What is Chiasmus?

I am currently reading or should I say trying to read Originary Technicity The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida by Arthur Bradley. Needless to say my vocabulary is expanding significantly. Every now and a gain a word jumps out at me and I need to know more. The word this morning was Chiasmus, it sounded familiar but I did not know the meaning so for my satisfaction and as a memory jogger I post a reminder from one of a number of websites I came across that offered an explanation, this was the one I preferred, drmardy.com I hope he will forgive me for reposting an extract from his explanation here...

What is Chiasmus?

It's not necessary to read any of what follows to savor the many chiastic quotes that appear on this site. However, by continuing on for a few moments in this section, you'll deepen your understanding of chiasmus and heighten your appreciation of chiastic quotations. If you're a bona fide word, language, and quotation lover, I think you'll find what you're about to read, fascinating.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick provides a more extensive description:

chiasmus [ky-AZ-mus] (plural -mi), a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" —Byron) or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas … . The figure is especially common in 18th century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all periods. It is named after the Greek letter chi (x), indicating a "criss-cross" arrangement of terms. Adjective: chiastic.

As you can see, the proper adjective is chiastic and not "chiasmic" or "chiasmatic," as I've heard some say. Technically, the plural is chiasmi, (as with hippopotamus). However, saying chiasmi can come across as pretentious, so you'll want to do that rarely.

According to the OED, chiasmus made its first published appearance in English in 1871 when a British scholar named A. S. Wilkins wrote about an observation from Cicero:

"This is a good instance of the … figure called chiasmus … in which the order of words in the first clause is inverted in the second."

The word goes back to the ancient Greeks and their fascination with language and rhetoric. The "chi" comes from chi, the letter "X" in the Greek alphabet. The word itself comes from the Greek word khiasmos, meaning "crossing." Khiasmos, in turn, is derived from the Greek word khiazein, meaning "to mark with an X."

"To Mark With an X"

One of the most fascinating features of chiasmus is this "marking with an X" notion. Take Mae West's signature line, "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men." By laying out the two clauses parallel to each other, it's possible to draw two lines connecting the key words:

It's not the men in my life X it's the life in my men.

The lines intersect, creating an "X." This quote, and all the chiastic quotations you've seen so far on this site, can be "marked with an X." Here are two more examples:

Home is where the great are small X and the small are great

One should eat to live X not live to eat

If you're ever wondering whether a particular quote is chiastic, simply lay it out in this manner. If you can mark it with an X, it is. If you can't, it probably isn't.

The ABBA Method

One other interesting way to view chiastic quotes is the ABBA method. Let's go back to the Mae West quote. If you assign the letters A and B to the first appearance of the key words and A' and B' (read "A prime" and "B prime") to their second appearance, they follow what is referred to as an ABBA pattern:

A   It's not the men   B   in my life   B'   it's the life A'   in my men

Here's how the other two quotes would be laid out:

A   Home is where the great   B   are small and   B'   the small A'   are great

A    One should eat to   B   live, not   B'   live A'   to eat

Chiasmus can be achieved by reversing more than two key words. This observation from the 18th century English writer, Charles Caleb Colton, is a good example:

"How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising
that past age which our fathers abused,
and as constantly abusing that present age,
which our children will praise."

Laid out schematically, it looks like this:

A   How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising
  B   that past age
    C     which our fathers abused,
    C'     and as constantly abusing
  B'   that present age,
A'   which our children will praise

Another good example comes from Genesis 9:6:

A   Whoever sheds
  B   the blood
    C     of man
    C'     by man shall
  B'   his blood
A'   be shed

Technically, it doesn't make any difference how many words are reversed. Some scholars believe that a chiastic structure can be found in much larger passages, including entire sections of the New Testament and other ancient sacred writings. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Here, I just wanted to show you how the order of words—any number of words—in the first part of an expression can be reversed in the second.

For a the full article visit drmardy.com

Dictating with your iPhone and Dragon Naturally Speaking

I use an iPhone4 app called iTalk to record conversations with my supervisor and other audio material.  I also use Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 (DNS) to dictate my work into Word. I wondered if it may be possible to get iTalk to link to DNS. I found a tutorial video which explains how to do it wich you can view from here.

The procedure is quite straight forward, it just needs the .aiff file from iTalk to be converted into a .wav file which is easy enough with the free software Audacity which you can download from here. If you have not come across Audacity before it is a good general purpose audio editor.

The process makes use of the transcription option in DNS. Although this technique will work with mixed voices the translation can be a bit bizarre. I am going to try it with just my voice only as a test and see if that is any better.

Our Helpful Brains

Our helpful brains

I have referenced this anecdote about how wonderful our brain is on a number of occasions. Just stumbled across it again on the blog at ChangingMinds.org and have borrowed it:-

You know we have wonderfully helpful brains. Just chuck it a bunch of mismatched information and it'll somehow manage to make sense of what you give it. For example you can jumble up the letters in word letter in a sentence and still make sense of it - just as long as you preserve the first and last letters. (jsut as lnog as you psrevere the fsirt and lsat ltretes).

This works for words too. Caldwell-Harris and Morris (2008) presented subjects with pairs of words in reversed order, such as 'card credit' and 'you thank'. Even though these are obviously the wrong way around, many people reported them as being the right way. Their subconscious brains heard the words and corrected them on the fly before presenting them to their conscious, which of course has only a few moments to make sense before the next thing in the stream of consciousness comes along.

