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25 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 39 - The Eye and the I: Essay and Image

  • from Part V - The Essay and the Essayistic Today
  • Edited by Denise Gigante, Stanford University, California, Jason Childs
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the British Essay
    Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024, pp 587-600

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

  • Determining the informational needs of family caregivers of people with intellectual disability who require palliative care: A qualitative study

  • Laurie McKibben, Kevin Brazil, Dorry McLaughlin, Peter Hudson
  • Journal:
    Palliative & Supportive Care / Volume 19 / Issue 4 / August 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 November 2020, pp. 405-414
  • Objectives

    People with intellectual disabilities are living longer, and many require palliative care. There is a lack of evidence regarding information needs which may exist for their family caregivers. This study aimed to determine the informational needs of family caregivers of people with intellectual disabilities who require palliative care.

    Methods

    A qualitative, exploratory design was underpinned by the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping and the Transformative Paradigm. The study involved five Health and Social Care (HSC) Trusts and two Hospices in one region of the United Kingdom. Family caregivers (n = 10) participated in individual interviews. HSC professionals’ (n = 28) perceptions of informational needs were explored within focus groups (n = 6).

    Results

    Family caregivers reported information needs chiefly concerning the disease, financial entitlements, and practical support which could change over the disease trajectory. Findings evidence the expertise of long-term family caregivers, prior to the end of life. Palliative care and intellectual disability teams acknowledged their role to work in partnership and facilitate access to information. Recommendations were mapped onto a co-designed logic model.

    Significance of results

    New insights into the specific informational needs of this family caregiving population. A co-designed logic model presents these needs and how they may be addressed. Central co-ordinators have been advocated for these caregivers. This model could have international applicability for similar family carers, supporting people with other disabilities or cognitive impairment, and should be further explored.

  • 5 - Form and Fiction, 1980–2018

  • from Part II - New Formations
  • Edited by Peter Boxall, University of Sussex
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018
    Published online:
    12 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019, pp 89-104

  • Summary

    Form is one of the more slippery concepts in literary criticism: elusive of definition, unavoidable in practice. Even the most doctrinaire of political critics, questioned as to why they are writing about novels to expose economic injustice, rather than about the more obvious evidence of income distribution, must justify their choice, in the end, by claiming there is something distinct about the novel as a form that offers insights unavailable elsewhere. That distinction has often been a dubious one. In a claim that set the tone for attitudes towards form at the beginning of the period covered by this Companion, Fredric Jameson argued that form named a special kind of deception: ‘the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions’. This inverted the tradition, beginning with Kant and Schiller, of using form to name what distinguished literature in a positive sense from other uses of language. This use of form was dubious in its own way, acquiring so many contradictory meanings that it became, as Angela Leighton observes, ‘a noun lying in wait of its object’. Yet whether the target of censure or praise, literary critics have never strayed far from using form to talk about the relationship between what Raymond Williams identified as two persistent but different meanings: a ‘visible and outward shape’ and an ‘essential shaping principle’. The attempt to talk about both at once is what makes the concept of fictional form so slippery. In trying to analyse as tangible that which can only be virtual, form must always evade our grasp. You can’t point to linear causality, just as you can’t touch first-person narration, but these are the shapes and shaping principles we use form to name. Form is an attempt to talk about what enables language to mean by imagining something tangible and material lying between words and their referents, be they themselves real or imaginary.

  • Family care conferences in long-term care: Exploring content and processes in end-of-life communication

  • Pamela Durepos, Sharon Kaasalainen, Tamara Sussman, Deborah Parker, Kevin Brazil, Susan Mintzberg, Alyssa Te
  • Journal:
    Palliative & Supportive Care / Volume 16 / Issue 5 / October 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 December 2017, pp. 590-601
  • Objective:

    End-of-life (EoL) communication in long-term care (LTC) homes is often inadequate and delayed, leaving residents dying with unknown preferences or goals of care. Poor communication with staff contributes to families feeling unprepared, distressed, and dissatisfied with care. Family care conferences (FCCs) aim to increase structured systematic communication around goals and plans for the end of life. As part of the Strengthening a Palliative Approach to Care (SPA–LTC) project, FCCs were implemented in four LTC sites in Ontario, Canada. The purpose of this substudy was to examine FCC content and such guiding processes as documentation and multidisciplinary staff participation.

    Method:

    A total of 24 FCCs were held for residents with a Palliative Performance Scale score of 40% (nearing death). Data were collected from conference forms (i.e., Family Questionnaires, Care Plan Conference Summaries), site-specific electronic chart documents, and fieldnotes. Directed content analysis of data was informed by the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association's Square of Care Model, which describes eight domains of care: disease management, physical, psychological, social, practical, spiritual, EoL, and loss/bereavement.

    Results:

    The FCCs addressed an average of 71% of the content domains, with physical and EoL care addressed most frequently and loss/bereavement addressed the least. Two goals and five interventions were documented and planned on average per FCC. Examination of the processes supporting EoL communication found: (1) advantages to using FCC forms versus electronic charts; and (2) high levels of multidisciplinary participation overall but limited participation of personal support workers (PSWs) and physicians.

