Modern Methods of Construction Industry

Modern Methods of Construction Industry MODERN METHOD OF CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLGY Definition: MMC is a term used to describe a number of construction methods which differ from traditional construction. Other terms that are commonly used include off-site construction, factory-built, industrialised or system building and pre-fabrication. History: Construction history is thus key to understanding and dating   structures. If you can show that a particular technique was used in a certain period, then you can use that information to date a building or construction or subsequent additions to a building. As most buildings are added to over time, being able to show when changes were made is fundamental to understanding how old and how significant they   are. Allied to our understanding of the role and conditions of those who worked on building sites, construction history seeks to understand how people in the past thought about building technology itself. How did they calculate whether something would stand up? How did they set out buildings on the ground? Here there is a clear overlap with the history of engineering and the building professionals, including the roles of overseers, designers, architects and engineers in every period. Construction History encompasses all periods from the various earliest signs of human activity to the very recent past, from cave dwellings to nuclear power stations. Obviously the techniques used to study these periods vary. Early buildings lack written records, so the descriptions tend to depend entirely on archaeological recording and interpretation. Later, written records can be used along with archaeological recording. In more recent periods very details accounts may survive, with drawings, models and photographs to show how building were put together and oral histories can be compiled from those who worked on them Prefabricated housing has been used in the UK duringperiods of high demand, such as after the World Warsand during the slum clearances of the 1960s. In totalabout 1 million prefabricated homes were built duringthe 20th century, many of which were designed to betemporary. However, problems arose over the quality ofbuilding materials and poor workmanship, leading to negative public attitudes towards prefabrication. Nevertheless it has continued to be used in the UK forhospitals, hotels and schools, as well as for housing inother countries. MMC is a new term intended to reflect technical improvements in prefabrication, encompassinga range of on and off-site construction method Research involved: 1.nhbcfoundation:to examine current attitudes ,policies ansd use of mmc and its prospects for future,the NHBC foundation commissioned research amongst large and medium sized hose builders and large and medium size housing association in private and social residential sectors The research set out to answer the following question The extent to which organisationareembracinfg or considering mmc Factors which are driving their interest Reason for usinfg or rejecting mmc Benefits and drawbacks experirnced I use 2.the research undertaken by BRE shows the houses to be more energy efficient , on the contrary there was no evidence of transport and waste reduction Types of mmc: 1: volumetric construction: three dimensional units produced in factory fully fitted out and dropped onto foundation to form a structure e.g bathroom or kitchen 2: panelised construction: unit produced in factory and than assembled into three dimensional in field e.g concrete wall panels,curtain walling etc. 3: hybrid construction: volumetric construction integrated with panelised construction ADVANTAGES OF MMC: †¢ Economic MMC houses typically have fewer defectsand can be built more quickly. †¢ Environmental the houses can be more energyefficient, may involve less transport of materials, and  produce less waste. †¢ Social there may be fewer accidents and less impacton local residents during construction. Current use of MMC The majority of homes in the UK are still constructedusing traditional brick and block masonry. However,within the last few years there has been increased use ofMMC for housing, driven by a range of factors includingdemands for faster construction and skills shortages.There is uncertainty about the amount of MMC housing2being built. A few large private house builders haverecently invested in MMC factories so production willincrease. It is estimated by the National House BuildingCouncil that about 10% of new UK homes are built usingtimber frames, and 5% using other MMC; equivalent toabout 25,000 MMC homes per year. There aredifferences within the UK, most notably in Scotland,  where timber frames have long been preferred, International use of MMC: In Japan 40% of new housing uses MMC. In other Europeancountries there is also much greater use of MMC,particularly in Scandinavia and Germany. Indeed, somehouse building companies in Europe have started to exporttheir houses to the UK; for example, one UK HousingAssociation is importing modules from Poland.The reasons for greater use of MMC in these countries are  uncertain, but suggestions have included: †¢ in colder climates the building season is short due tobad weather use of MMC allows quick construction. †¢ MMC building materials, such as timber, are