20 Evaluation Essay Topics Fresh Ideas about Medical Ethics

20 Evaluation Essay Topics Fresh Ideas about Medical Ethics Medical ethics is a highly controversial and sensitive topic. It is highly debatable and prone to go in many ways. If you are writing an evaluation essay on medical ethics and find yourself in need of a topic, consider the 20 below: Doctors and Physician Assisted Suicide Nursing Theories: Which Theories Are the Most Ethical The Ethics of Preventative Medicine Religious Clashes: How Medical Ethics Confront Religious Beliefs Cultural Bias and Medical Ethics The Ethics of Care for the Mentally Handicapped The Ethics of Pregnancy: When a Doctor Can Have Their Patient Arrested Ethical Dilemmas for Doctors: When Parents Should Be Arrested for Abuse or Negligence Office Place Ethics: When Medical Practitioners Fail to Uphold Office Standards How Medical Ethics Differ in Asian Countries Compared to African Countries When Medical Ethics Are Non-Existent: What Doctors Must Do in Foreign Countries The Ethical Difficulties of Practicing Medicine Overseas Ethical Standards Across the States: What Is Ethical How to Monitor Ethics in the Medical Field Why Medical Ethics Are Still Important How Quality Medical Ethics Classes Are Taught When It Is Medically Ethical to End a Life Why Doctors Cannot End Lives of Suffering Individually The Need for International Ethics in the Medical Field Are Medical Ethics Same Everywhere? Sample Evaluation Essay: Are Medical Ethics the Same Everywhere? There are different standards for medical ethics around the world and in some cases cultural clashes can cause a rift. When people move to America they often keep their cultural practices as a part of who they are, and nowhere was this more prevalent than with the Hmong culture. But this also creates a string of ethical dilemmas for medical practitioners in the West who are legally bound to report certain ethical problems like a parent not following the advice of a doctor after signing to do so. Hmong people often do things in ways unfathomable to Western practitioners because they believe that each condition, its cause, and its potential results, stem from something much different than what western doctors would see. Medicine is seen as a temporary fix among the Hmong, not a permanent thing. This can be an area of ethical concern when a medical condition warrants long term medication such as seizure medication, something parents are not willing to do. In such cases, doctors are legally required to report the parents and have the child taken away even if they know the parents have nothing but the deepest love for their child. Additionally, many Hmong avoid hospitals at all possible costs because they are viewed as charnel houses, where the spirits of dead people linger, not as places of healing like they are viewed by people in the West. This can present additional ethical concerns when people will not seek the medical attention they need or their family needs. One example of this is childbirth. Hmong women who would otherwise not seek medical care, would go to the hospital for delivery incorrectly thinking that if they delivered at home the babies wouldn’t be allowed to be U.S. citizens. They naturally deliver healthy babies most of the time in spite of not receiving any Western prenatal care, due to their culturally nutritious diets, the low rate of smoking, the low rate of drinking, The babies, as a result, are often the right size for birth. There was a high prevalence of new mothers seeking medical attention in the delivery room during the 1980’s and 1990’s but nowhere else. For having such staunch beliefs against much of Western medicine, the love and desire of mothers to ensure the very best of chances for the child overruled any cultural apprehensions in this regard and resulted in mothers bearing their babies in a place they would otherwise have avoided just to give them the citizenship. This is truly an inspir ing perspective if one takes the time to think about it. A great insight into the power of strong cultural values juxtaposed against maternal instincts. The Hmong taught a lot of lessons to the Western culture, many of which are exposed in comparison to medical ethics for Hmong and for Americans. There is a serious problem with the high prevalence of antibiotic use in people and animals, as well as the advertisements for medications on television which inevitably encourage people to incorrectly believe they have symptoms and need medication. What is particularly bothersome though is the idea that Western medicine is always right even though it often treats only the symptoms individually and not the illness, something which results in people taking medication after medication to then treat subsequent symptoms that are the direct result of the previous medication. The Hmong embodied this concept wholly with their disregard to regular medication and the use of only those medicines which were needed. Another aspect of the culture which struck me was how the Hmong people, even those Christian converts, never gave up on their roots no matt er what, always seeking out the traditional medications in tandem with Western medication. Some Hmong patients will explain what treatment they thought would be best and remained optimistic about a particular condition. Many are adamant about Hmong healing and will not follow directions from Western doctors for medications or transfusions, which can represent child abuse and a serious ethical dilemma for western doctors responsible for reporting such behaviors. It seems that with such different beliefs, the treatment of symptoms by the Western medicine will continually conflict with treatment of the entire condition or cause as Eastern medicine generally seeks to do in practice. References: Boylan, Michael.  Medical Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print. Campbell, Alastair V and Alastair V Campbell.  Medical Ethics. Auckland, N.Z.: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Egendorf, Laura K.  Medical Ethics. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2005. Print. Fadiman, Anne.  The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. Print. Skloot, Rebecca.  The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010. Print. Torr, James D.  Medical Ethics. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Print. Veatch, Robert M.  Medical Ethics. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1997. Print.

