Narrative at Risk: Accident and Teleology in American Culture, 1963-2013

Accident in fiction is always inevitable. When a character in a novel suffers a car accident, for example, the accident is the effect of the author\u27s intentions, and therefore it is not accidental. The words and images that constitute the meanings and events of the text do not change. The accidents in the narrative always happen the same way, reading after rereading. Drawing from this observation, the question that Narrative at Risk attempts to answer is, in its simplest iteration: how can narrative accurately represent accident when its textual representation is not subject to the effects of accident? I ask this of a number of American cultural objects that were produced over the last fifty years, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the present. Narrative at Risk interrogates representations of accident primarily in novels and films--but also in television, roleplaying games, comic strips, and videogames--in order to examine how contemporary American culture ascribes meaning to the accidental. I read a wide array of accidents--from mechanical failures to failed suicides, depictions of biological evolution to games of chance--as providing a broad but nonetheless coherent understanding of how American society has conceived of accident in relation to individuals, communities, and the species as a whole. Narrative at Risk, in treating media such as film, television, and videogames alongside literature, broadens our understanding of how accident developed as a danger over the past fifty years, as well as how various media influenced and shaped one another through borrowed reading practices. In the introduction, I focus on the crystallization of the mass media that brought traumatic events into American homes again and again, specifically, the moment of President John F. Kennedy\u27s assassination and the epistemological and ontological crises this event and its media coverage initiated. The first chapter reads the role of this mediation and the crises of the 1960s as they jointly inform representations of accidental mechanical failure. Through readings of four texts, I theorize a politics of accident, taking as my initial subject what Ronald Reagan called his most formative moment: his role as a train accident victim in King\u27s Row: 1941), and his discussion of this role in his 1965 memoir Where\u27s the Rest of Me? I delineate how Reagan\u27s obsession with narrating accident later shaped a politics of the accident in texts such as David Cronenberg\u27s film Crash: 1996), Don DeLillo\u27s novel White Noise: 1985), Colson Whitehead\u27s novel The Intuitionist: 1999), and Rockstar Game\u27s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: 2004). The subsequent chapter shifts from the first\u27s broad historical range to texts composed and published at the end of the Cold War: Paul Auster\u27s novel Leviathan: 1992); Jeffrey Eugenides\u27s novel The Virgin Suicides: 1993); and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man : 1996) an episode of the television show The X-Files: 1993-2002). I read the failure of suicide attempts in these texts as accidents that express the limits of intentionality, which bring to the fore the nation\u27s inability to conceive of a future beyond the ideological bounds of the conflict with the Soviet Union that provided meaning during the Cold War. The third chapter recontextualizes the final years of the Cold War. Here I read Richard Kenney\u27s poem, A Colloquy of Ancient Men from his collection, The Invention of the Zero: 1993), alongside two novels: Michael Crichton\u27s Jurassic Park: 1990) and Richard Powers\u27s The Gold Bug Variations: 1991). Rather than depicting the futurelessness of the United States, these texts look to deep history on the scale of evolutionary time. They depict evolution as a series of random, accidental changes that take place in the history of a species\u27 development; in doing so, they together trace the Cold War fear of thermonuclear annihilation shifting to an anxiety of genetic manipulation. The fourth chapter turns to the 1970s to investigate the early years of the culture wars. I begin by reading how chance disrupts the narrative of Kathy Acker\u27s novel Blood and Guts in High School: 1984), then consider the religious right\u27s hyperbolic condemnation of chance in TSR\u27s roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons: 1974). I then scrutinize games of chance in three other texts: Michael Cimino\u27s film The Deer Hunter: 1978); Thomas Pynchon\u27s novel Gravity\u27s Rainbow: 1973); and Sam Lipsyte\u27s short story The Dungeon Master : 2010). These three cases demonstrate how chance undermines the paranoid fantasy that there are external forces authoring the world. Finally, Narrative at Risk concludes with an exploration of accident in the present through a discussion of two television shows--Breaking Bad: 2008-2013) and The Americans: 2013-)--and Steve Erickson\u27s 2012 novel These Dreams of You. Imagining accidents as the fault of the government, these texts collectively suggest American culture\u27s continued reliance upon teleological thinking and conspiracy theory

Policy for Therapeutic Massage in an Academic Health Center: A Model for Standard Policy Development