The brain also helps you see things you think you should see and ignore things that do not make sense. And when it comes to memory, it gets worse as we easily forget things we just perceived (like people's names) and will swear to things happening which did not.

The bottom line is that what we think is true, even if we have just experienced it, is not necessarily so. If in doubt (and maybe if not), always look twice.

Reference:
Caldwell-Harris, C. and Morris, A. (2008). Fast Pairs: A visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects, and subjective phenomenology. Consciousness and Cognition, 17 (4), 1063-1081.

Source: http://changingminds.org/blog/blog.htm

How NOT to write a PhD thesis

In a Times Higher Education article, Tara Brabazon gives her top ten tips for doctoral failure. As I complete my first, not very good essay, I am only too aware of how prophetic the advice in this article may prove to be.
From the article:-

...I understand the angst, worry and stress of supervisors, but I have experienced the other side of the doctoral divide. Examining PhDs is both a pleasure and a curse. It is a joy to nurture, support and help the academy’s next generation, but it is a dreadful moment when an examiner realises that a script is so below international standards of scholarship that there are three options: straight fail, award an MPhil or hope that the student shows enough spark in the viva voce so that it may be possible to skid through to major corrections and a full re-examination in 18 months.
When confronted by these choices, I am filled with sadness for students and supervisors, but this is matched by anger and even embarrassment. What were the supervisors thinking? Who or what convinced the student that this script was acceptable?

Therefore, to offer insights to postgraduates who may be in the final stages of submission, cursing their supervisors who want another draft and further references, here are my ten tips for failing a PhD. If you want failure, this is your road map to getting there.

1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography
2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references
3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks
5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida
6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago
7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script
8. Make the topic of the thesis too large
9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis
10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion     

The article contains very sound advice from an informed viewpoint. The follow up comments also contribute some sound advice and information...

Read more here...

Reference

Brabazon, T. (28 January2010) How not to write a PhD thesis. Times Higher Education. Available from: <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410208> [Accessed 9 February 2013].

Giphantie: the prophecy of photography

Source: Introduction to the History of Photography

According to M. W. Marien (Photography, A Cultural History), prior to 1800, in utopian and speculative fiction there is only one example of imaginative anticipation of photography and film: the novel Giphantie by CHARLES-FRANCOIS TIPHAIGNE DE LA ROCHE (1722 - 1774), published in 1760.

“You know, that rays of light reflected from different bodies form pictures, paint the image reflected on all polished surfaces, for example, on the retina of the eye, on water, and on glass. The spirits have sought to fix these fleeting images; they have made a subtle matter by means of which a picture is formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat a piece of canvas with this matter, and place it in front of the object to be taken. The first effect of this cloth is similar to that of a mirror, but by means of its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case with the mirror, retains a fac-simile of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully, but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains them all. This impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is then removed and deposited in a dark place. An hour later the impression is dry, and you have a picture the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness.”

(excerpt of Giphantie from: http://www.precinemahistory.net/1750.htm )

 




























pages images source: http://histv2.free.fr/litterature/tiphaigne.htm

Note Taking - Cornell Style

Last week I decided to change the way I took notes in the hope that I could make it easier to find what I was looking for when I come to right them up. I decided that a wide left margin would be a good starting point to record keywords, notes on notes etc.  Then I came across a post on my favourite PhD Blog Thesis Whisperer with the title -Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method. The article describes a rather similar idea for taking notes with the added provision for including a critical summary. Which at some later stage you can probably lift right off the page into your thesis. There is also a link part way down the page for a PDF template for the proposed page layout. You could of course just rule up a notebook yourself with the same layout. I had had the idea of looking for paper ruled in Landscape format to make for wider columns. Whilst it is available, it is not conveniently so. I think I am just about getting the hang of my new note taking method. As Katherine Firth, the author, explains the method much better than I could, I make no apologies for reposting the article here:-

Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method

December 12, 2012 · by Thesis Whisperer

This post is by Dr Katherine Firth who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine is a Thesis Whisperer, like me. Unlike me, Katherine is still an active researcher in her field of 20^th-century poetry. Over coffee Katherine told me about the ‘Cornell Method’ and kindly agreed to write a post. I found it enlightening, I hope you do too.
I take a lot of notes.  Even when I was doing my PhD and I was taking thousands of pages of notes, I took them by hand.  I tried using a computer, but there are so many things that are really hard to do on screen (drawing an arrow to make a connection between points, for example) that are really quick on paper.  Also, you only need one hand to write notes, but two hands to type.  And that free hand comes in useful for holding open books, grasping coffee cups, or stuffing your face with Gummi bears.

Now that I’m working with lots of PhD students, I find that they also take a lot of notes.  Years and years of notes.  Notes about field work.  Notes about interviews.  Notes about lab results.  Notes about books they’ve read. And then they get stuck.  Because they have to turn the notes into a thesis.  And that’s really hard.

How You Can Change the Past - The Quantum World

A repost from New Scientist 4 January 2013

Does objective reality exist? Is there an underlying truth that doesn't depend on the observer?
According to quantum physics, there may be no consistent reality. Not only do we change the outcome of experiments by what we choose to measure, but we can alter those results after they've already happened.
In this animation, find out how our choices of what to observe can change what actually happens, and what that means for our understanding of reality. A classic experiment illustrates the conundrum by attempting to measure whether a photon behaves as a particle or a wave. It turns out that it can be either, or a mixture of both, depending on how the experiment is set up.