Radiobiology of proton therapy, heavy ion therapy and neutron therapy Essay

Radiobiology of proton therapy, heavy ion therapy and neutron therapy - Essay Example For example, tumor cells often lack the necessary mechanisms required to effectively repair radiation damages. Despite the relative efficacy, safety and reliability of most conventional radiation modalities one of the key problems associated with many photon beams therapies is how to deliver an ideal dose that will kill all the tumor cells without affecting the surrounding normal tissues. However, this is often difficult to achieve due to the unavoidable deposition of radiation dose at the point of radiation entrance (Durante and Loeffler, 2010, p.42). The therapeutic application of charged particle energy beams began in 1946 after the discovery of the radiobiological properties of proton beams. Since then, the use of particle beam radio therapy procedures such as proton therapy, heavy ion therapy and neutron therapy is increasingly gaining importance in therapeutic radiobiology particularly in the treatment of diseases such as cancer (Cunha, 2010, p.1505). The delivery of the radiat ion in sessions (fractionation) in particle beam therapy also ensures that the target cells are destroyed while the surrounding normal tissues are able to repair themselves. This is particularly attributed to their characteristic physical depth-dose distribution ability that ensures maximum high precision impact on the target tumor cells. Compared to the conventional photon radiotherapy, the use of high energy beams of charged protons, neutrons and heavy ions provides significant advantages particularly in the treatment of deep localized tumors. For example, treating cancerous or tumor cells using beams of charged particles allow a more precise approach than most of the conventional radiotherapy modalities. This consequently shortens the treatment time while at the same time minimizing the irradiation of the surrounding disease free tissues. This paper critically analyzes the radiobiology of proton therapy, heavy ion therapy and neutron therapy as well as their potential benefits an d limitations. Figure 1: Comparative lateral penumbra for photons, protons and heavy ions (carbon ions) Proton Therapy Proton beam radiotherapy is increasingly being used due to its numerous potential physical and radiobiological advantages over the conventional radiotherapy techniques. According to Schulz-Ertner and Tsujii (2007, p.954), protons are particularly preferred as a radio therapy option due to their distinct depth –dose profile which makes them particularly suitable for therapeutic use in deep seated, localized and radioresistant tumors. Although the use of proton therapy for tumor treatment is currently a well established therapeutic modality in many parts of the world, the application of other heavy ions and neutrons is still restricted to a few medical facilities due to the potential dangers associated with such high energy beams. Proton particle therapy works by directing energetic ionizing particles such as protons, neutrons or heavy ions towards the target t umor cells. The particles then damage the DNA of the target cells thereby causing their ultimate death. The radiation induced cell death is primarily caused by the damage to the nuclear materials due to secondary electron production. For example, particle beams such as protons often deposit their energy at higher linear energy transfer (LET) compared to electromagnetic radiation (Fokas et al., 2009, pp.224). The dose deposited in the surrounding tissues is one of the most important aspects of particle beam