morereadily available. †¢ there is a greater tradition of self build housing. MMCappeals because faster construction reduces disruptionto neighbours and allows earlier occupancy. †¢ there are cultural preferences for certain house styles,e.g. timber frame in Scandinavia. Issues While the Government is keen to encourage use of MMCfor house building, research is still ongoing to assess itsbenefits. Issues arise over the cost of MMC; the industrycapacity; its environmental benefits; the quality of suchhousing; public acceptance; and planning and buildingregulations. These questions are considered below. Cost Although some house builders argue that MMC is lessexpensive than traditional methods, industry sourcesindicate increased costs of around 7-10%. Reasons forthe higher costs are difficult to discern because mostproject financial information is commercially confidential, and traditional masonry building costs vary widely too. Itmay be that the costs appear high because some benefits  of using MMC, such as better quality housing and feweraccidents, are not obviously reflected in project accounts.MMC housing is faster to build, reducing on-siteconstruction time by up to 50%, and thus reducinglabour costs. Quicker construction is an extra benefit forbuilders of apartments (because viewing often starts onlyonce all flats are finished), and for Housing Associations, who receive rent earlier. However, it is less important forprivate house builders as they rarely sell all the properties  on a new development at once.An additional consideration is that the majority of factoryoverhead costs , e.g. labour, are fixed regardless ofoutput. In contrast, site-based construction costs are only  incurred if building is taking place. It is therefore lesseasy with MMC to respond to fluctuating demand. Industry capacity Industry capacity may be a barrier to increasing thenumber of houses built using MMC. Difficulties fall intotwo categories: a shortage of skills, and the factory Skills: There is a shortage of skilled labour in the UKconstruction industry, with over 80% of house builders  reporting difficulties with recruitment. Using MMC tobuild house parts in factories, and faster on-site  construction, means that fewer labourers are required.Factory workers with previous experience in othersectors, such as the car industry, can also be used.However, there is uncertainty about the level of skillsneeded for MMC compared with masonry construction.MMC can require highly skilled labour for precise on-siteassembly of factory-made house parts. Some of theproblems with prefabricated housing built during the 20thcentury stemmed from poor skills, rather than defectswith the housing materials. The Construction IndustryTraining Board (known as CITB ConstructionSkills),funded by industry and Government, is developing MMCtraining courses for the estimated 2,000 workers erecting MMC housing with no formal qualifications. Governmenthas also suggested a need for training for other industry professionals, including surveyors, mortgage lenders, and planners, to ensure they are fully aware of MMC. Factories: There are currently over 30 house building factories in the UK. A recent survey found there iscurrent industry capacity to produce over 30,000 MMChomes per year.5 Therefore existing factory capacity  should be sufficient to produce about 17% of new UKhousing, based on a current building rate of 175,000homes per year. Production could be increased byimplementing more factory shifts. Environmental benefits: The Government is promoting the environmental benefits of MMC, as are many of the manufacturers. Research conducted by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) found MMC homes to be more energy efficient, but there was no significant evidence of waste and transportreductions. Evaluating the environmental benefits of a new MMC housing development is complex because it is difficult to attribute outcomes solely to the use of MMC Energy savings: Houses built using MMC typically require less energy toheat because of increased levels of insulation fitted in thewalls and roof, and also less air leakage from thebuilding. One of the reasons house builders are interestedin MMC is because they anticipate that the energyrequirements of the UK building regulations will soonbecome more stringent. The 2003 Energy White Paper committed the Government to implementing new energy related building regulations by 2005. Waste: Construction and demolition waste comprises 25% of UK waste. The amount of waste produced using MMC islikely to be reduced because factory materials can beordered to exact specifications, and there is a lower riskof on-site spoilage, e.g. through wet weather. However,there is little research confirming such reductions. Transport: Building homes in factories may reduce the total numberof trips to a building site. This is of growing importanceas more house building takes place on brownfield sitesin inner-city areas. Little detailed analysis has beenconducted to date on transport benefits, but they arelikely to vary considerably depending on the distancebetween the building site and the factory. Quality and accreditation: The number of defects in traditionally built homes in theUK is considerable, with house builders allocating up to £2,000 per house to rectify problems. Greater use offactory