    Significance of Results:

    Communication around the end of life in LTC can be supported through the use of FCCs. Description of content and FCC processes provides guidance to persons implementing FCCs. Recommendations for tailoring conferences to optimize communication include use of specific conference forms, increased bereavement discussion, and further engagement of PSWs and physicians.

Doris Lessing and the Forming of History
  • Edited by Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant
  • Tom Sperlinger
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 May 2017
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016
  • Explores Doris Lessing's innovative engagement with historical change in her own lifetime and beyond.The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century world literature. This volume views Lessing's writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through which she lived. The 12 original chapters provide new readings of Lessing's work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women's writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genres from realism to autobiography and science-fiction, and draw on previously unstudied archive material. The volume also explores how Lessing's writing can provide insight into some of the issues now shaping twenty-first century scholarship – including trauma, ecocriticism, the post-human, and world literature – as they emerge as defining challenges to our own present moment in history.Key FeaturesOffers a critical overview of the full range of Lessing's work, setting the agenda for future study of her writingProvides new readings of an unprecedented range of Lessing's writing, including previously unstudied archive material, landmark novels such as The Golden Notebook, drama and reportage, essays, memoirs and short storiesSituates Lessing in relation to new literary and cultural contexts, including the nineteenth-century novel-series, cinema, and post-war youth cultureRelates Lessing's work to contemporary theoretical debates on post-humanism, trauma, ecocriticism, radical women's writing and world literature

  • 3 - Sequence, Series and Character in Children of Violence

  • Edited by Kevin Brazil, University of Southampton, David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Tom Sperlinger, University of Bristol
  • Book:
    Doris Lessing and the Forming of History
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 May 2017
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 39-55

  • Summary

    In her final book, Alfred and Emily (2008), Doris Lessing returned to a character who had been represented repeatedly and in different ways over her long writing life: the mother. The second part of Alfred and Emily – a memoir following a fictional reimagining of her parents’ lives – opens with the claim: ‘I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguously, all himself’ (152). Of her mother, in contrast, she writes:

    Nothing that she ever told or was said about her, or one could deduce from her in that amazing girlhood, so busy, so full of achievement, or of her nursing years, about which we had the best of witnesses, my father himself, or the years in Persia, so enjoyable and so social, nothing, anywhere, in all this matches up with what my mother became.

    Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several. (156)

    That the self, especially the female self, is not one but several, is one of Lessing's most pervasive themes. But the syntax of the first sentence here specifies one particular way in which multiple selves are conceptualised. It begins by negating three ways of learning about her mother (telling, deducing, witnessing), before listing a series of stages in her life, ‘girlhood’, ‘nursing years’, ‘Persia’, each given two attributes, the first and last echoing through the repetition of ‘so … so …’, with the knowable father whose act of ‘witness’ is not enough at the centre. The nascent paratactic sequence is then terminated by the repetition of ‘nothing’, returning us to the beginning of the sentence, while the dispersing ‘anywhere’ implies that this repetitive series could nevertheless continue, possibility infinitely.

    This structuring of her mother's unknowability in the form of a sequence which fails to cohere is accentuated by the inclusion within Alfred and Emily of a number of photographs, mostly of her parents, some of which had already been published in the autobiographies Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997).

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Kevin Brazil, University of Southampton, David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Tom Sperlinger, University of Bristol
  • Book:
    Doris Lessing and the Forming of History
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 May 2017
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 1-9

  • Summary

    ‘It's a question of form’ (1993: 418). So declares frustrated writer Anna Wulf, in what remains Lessing's most celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook. As this volume shows, the attempt to find forms which might record, model and engage historical change and all that it entails is one that persists throughout the six decades spanned by Lessing's writing. The chapters that follow attend to the full weight of Anna's statement: when Lessing's writing turns towards history it is not simply a question of finding the literary form that might best represent it; rather it involves questioning the very relationship between form and history, as they are brought together afresh in each new work. These questions might be common to literary criticism, but the chronological breadth of Lessing's career, and its sheer variety and productivity, makes them both particularly pressing and particularly enlightening in her work. As she moves from colonial Rhodesia to post-war Britain, and from war-torn Afghanistan to our posthuman future, her work employs the full panoply of techniques, modes, genres and effects that we refer to as forms: short stories, realism, serial fiction, documentary, drama, jokes, Sufi tales, reportage – and more.

    But to what, exactly, does Lessing's writing turn, when it turns towards history? This is another question to which there is neither a single nor a simple answer. Two contradictory understandings of history can be seen to run throughout Lessing's work, and it is the irresolvable tension between them that makes the question of history, as much as the question of form, such a persistent and unifying theme in her oeuvre.

    On the one hand, there is the notion of history as a teleological and determining process, one which guides the actions of the living, and whose logic can be grasped by those perceptive enough to see it. The most significant source for this belief was, of course, Marxism – or rather, a version of Marxism seized upon for offering the only vision of anticolonial resistance and anti-racist humanism to a young critic of colonial Rhodesia. But just as Lessing later argued that Marxism's utopianism, and its attempt at a ‘world-mind, a world ethic’ (1993: 14), was but one secular manifestation of an enduring pattern, so too this understanding of history as a meaningful process in itself, whose shape it was the task of the visionary writer to perceive, appears in multiple guises in Lessing's work.