Business Ethics and corporate social responsibility(new) Essay

Business Ethics and corporate social responsibility(new) - Essay Example This is apparent in the company’s advertising and sales catalogues which depict aspirational youths maintaining the physical characteristics the company believes are stimulating to other youths who look toward reference groups to determine and shape their identities. The brand engages the desirable and shuns what the business considers the undesirable, the less attractive (Logue 2013). The CEO Mike Jeffries made an explicit commentary that the business hires only nice-looking individuals as sales representatives and managers in-store and that the company does not want people who are not cool to wear the company’s clothing (Levinson 2013). The majority of the branded clothing merchandise provided by Abercrombie & Fitch serves as a billboard for the company, presenting the business’ trading name in very visible and eye-catching font. As the CEO believes that this aspirational brand should retain its most loyal markets, this being trends-focused, attractive and yout hful buyers, the company believes that marketing to other market segments would depreciate the brand value of the organisation and make it less inspiring to loyal consumers. Offered the CEO in a 2006 interview (which has recently resurfaced in mass media), â€Å"Candidly, we go after the cool kids. A lot of people don’t belong in our clothes, and they can’t belong† (Levinson 2013, p.1). These comments angered one famous celebrity, Hollywood actress Kirstie Alley, who recently shed considerable weight and after having been the victim of media taunting about her explosive weight gain in recent years. Offered Alley, â€Å"blah, blah, blah, blah. That would never make me buy anything from Abercrombie. I’ve got two kids...they will never walk in those doors† (Winston 2013, p.1). In addition, advocates for the rights of overweight consumers have even developed mock advertising campaigns in an effort to bring public attention to the alleged unethical beha viours of the company. Figure 1: Mock A&F Publicity Exposing Hostile Sentiment about CEO Comments Source: LeTrent, S. (2013). ‘Attractive & Fat’ ad spoofs Abercrombie, CNN Living. [online] Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/living/abercrombie-attractive-and-fat (accessed 21 May 2013). The CEO responsible for creating this negative public backlash had, historically, stood by his comments, defending the statements as justifiable with brand strategy and corporate rights. However, with a sudden 17 percent drop in retail sales in the United States as a result of the controversy (Become Gorgeous 2013), the CEO offered, â€Å"We look forward to continuing this dialogue and taking concrete steps to demonstrate our commitment to anti-bullying† (News Limited 2013, p.2). However, prior to this apologetic statement, Abercrombie & Fitch had been the historical target of special interest groups and general societal stakeholders for unethical business behaviours associ ated with alleged pornographically-centric depiction of its advertising models and for offending youth markets that are, essentially, shunned by the business and its representatives. Sales continue to fall with this company quarter by quarter. Literature review – Ethical leadership and stakeholder values Some of those who argue that Abercrombie & Fit

DEATH Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

DEATH - Essay Example He does this as a gesture of remembrance, to hopefully keep his brother from focusing on the negative aspects of him being away, and instead remember the fond times the two of them had shared in the car. When Henry finally leaves, the car seems to be the only comforting semblance for Lyman, of the times they had spent together. The images of a healthy, happy Henry are embodied in the spirit of the red convertible, and these special memories are what keep Lyman from digressing into sorrow. Some of the relaxing and content thoughts Lyman conjures up are ones where they had no specification of destination, during the summer when there were traveling in the car. â€Å"We took off driving all one summer,† and the story goes on to show how happy and at peace they both were, finding spots in areas where they felt â€Å"so comfortable†, Henry is depicted as feeling at ease enough to fall, â€Å"asleep with his arms thrown wide† (Erdrich 2002). Lyman continues to grasp onto these visual memories he brings up, in anticipation of those same feelings for when his brother will finally return. The car itself is what symbolizes the bond between the two of them, even with a gre at distance of separation dividing them. Finally, Henry returns home in the story but it’s obvious he has changed; things are just not the same. â€Å"Henry because quiet and restless† (814). Often he secluded himself and although he was there, his mind seemed to be somewhere else. It appeared war and the white mans culture had taken its toll on him and all that was there for him was ugliness. This is evident in the story when, one night they all gather around the dinner table and beforehand, Henry has bit down into his lip so hard from frustration that he sits with blood dribbling down his chin, theorizing how badly he wanted to be done with American ways, in his mind and in his life (817). This is representative