production can reduce defects because there isless risk of weather damage during construction, andmaterials can more easily be standardised and tested.However, if there is belatedly found to be a problem with a particular MMC then this would have been replicated inmany homes, because they are mass produced. Housingis built to last a minimum of 60 years, so problems couldgo unnoticed for some time. For this reason buildinginsurers, mortgage lenders, and surveyors are cautious about greater use of MMC. For example, some insurersare worried about the resilience of MMC to flooding. Incontrast, the risks of traditional site-based masonryconstruction are well known because the method has been used for a long time.Accreditation systems to test the performance of housingproducts are operated by the British Board of Agrà ©ment7and BRE Certification. But the process can take over a year and cost up to  £100,000, meaning that not allcompanies apply. Six housing MMC have been grantedaccreditation so far, with three more in the pipeline. Ifhouses are built using unaccredited methods then it canbe difficult to gain buildings insurance, and hence amortgage. Some manufacturers argue that Governmentshould offer grants to assist with accreditation.The Council of Mortgage Lenders suggests that theHousing Corporation should make it mandatory to useaccredited methods when building social housing. TheHousing Corporation is reluctant to do so because itbelieves the decision about which MMC to use should betaken by individual Housing Associations. Also, with the 25% MMC target commencing in 2004, there areconcerns that there would be insufficient industry  capacity if Housing Associations were limited to usingaccredited manufacturers. Government and industrybodies are in preliminary discussions about options for afast-track accreditation scheme. Public attitudes: There are industry concerns about the publicacceptability of MMC housing. A survey of MMCmanufacturers identified lack of market demand andpublic perception as the two most important limitationson expansion.5 Industry concerns reflect public opinion:in a 2001 MORI poll, 69% of respondents felt a brickbuilt home would fetch a better price.8 Negative attitudestowards MMC may stem from highly publicised problemswith historical use of prefabricated housing. There arealso concerns that if more innovative MMC is usedexclusively for social housing the distinctive design may  mean residents are stigmatised. However, all but onetenant of a new social housing MMC development inLondon said they would be willing to buy a similar home.Also, because most UK MMC developments are made tolook like traditional brick houses, potential occupant may be unaware of the construction method. Planning: The planning system has an important indirect influenceon the MMC market because of its role in determiningthe supply of land for house building. Governmentplanning policy is laid down in Planning Policy Guidance(PPG), one of which (PPG3) is about housing. PPG3covers issues such as housing density, but use of MMC isnot currently mentioned, and planning guidance wouldnot generally cover such details about construction type. Building Regulations: The UK building regulations do not specify buildingmaterials or construction method, but instead set  minimum performance standards. Proposed changes tothe building regulations covering energy efficiency,broadband access and structural integrity areforthcoming. These changes may make it cheaper andeasier for MMC to meet the regulations compared withtraditional masonry construction. Health and safety: The construction industry is one of the most dangerousfor workers, with about 100 deaths per year in the UK.MMC could improve safety because there is a reducedrisk of accidents in a controlled factory environment, andless time is spent on the construction site. The Healthand Safety Executive, who regulate construction safety,are encouraging the use of MMC. EXAMPLES OF MMC: Zurich Municipals definition is: A construction process that can encompass the use of composite new and traditional materials and components often with extensive factory produced sub-assembly sections. This may be in combination with accelerated on-site assembly methods and often to the exclusion of many of the construction industry traditional trades. The process includes new buildings and retrofitting, repair and extension of existing buildings. Identified below are examples of more common types of MMC: 1. Super-structure Modular Construction Pod Construction Open panel Timber frame and Steel frame Structural Insulated Panels Solid Cross Laminated Timber Panels 2. On-site technologies Insulated Concrete Formwork (ICF) External Finishing Systems Timber Cladding External   Finishing Systems (EIFS) Brick Slip System Green Wall and Roofs For new build developments using Modern Methods of Construction evaluating the following areas and implementing controls will help ensure a successful build: Build quality control e.g. adequacy of inspection regimes during the build Selection and competency criteria for contractors Standards for construction site fire safety Standards for construction site security Compliance with published safety guidance e.g. trade associations, Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or insurer recommendations Emergency procedures