  • “They don't just disappear”: Acknowledging death in the long-term care setting

  • Janine Maitland, Kevin Brazil, Bill James-Abra
  • Journal:
    Palliative & Supportive Care / Volume 10 / Issue 4 / December 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 May 2012, pp. 241-247
  • Objective:

    The purpose of this study was to describe the value of a formal room blessing ritual held within a long-term care facility, from the perspectives of staff, residents, and family members.

    Method:

    A qualitative research study involving interviews with staff, residents, and family members was conducted to examine the perceived value of a room blessing ritual.

    Results:

    Twenty-four room blessing attendees participated in the study (nine staff, eight residents, and seven family members). Attendees felt that the room blessing provided an opportunity to formally acknowledge the death of the resident and their grief; the majority felt that this was a positive experience and that it provided an element of closure. Staff members and residents expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to connect with family members of the deceased to express their condolences during the ritual. Participants also identified the inclusivity of the ritual (i.e., an open invitation to all staff, residents, and family members) as a positive aspect that served as a reminder that others shared in their grief. Staff members felt that blessing the room for the new resident was an important component of the ritual, helping to bridge the gap between mourning and welcoming a new person. Staff, residents, and family members felt that the room blessing positively reflected the mission and values of the facility. The most highly valued aspect of the ritual for all attendees was the sharing of stories about the deceased to celebrate that person's life.

    Significance of results:

    Long-term care facilities need to recognize that formal supports to manage the bereavement needs of staff and residents, such as a room blessing ritual, should be incorporated into their model for managing end-of-life care, given the relationship between the emotional health of staff and the quality of care provided for residents.

  • Effect of a Multifaceted Intervention on Adherence to Hand Hygiene among Healthcare Workers: A Cluster-Randomized Trial

  • Dominik Mertz, Nancy Dafoe, Stephen D. Walter, Kevin Brazil, Mark Loeb
  • Journal:
    Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology / Volume 31 / Issue 11 / November 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 January 2015, pp. 1170-1176
    Print publication:
    November 2010
  • Objectives.

    Adherence to hand hygiene among healthcare workers (HCWs) is widely believed to be a key factor in reducing the spread of healthcare-associated infection. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of a multifaceted intervention to increase rates of adherence to hand hygiene among HCWs and to assess the effect on the incidence of hospital-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) colonization.

    Design.

    Cluster-randomized controlled trial.

    Setting.

    Thirty hospital units in 3 tertiary care hospitals in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

    Intervention.

    After a 3-month baseline period of data collection, 15 units were randomly assigned to the intervention arm (with performance feedback, small-group teaching seminars, and posters) and 15 units to usual practice. Hand hygiene was observed during randomly selected 15-minute periods on each unit, and the incidence of MRSA colonization was measured using weekly surveillance specimens from June 2007 through May 2008.

    Results.

    We found that 3,812 (48.2%) of 7,901 opportunities for hand hygiene in the intervention group resulted in adherence, compared with 3,205 (42.6%) of 7,526 opportunities in the control group (P < .001; independent t test). There was no reduction in the incidence of hospital-acquired MRSA colonization in the intervention group.

    Conclusion.

    Among HCWs in Ontario tertiary care hospitals, the rate of adherence to hand hygiene had a statistically significant increase of 6% with a multifaceted intervention, but the incidence of MRSA colonization was not reduced.

  • The spirit of palliative practice: A qualitative inquiry into the spiritual journey of palliative care physicians

  • Adrienne Penderell, Kevin Brazil
  • Journal:
    Palliative & Supportive Care / Volume 8 / Issue 4 / December 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 September 2010, pp. 415-420
  • Objective:

    Much is known about the important role of spirituality in the delivery of multidimensional care for patients at the end of life. Establishing a strong physician–patient relationship in a palliative context requires physicians to have the self-awareness essential to establishing shared meaning and relationships with their patients. However, little is known about this phenomenon and therefore, this study seeks a greater understanding of physician spirituality and how caring for the terminally ill influences this inner aspect.

    Method:

    A qualitative descriptive study was used involving face-to-face interviews with six practicing palliative care physicians.

    Results:

    Conceptualized as a separate entity from religion, spirituality was described by participants as a notion relating to meaning, personal discovery, self-reflection, support, connectedness, and guidance. Spirituality and the delivery of care for the terminally ill appeared to be interrelated in a dynamic relationship where a physician's spiritual growth occurred as a result of patient interaction and that spiritual growth, in turn, was essential for providing compassionate care for the palliative patient. Spirituality also served as an influential force for physicians to engage in self-care practices.

    Significance of results:

    With spirituality as a pervasive force not only in the lives of palliative care patients, but also in those of healthcare providers, it may prove to be beneficial to use this information to guide future practice in training and education for palliative physicians in both the spiritual care of patients and in practitioner self care.

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