Detroit Electric Essay Example for Free

Detroit Electric Essay 1. What organizational structure do you believe is being used to produce Detroit Electric vehicles? Detroit Electric concentrates theirs efforts on research and development of the motor, vehicle design, marketing and distribution. The company does not produce cars; the actual manufacturing of cars is outsourced. From the case I conclude that technology design is the core business of Detroit Electric. Technology changes rapidly and therefore Detroit Electric has to be flexible in conditions of change and uncertainty. Technical excellence and efficient use of resources is the key to compete and to avoid wastage as the cost of RD is high. Based upon the above observation, I believe that the organizational structure used is the matrix model. 2. How has differing organizational structures influenced the pace of development between these two companies? Ford and Detroit Electric are both car companies. The major difference is that Ford manufactures cars whereas Detroit Electric does not. Ford’s organizational structure will most likely resemble other manufacturers’ structure, i. e. functional departmentalization. A major disadvantage of this structure is that because specialists are working with and encouraging each other in their areas of expertise and interest, organizational goals may be sacrificed in favor of departmental goals; hence, the inability to coordinate efforts amongst competing department to achieve the goal of producing electric vehicles. Detroit Electric’s matrix structure on the other hand gives the organization the flexibility to respond to challenges faster in conditions of change and uncertainty; hence their relative pace (fast)in developing electric cars. 3. What issues may arise from this cooperative arrangement of international companies? The first issue is control. How does Detroit Electric ensure that their exact specifications are followed by their licensees? Regular audits will have to be conducted and these audits are costly. Who will bear responsibility if problems arise (faulty products) due to failure of any of its licensees do not follow procedures? The second issue is differences in objectives. For example, Detroit Electric’s performance and quality standards objectives may differ from their licensees.

A world of work Essay -- essays research papers

A WORLD OF WORK Outsourcing means that companies hand work they used to perform in-house to outside firms. ADVANTAGES: v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  bring down costs à ¨ lift profits and boost growth v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  specialisation Due to the advance in technology products have become more complex which made it difficult for one company to do all the work itself. In order to manage the complexity of these products the astute idea of outsourcing represents an ideal solution (e.g. car industry) DISADVANTAGES: v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  drain of jobs, v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  higher organisational costs à ¨ overview, Some years ago this phenomenon used to be hailed as a wonder of the new economy. Nowadays the opinion is less exuberant. Same forces of globalisation are blamed for relentless export of jobs from rich to poorer countries (depressing proof for the declining competitiveness in engineering skills) GLOBALISATION A network between businesses all over the world is established in order to make use of the strengths of different technologies and cultures. NEGATIVE ASPECTS: v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  fierce competition, v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  anxiety among people, v  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  possibilities of expansion for smaller companies are restricted (monopolies) The movement of work abroad agitates worriers in the West and is a cause of concern among the public. Global business work is farmed out to other companie...