Design Considerations Reducing risk at the design phase is an important component in the delivery of a successful build. Ensuring all stakeholders are engaged in reducing risk ultimately adds value by ensuring potential losses can be minimised as well as more subtle benefits through reduced maintenance costs, improved occupier satisfaction and well-being. An example of reducing risk for wall construction is given below but the principle of reducing risk should be applied across all elements of the design. The wall or facade of the building can have a material impact upon the arson or accidental fire risk. It can also affect the fire spread risk should a fire occur and ultimately the extent of any loss. Within the social housing sector there continues to be a demand for Modern Methods of Construction (MMC). MMC can offer advantages such as improved build time, environmental benefits and reduced on-site labour costs. The extent of these benefits often depends upon the size of development and design employ Pros and Cons of Modular Construction Pros: Thanks to the ability for the project to run simultaneously on-site and in-factory, modular construction can be up to 50% quicker than traditional construction. As major parts of construction are handled within a factory, weather conditions are often irrelevant during the majority of the project. The factory-based manufacturing process allows not only for greater quality control during the manufacturing process but for many health and safety risks to be considerably reduced, if not eliminated, The process aims to minimise waste and reduce the projects carbon footprint, as fewer people are travelling to the site and modules are produced directly to spec using Computer Aided Manufacturing. The impact on the community surrounding the construction site can be significantly reduced, due to much lower levels of noise and traffic during the project period The methods employed in modular construction can often benefit the energy efficiency and airtightness of the final construction Cons: Access to the site must be considered from the very beginning, as it will need to allow for the delivery of large modules. Traditional construction allows for later design changes, while modular construction is unlikely to be able to factor these in, so early complete design sign off is crucial with clients. The logistics and planning of individual module assembly will need rigorous planning to ensure a smooth project. WHY MODERN METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION OUTPERFORMS TRADITIONAL CONSTRUCTION AT EVERY LEVEL: following are the reasons: 1) they are manufactured in less time. 2) they are well designed in a control environment. 3) as they are designed in a controlled environment, there are very low chances of errors and quality compromise. 4) they are cheap as compared to traditional methods. 5) due to rapid demand of infratructure.it is the future of construction industry. 6) less labour is required. 7) it is easily assembled and can be easily re-assembled. 8) it offers greator choice and adaptability. 9) it is very economical and efficient method Conclusion: In short mmc is very good   to be adopted because it reduces times and save energy secondly the structure is very efficient rather by adopting old cultural techniques.In most of developing country is mmc is adopted like in England,china,japan,America etc. In modern method of construction structure can easily be placed and removed when new changes are required but skilled labour is needed for operation.

Critical Analysis of Porphyria’s Lover

Michelle Padgett English 102 Ms. Riggs 3 March 2013 Critical Analysis of â€Å"Porphyria’s Lover† by Robert Browning Robert Browning wrote â€Å"Porphyria’s Lover† in the 1830s. The speaker is Porphyria’s lover and he speaks in a very solemn tone. The poem never divulges the two characters’ real names. The mood is grim and despondent throughout the whole poem. The speaker in the poem shows through many ways that Porphyria yearned for her death, through the spontaneity of her murder, his solemn demeanor, her sickly symptoms, and the smile that was on her face when she was killed.The mood is very dismal and melancholy. It begins with a description of a storm approaching. This sets the overall tone of the poem. â€Å"The rain set early in tonight,/ The sullen wind was soon awake,/ It tore the elm-tops down for spite,/ And did its worst to vex the lake:†(698). The speaker seems to be in a solemn mood because he is troubled with what he is about to do. He is preparing himself for the horrific crime he must commit. When Porphyria sits beside him, he does not respond to her when she speaks to him. And, last, she sat down by my side/ And called me. When no voice replied, /She put my arm about her waist†(699). The speaker hints that something is wrong with Porphyria. He states that she has passion for him, but is too weak to express it, even though she has done so before. â€Å"Murmuring how she loved me–she/ Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,/ To set its struggling passion free†(699). Illness is evident in Porphyria when her lover claims that she is pale and his love for her was â€Å"all in vain†(699). A sudden thought of one so pale†(699). His love for her was futile and hopeless because of her failing health and he knew they would