effect of a scene's context on the detection of distortions presented in natural-image patches. Via a two-alternative forced-choice experiment, we measured thresholds for detecting 6.2 c/deg gabor target in image patches which were placed in various image surrounds (contexts), including various textures, a solid-gray background, and the patch's original context. The contexts were adjusted using histogram specification to control for differences in brightness, contrast, and other first-order statistical properties of the luminance distribution. Our results revealed that the context in which a patch is placed does indeed affect the ability to detect distortions in that patch. The findings suggest that characterization and implementation of a human visual system's ability to detect errors has potential in providing perceivable greater quality in image applications.School of Electrical & Computer Engineerin

An Essay on the Nature of Visual Perception

In this dissertation, I address two distinct, but related questions: (1) Is vision encapsulated from higher-level cognitive content? For example, do higher cognitive states like belief and desire alter the contents of vision? (2) What is the scope of visual content? Is the content of vision restricted to “low-level” properties like shape and color or does vision involve a recognitional component? Regarding the first question, I argue that vision is cognitively penetrable, that what we see depends in part on the particularities of our beliefs, expectations, and goals. Regarding the second question, I argue that we visually represent at least some relatively high-level, abstract properties, such as causal interactions, animacy, and facial categories. Both these positions speak to broader issues concerning the epistemic status of our visual capacities. More specifically, we can no longer understand vision as an entirely non-epistemic capacity, one that merely provides us with a structural description of the environment; rather, the visual system carries ontological commitments and by virtue of these commitments it imposes at least a primitive order on what we see

An Exploration of Internal Controls and Their Impact on Employee Fraud in Small Businesses

The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain greater understanding of the current practices of the internal control systems of small businesses and to explore the effectiveness of their systems in comparison with anti-fraud activities recommended by forensic accountants. The researcher selected five small businesses that were members of the Central Louisiana Regional Chamber of Commerce and had fewer than 100 employees. The researcher interviewed the owners and/or managers of the businesses, reviewed and analyzed company documentation, interpreted data, made observations, and offered recommendations. The researcher asked each participant to respond to questions related to the five elements of the model developed by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO): control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring. The researcher discovered that there were more internal controls utilized by the businesses that participated in this study than were depicted in a review of current literature. Also, the researcher identified several themes of best practices of internal controls: anti-fraud training; written code of conduct; risk assessment; hiring and onboarding process; approval processes and authorization levels; separation of duties; information and communication; and monitoring. Further, the researcher made six recommendations for action: establishing internal controls; addressing personnel issues; conducting anti-fraud training; revising personnel manuals; assessing risk; and monitoring COSO standards. This study should assist small business owners and/or managers achieve their organization’s objectives and make a significant contribution to the local economy

Wearing A Mask to Each Other : Masculinity & the Public Eye in Victorian Sensation Fiction

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even when the actions of the men are relatively innocent or disconnected from the secrets they keep. These patterns of concealment and displacement craft a protective distance from society, but fundamentally isolate the men involved. Rather than effortlessly assuming patriarchal authority, male characters act in desperate ways to maintain their position and their manliness, highlighting the fractures and contradictions inherent in Victorian gender ideology. These strategies of concealment mirror the division between the private and public spheres and England and the colonies, exhibiting a foundational pattern of concealment in Victorian society

The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism

Investigations Into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art

​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general