American Modernism

Has modernism any relevance to the South of the world? Black people have always united together in order to create and maintain positive definitions of Blacks. The most important and common form of this racial union has been Afro-American folk culture: the musical, oral, and visual artistic expressions of Black identity that have been handed down from generation to generation. The Harlem Renaissance, whose spirit Hurston's work reflects, was a manifestation of this bonding, although it had many false revolutionaries and failed in some respects to realize its radical potential.The modernist black writers who arose in the first three decades of the twentieth century introduced a new stereotype into American literature. Zora Neale Hurston wrote as a Black woman about her own experiences and therefore, in some way, spoke to the general Black female experience in America. Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) offers an excellent source for demonstrating the modern Black fema le literary tradition. A large and chief part of Hurston's career took place during the Harlem Renaissance, which began in the twenties while she was attending Howard.Hurston's best work, especially her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the product of a Black female folk aesthetic and cultural sensibility that emerged from the best revolutionary ideals of the period. It also anticipates the comparable renaissance in black women’s literature. Despite, or perhaps because of, these achievements, Hurston, like many Black women writers, has suffered â€Å"intellectual lynching† at the hands of white and Black men and white women (Brigham 23).Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared at the tail end of what is termed in American literature as the American Modernism. Roughly between 1917 – the end of World War I – and the 1930 stock market crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, throngs of southern African Americans migrated north -a migration that technically began as early as 1910 – primarily to the northeast for economic and social reasons, escaping more overt and often violent manifestations of tensed black-white race relations.A time when â€Å"the Negro was in vogue,† this was a time of cultural celebration of blackness – black visual arts, black music, black intellectual thought, black performing arts, and black identity (Hemenway 34). Leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance challenged black authors and artists to define African American life beyond the prescribed boundaries of stereotype and caricature, sentimentality, and social assimilation. Arguably a movement among intellectuals, the Harlem Renaissance proved spiritually and aesthetically liberating for African Americans and established global connections with an African past.Hurston's accent on rural common folk of the south both challenged and continued some of the essential tenants of the Harlem Renaissance: national and global communi ty, self-determination, and race pride. The most concentrated place of this cultural explosion was Harlem (New York). Published in 1937, Hurston most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was not immediately famous. In fact, the novel was largely mistreated and greatly criticized by her black male contemporaries, because it allegedly presents blacks in stereotypical ways that white readers enjoyed and encouraged of black writers.This criticism was particularly harsh from those who thought that Hurston should be writing more overtly protest pieces about whites as blacks' enemies. While Hurston does not center around white people in the novel, their Jim Crow presence is apparent from the opening through the closing pages. The novel was not printed some thirty years after its initial publication. In 1971, it was reprinted but again was not printed by 1975. In 1977, Hurston's novel was on the top of reading lists among American colleges and universities and continues that even tod ay (Kenner 234).Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie, a black woman of mulatto ancestry, in search of spiritual liberation from patriarchal control. The format of the book is Janie's telling of her own story in her own voice as she remembers the details of her own life. As the narrator, Janie has an authority that even the readers cannot challenge when they want details, particularly technical details, that Janie does not remember or choose to share.While Janie's story is on many levels gender and racially related -readers never forget that Janie's grandmother was a slave or that the characters are living during Jim Crow segregation in the period of the 1930s and 1940s – much of Janie's social relations within the community of black people is gender specific. Her plot is mainly based on others' opinions of how a woman should live, what a woman and especially a woman her age should and should not be doing. Moreover, Janie in the narration is one of a person who i s able to self-define and to transcend restricted boundaries ultimately through communal storytelling rituals (Lemke 90).One of the new ways in which Hurston demonstrated alternative ways of writing is that she often collapsed the boundaries between fact and fiction. The cultural and contextual situatedness of Their Eyes Were Watching God reflect a Black woman's interpretation of social reality in the sense in which the ‘real world' is constituted, in terms of personal and cultural experience, is likely to be at variance with the interpretation of these notions by Euro-American males.Central to appreciating Zora Neale Hurston's genius, versatility, and identity politics is knowing the ways in which she frequently stepped over disciplinary boundaries in her practice of anthropology, intermixing social science with the humanities so many years in advance of what we now call postmodernist practices within anthropology. Hurston's lifelong concern with the self and its limitations (those imposed from without and from within) is, of course, the natural, perhaps even the proper subject of an autobiography. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator observes that â€Å"Pheoby [is] eager to feel and do through Janie †¦ and Janie [is] full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation† (18). Pondrom claims that the â€Å"adoption of myth as a principle of meaning and order is Hurston's most important link to modernism† (1986:201). For Pondrom, Hurston's utilization of myth links her to the modernist writers approaches of Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and Crane. Pondrom writes that Hurston's â€Å"'mythic method' links her even more powerfully to the great female modernists, who found myth a means to affirmation of the self rather than simply a stay against disorder.†For Pondrom, Hurston takes a place among H. D. , Stein, and Wolff â€Å"in a current now [mid-1980s] being recognized as fundamental to the modernist movement† (202). Pondrom discusses overlaps between Their Eyes and Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian mythologies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she writes how everyone is drawn â€Å"on stage† in the cross-gender verbal jousting: â€Å"The girls and everybody else help laugh. They know it's not courtship. It's acting-out courtship and everybody is in the play.The three girls hold the center of the stage till Daisy Blunt came walking down the street in the moonlight. † Showing the proximity of immersion and recuperation images in Hurston's diasporic underground, the African rhythm infuses the dramatic scene: â€Å"Daisy is walking a drum tune. You can almost hear it by looking at the way she walks† (1995:229). Janie's experiences in Their Eyes Were Watching God take place in relation to Hurston's deepening appreciation of the ordering potential of black culture and its West African underpinnings.Her juxtaposition of sunrise/set images and the chaotic and cosmopolitan experiences of modernity recalls accounts of Yoruba mythology cited early in the twentieth century from divination priests in Badan, Nigeria. In â€Å"The Religion of the Yoruba† Leo Frobenius records a myth invoking this structure: Long, long ago, when everything was in confusion and young and old died, Olodu-mare (God) summoned Edshu-ogbe and said: â€Å"Create order in the region of the sunrise. † To Oyako-Medyi: â€Å"Create order in the region of the sunset. † Next morning Edshu-ogbe created order in the east and in the evening Oyako-Medyi created order in the west.(1973:188–89) From the external correlatives of several scenes to her explicit invocation of Esu/Elegba, in Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston's points of reference for Janie's emerging consciousness are markedly West African. In ways that echo the narratives recorded by Frobenius, Hurston uses sunrise and sunset descriptions as a changeable and timeless witness to chaotic developments in the plot of the novel. After Janie's initial march through Eatonville creates a swirl of envy, Phoeby enters through â€Å"the intimate gate with her heaping plate of mulatto rice† (1995:176).As Janie reflects on her experience and prepares to tell her tale, Hurston's sunset provides the backdrop: the â€Å"varicolored cloud dust that the sun had stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees† (178). When Janie tells Phoeby about living under Nanny's and Logan Killicks's control, Hurston uses the deepening night to underscore the danger in the tale and the telling: â€Å"the kissing darkness became a monstropolous old thing† and Janie â€Å"saw her life like a great tree with†¦Dawn and doom in the branches† (181– 82).On the morning of the conflict with Logan Killicks, the â€Å"sun from ambush was threatening the world with red daggers† (199). In the scene in which Janie awakes after having spent the night alone, wondering, while Tea Cake sp ent her money on a party, the sunrise is paranoid, â€Å"sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark† (272). Hurston images the false calm before the final storm â€Å"even before the sun gave light dead day was creeping from bush to bush watching man† (301).The first moments of Janie's excavation are imaged as she connects the mysteries of her emerging consciousness to the eternal rhythms of movement and variability: â€Å"mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun† (236). Hurston's new technique in Their Eyes combined the excavation of consciousness with an improvised relationship to a living tradition that she encountered during her research in New Orleans and Haiti. Central to her mythic method is Hurston's brilliant use of Esu/Elegba in relation to the patterns of Janie's descent and emergence.Hurston's novel Their Eyes offers an e xcellent source for demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to Black women's culture in general and American Modernismin particular (Awkward 23). Hurston locates her fiction strongly in Black women's traditional culture as developed and displayed through music and song. In presenting Janie's story as a narrative related by herself to her best Black woman friend, Pheoby, Hurston is able to draw upon the rich oral legacy of Black female storytelling and mythmaking that has its roots in Afro-American culture.The reader who is aware of this tradition will understand the story as an overheard conversation as well as a literary text. The struggle between communal relationships and modern institutions is the core of Hurston's blues critique in Their Eyes. Janie appreciates Starks's store as a social center (Baker 98). But she is chronically inept at the tasks that relate to the business. Is Hurston implying that Janie is stupid? Unlikely. Instead, for Janie, selling things in the store distracts her from the essential rhythms of nature and the homegrown power of stories that take place on the porch.In Hurston's narration, the natural beauty of the South and the communal cool squeeze the business of the store from both sides: Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. So Janie had another day. And every day had a store in it, except Sundays. The store itself was a pleasant place if only she didn't have to sell things. When people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. (Hurston 1995:215)As the sense of social decay and the power of modern economics increases their hold on people's lives and as Janie moves outside of her middle-class economic position in Eatonville, Hurston's blues images become collective, intensify, and grapple openly with the forces of fragmentation. As a new season opens on the muck, Hurston images the economically and e xistentially threadbare workforce and the hard times: Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans.Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor. (282) But heeding Pound's warning to devise an adequate technique or â€Å"bear false witness, † Hurston depicts the economic ‘dehumanization’ in relation to the humanizing forces of living cultural traditions: â€Å"Blues made and used right on the spot. † On â€Å"the muck† the blues voices pierce through the â€Å"mud which is deaf and dumb† as â€Å"the jooks clanged and clamored.Pianos living three lives in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, w inning, and losing every hour. † Instead of the urban realist's trope of ever-warm boardinghouse beds used three shifts per day, in Hurston's vision the keys never get cold, â€Å"pianos†¦live three lives in one. †Refusing to resolve the struggle between the â€Å"deaf mud† and â€Å"live muck, † she concludes the passage with an asymmetrical image of â€Å"rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants† (282).Ambiguous and improvised, impulses swirl through Hurston's modernist schema of the mud and the muck. She leaves no fixed path, no pro-forma method for descent. â€Å"Permanent transients† ride the crest of the wave where Wright's â€Å"walleyed yokels† are long since washed over and submerged by his ideological approach to the blues horrors in his memory. Instead, Hurston's excavation of â€Å"the muck† explores uncharted personal and communal territory. Janie's improvised diasporic modernist quest advances with the mantra that â€Å"new words would have to be made and said† (200, 268).At the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston describes Janie in a space of continuing diasporic modernist process. In connection to various relationships, Janie explored the patterns of inner and interpersonal experience and met many of Esu/Elegba's challenges at the communal and personal gates (Pavlic 234). She excavated new depths in her consciousness and from these depths she examined her relationship to social space with deepened insight. In death, Tea Cake becomes an ancestor and joins the patterns of Janie's consciousness.Alone in her house again, Janie opens the window to allow Tea Cake's presence to come to mind. Hurston emphasizes the modernist dimensions of ancestry. They inform the combination of communal and solitary processes and present guidance which, at best, can mitigate against the pitfalls of Afro-modernist seclusion. Hurston describes Tea Cake's ancestral presenc e now combined with her own energy (the wind) and with Janie's asymmetrical space of communal loneliness: â€Å"The wind through the open windows had broomed all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness.She closed in and sat down. Combing road-dust out of her hair. Thinking† (1995:333). As an ancestor, Tea Cake will continue to â€Å"live† in the images of Janie's mind but, possibly in tribute to Tea Cake's performative skill, Janie's telling of the story to Phoeby demonstrates she is not isolated in Afro-modernist seclusion. Unlike Hurston's other characters, Janie is capable of articulating the depths of her experience in interpersonal terms. Hurston emphasizes how the combination of sense impression and thought prevent abstraction of the ancestors: â€Å"Of course he wasn't dead.He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking† (333). The close of the novel seems romantic and resolved; however, Tea Cake' continued ancestral prese nce will disrupt the resolution. Esu/Elegba's role doesn't cease in death. Janie will have to pursue the patterns and enable Tea Cake to overcome the â€Å"dogged† stasis that caused his demise. Janie will have to feel the wind and share the thunder. The descendant becomes part of the redemption of the ancestor, because Esu/Elegba will return (Pavlic 243).In Their Eyes, Zora Neale Hurston, is using modernism to bring her intellectual characters out of their isolation and into contact with the needs, concerns, and traditions of black people generally. Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction, especially her novels, leads us to examine ourselves in relation to the world around us. Without exaggeration, her novels enlarge both our minds and our hearts. Hurston, however, would not make such a claim; instead, she would keep moving towards some goal to be reached, some project to be started.Her anxious restlessness about herself and her work makes her a very contemporary writer, a moder nist who tried to enlarge the very notion of what it is to be American. She wrote about traditional subjects—love and loss, displacement and home, failure and triumph—at the same time she attempted to redefine our notion of American culture. Their Eyes Were Watching God offers us the same vital contrasts and the same struggle to reconcile the harp and the sword.Works CitedAwkward, Michael, ed. New Essays on â€Å"Their Eyes Were Watching God. † New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Baker, Houston. Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.Brigham, Cathy. â€Å"The Talking Frame of Zora Neale Hurston's Talking Book: Storytelling as Dialectic in Their Eyes Were Watching God. † College Literature Association 37, no. 4, 1994.Frobenius, Leo. â€Å"The Religion of the Yoruba. † In Leo Frobenius: An Anthology, ed. E. Naberland, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973.Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.Hurston, Zora Neale. Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1995.Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.Pavlic, Edward M. Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2002.Pondrom, Cyrena. â€Å"The Role of Myth in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. † American Literature 58, no. 2, 1986.