not be together for much longer. The speaker was not yet decided upon what he wanted to do with their situation. â€Å"Porphyria worshiped me: s urprise/ Made my heart swell, and still it grew/ While I debated what to do†(699). The act of taking her life was spontaneous, a spur of the moment decision. Even though her death was inevitable, he had not known the means to which her demise would be carried out. I found/ A thing to do, and all her hair/ In one long yellow string I wound/ Three times her little throat around,†(699). The word â€Å"found† indicates that he did not plan out her death beforehand. After he kills her, he convinces himself that she felt no pain. This proves that he did not do it out of anger or revenge. â€Å"No pain felt she;/ I am quite sure she felt no pain†(699). The lover warily opened her eyes and he saw no blame in them, only happiness. He described her blue eyes as laughing which reveals what she feels in the last moments of her life. I warily oped her lids: again/ Laughed the blue eyes without a stain†(699). He then unwound her tresses from around her neck and gav e her a â€Å"burning kiss† filled with all the love he had for her (699). He sits with Porphyria’s head resting on his shoulder while she still smile. â€Å"The smiling rosy little head,/ So glad it had its utmost will†(699). Porphyria’s will was to die, but to not know when or how she would. This makes the spontaneity of the act all the more understandable. The speaker calls it her â€Å"darling one wish† making it all the more important and special (700).The speaker was not able to let her go, even after her death. â€Å"He must and has indeed chosen to sit within the realm of the painful emotion that his act of granting her last wish burdened him with†(Best). His act of love burdens and renders him unable to relinquish his love just yet. â€Å"And thus we sat together now,/ And all night long we have not stirred†(700). Porphyria’s death was so just that â€Å"God has not said a word! †(700). His actions were ethicall y right and not one God from any religion would disagree and punish him for it.Robert Brown’s â€Å"Porphyria’s Lover† is very misunderstood in its meaning. The speaker is seen as a madman, when really, he is a man faced with a task that he must grant unto his love. Brown sets up the play as gloomy when he writes that a storm if fast approaching and the wind is blowing so hard that the trees are bending. The lover finds it hard to speak to Porphyria because he is faced with a horrific situation. Her murder was made with a split decision and carried out with great remorse. He even remarks upon her pale face, hinting that she is sick.After her death, she has a smile on her face and her eyes are laughing. This is a telltale sign that she wished for her own painless death to escape a gruesome one down the road. His love for was so great that even the Gods could not object to him killing her. Works Cited Best, J. T. â€Å"‘Porphyria's Lover’ — Va stly Misunderstood Poetry. † The Victorian Web. N. p. 8 June 2007. Web. 6 March 2013. Browning, Robert. â€Å"Porphyria’s Lover. † 1836. Compact Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. 8th ed. Ed. Kirszner and Mandell. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. 698-700. Print. Padgett

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth’s romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, â€Å"The Prelude† (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keats’s great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and women’s, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. ————————————————- Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.

Defining Organizational Culture An Organization

Defining Organizational Culture With numerous meanings given to organizational culture, scholars claim that the field is grounded in the shared assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and enacted by employees within an organization, which affect its performance and overall welfare (Belias Koustelios, 2014). Another widespread definition of organizational communication often used by organizational scholars states that: â€Å"Organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions that a group has invented, or discovered in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that have worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems† (Schein, 2004, p.3). A simpler definition of organizational culture claims that the culture of an organization is the study of specific systems of meaning within an organizational setting (Gabriel, 2010). Tharp (2009) explains how most definitions of organizational culture include the concept of shared meaning, which shows that organizational culture can only be developed within groups. Secondly, organizational culture is socially constructed according to the location of the organization, its history, the working environment, and certain events that surround it (Tharp, 2009). Finally, most definitions claim that organizational culture is multidimensional and involves both cognitive andShow MoreRelatedorganizational behaviour1261 Words   |  6 Pages Organizational Behavior MG6013 The exploration of the theories, research and practices that allow a better understanding of human behavior in organizations. 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