Context:Massage is the most common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy used in hospitals in the United States. As such, it is often the first CAM therapy to be integrated with conventional medicine. However, few academic medical centers have a written standard policy to guide this integration. This lack of standard policy may impede institutions from offering massage therapy as a clinical service, and may put health care professionals and institutions at risk through a failure to clearly address criteria for practice credentials or malpractice liability. Objective: To create a clinical policy for therapeutic massage that may be used as a template for development of policy in academic health centers. Results: We present a clinical policy for therapeutic massage, developed by the University of Michigan Health System, that defines therapeutic massage, provides guidelines for the credentialing and professional conduct of massage therapists, lists indications and contraindications for therapeutic massage, and addresses malpractice in accordance with the specific culture and needs of academic health centers. This policy was created by health care professionals after review of existing evidence and consideration of national criteria for massage therapy. This policy is intended to be used as a template for the development of a standard policy for therapeutic massage by health system administrators, medical directors, and massage professionals, to support the integration of therapeutic massage within their institutions. Conclusions: With minor modifications of this policy by individual institutions, adoption of this policy may facilitate the thoughtful integration of this CAM therapy into academic health care settings, meeting the unique requirements of academic health care institutions while serving the needs of patients.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63197/1/acm.2007.6323.pd

Dancing with Culture: A Grounded Theory Study on Latin American and Spanish Speaking Caribbean Women Living in the United States Process for Dealing with Internal Conflicts

This grounded theory study explored the competing cultural expectations and cultural approaches by women from Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries living in the United States. The study explored the following questions: In what ways do women from Latin America living in the United States establish priorities among potentially conflicting cultural expectations or roles? What internal conflicts result out of living between two cultures? What does the process for making sense of cultural expectations look like? How do Latin American women living in the United States make sense of this process? Using a constructivist grounded methodology, the research reflects the insights of 20 female participants from various Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries. The data analysis resulted in five major findings, illuminating a framework for understanding the process for making sense of conflicting cultural norms, expectations, and cultural approaches. This is presented in four stages, (1) confronting the new norm/expectation, (2) recognition/acknowledgment of the conflicting cultural value/norm/expectation, (3) adapting to the new context/situation and (4) managing from a cultural standpoint. The main decision-making process related to cultural expectations was tied to: (a) what it meant to be a woman from their native country in the United States and (b) what this means when they return to their country of origin. Concluding with “creating a new norm/dynamic,” this becomes the “balancing act” or “the dance between cultures

Language skills of profoundly deaf children who received cochlear implants under 12 months of age: a preliminary study

Conclusion. This study demonstrated that children who receive a cochlear implant below the age of 2 years obtain higher mean receptive and expressive language scores than children implanted over the age of 2 years. Objective. The purpose of this study was to compare the receptive and expressive language skills of children who received a cochlear implant before 1 year of age to the language skills of children who received an implant between 1 and 3 years of age. Subjects and methods. Standardized language measures, the Reynell Developmental Language Scale (RDLS) and the Preschool Language Scale (PLS), were used to assess the receptive and expressive language skills of 91 children who received an implant before their third birthday. Results. The mean receptive and expressive language scores for the RDLS and the PLS were slightly higher for the children who were implanted below the age of 2 years compared with the children who were implanted over 2 years old. For the PLS, both the receptive and expressive mean standard scores decreased with increasing age at implantation

Aggregates relaxation in a jamming colloidal suspension after shear cessation

The reversible aggregates formation in a shear thickening, concentrated colloidal suspension is investigated through speckle visibility spectroscopy, a dynamic light scattering technique recently introduced [P.K. Dixon and D.J. Durian, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 184302 (2003)]. Formation of particles aggregates is observed in the jamming regime, and their relaxation after shear cessation is monitored as a function of the applied shear stress. The aggregates relaxation time increases when a larger stress is applied. Several phenomena have been proposed to interpret this behavior: an increase of the aggregates size and volume fraction, or a closer packing of the particles in the aggregates.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures; added figures included in the pdf versio

AUDIOVISUAL INTEGRATION OF SPEECH BY CHILDREN AND ADULTS WITH COCHEAR IMPLANTS

The present study examined how prelingually deafened children and postlingually deafened adults with cochlear implants (CIs) combine visual speech information with auditory cues. Performance was assessed under auditory-alone (A), visual- alone (V), and combined audiovisual (AV) presentation formats. A measure of visual enhancement, RA, was used to assess the gain in performance provided in the AV condition relative to the maximum possible performance in the auditory-alone format. Word recogniton was highest for AV presentation followed by A and V, respectively. Children who received more visual enhancement also produced more intelligible speech. Adults with CIs made better use of visual information in more difficult listening conditions (e.g., when mutiple talkers or phonemically similar words were used). The findings are discussed in terms of the complementary nature of auditory and visual sources of information that specify the same underlying gestures and articulatory events in speech