Disappointment

What happens when journalism is made superfluous? Combining ethnography, media analysis, moral and political theory this book examines the unraveling of professional journalism in Russia over the past twenty-five years, and its effects on society. It argues that, contrary to widespread assumptions, late Soviet-era journalists shared a cultural contract with their audiences, which ensured that their work was guided by a truth-telling ethic. Post-communist economic and political upheaval led not so much to greater press freedom as to the de-professionalization of journalism, as journalists found themselves having to monetize their truth-seeking skills. This has culminated in a perception of journalists as political prostitutes, or members of the 'second oldest profession', as they are commonly termed in Russia. The book argues that this cultural shift has fundamentally eroded the value of truth-seeking and telling in Russian society.  Broadly speaking, the book thus tracks what happens to public life at a time when a society's collective truths are systematically displaced by consistent falsehood and fabrication.

This article aims at juxtaposition of Midaq Alley (Najeeb Mahfouz) and Manto's selected plays: The Insult(Hathak), New Constitution, Black Shalwar. Both of the aforementioned authors almost lived in the same era with social circumstances that very much resembled: native lands of the writers were under British colonisation, people underwent exploitation and witnessed deprivation, societies were transformed. The period caused transition, tradition was denigrated and the so called civilization was admired; this phenomenal change caused  isolation of the weak fabric of society; Mahfouz and Manto have fictionalised the tormenting scenario of the age. They have recorded harshness and politics of the age under the aesthetic covers of literature; Manto argues in one of his essays:
"If you are unaware of the times through which we are passing, read my short stories. If you  cannot tolerate them, it means this age is intolerable. There is no fault in my writings. The fault which is attributed in my works is fault of the age."
These writers exposed whatever they observed and experienced; though the satire was not direct and bitter, it received rigorous reaction from the society. They were called upon by the religious authorities and questioned for what they had written. Manto even faced legal prosecution for some of his short stories.

In Suicide, Durkheim described two qualitatively different experiences of normative anomie, each with a distinct affective basis: an intentional, if not ruthless, disdain for society’s normative order; and an unintentional disregard for, or confusion about, norms or rules of conduct. We generalize Durkheim’s classification of the socioaffective aspects of anomic suicide, and present two theoretical models of normlessness–anomie and the emotions. These models posit that intentional anomie involves the primary emotions anger, disgust, and joy–happiness; these emotions can combine to form the secondary emotions contempt, pride, and derisiveness. Unintentional, passive anomie rather involves the emotions surprise, fear, and sadness; these can combine to form the secondary emotions disappointment, shame, and alarm.
We additionally hypothesize that each kind of anomie has distinct potential behavioral



consequences: intentional anomie can result in immorality, shamelessness, acquisitiveness, and premeditated homicidality; unintentional anomie, in depression, confusion, uncertainty, unpremeditated homicidality, and suicidality.

While playing classical piano music written by European composers in arid Winton, QLD, my mother grew up wishing she was elsewhere. In 1929, aged thirteen years, her dedication to the European canon was rewarded with a music degree conferred by the London College of Music.

My mother was not alone in her desire for recognition and acclaim by European culture. White Australians obsession with British and European culture, landscape and history throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, is well documented. In fact, the tendency to deny those aspects of Australian reality that are perceived to be strange, unpalatable or inconvenient continues in Australia today.

My research Beneath Horizons: Australian Desert Landscapes, analyses preconceptions such as fear of a vast and dangerous void, that are held by many urban-dwelling Australians who cling to the metaphorical rim of the continent, rarely venturing inside to experience the desert for themselves. Consequently, our concept of the desert is configured from cultural histories, mythologies, maps, televisual and cinematic constructs. We imagine the desert, but without going there. We don’t immerse ourselves in the desert space, experience the freedom of endless space, or see expansive horizons that activate our senses and transform the desert into a spiritual place. The installation Red Desert Project for example, offers urban-dwellers a micro-experience of being out there in the red sand desert.

My research focused on the ground beneath me to locate my presence as an observer at a particular time and place in the desert landscape. I engaged daily with the forces of nature that continually transformed the desert floor of that place. I made three journeys to the desert, camping in remote sites significant to colonial explorers to experiment and record my experiences with the forces of nature and to map ever-changing details of the living desert. I wanted to gain insights into why my mother avoided the arid landscape of her childhood and why most Australians avoid the central deserts of Australia.

This research aimed to map the perceived emptiness of the desert landscape and contribute to an increased perception and awareness of the movement of time and space in the imagined desert landscape of Australia, so that people may be encouraged to treat the land, along with its Indigenous custodians, with more insight, empathy and respect.

The present study aimed at investigating and comparing the differences in the levels of depression inflicted by childbearing and childless couples. A sample of 400 couples; 200 childless and 200 childbearing couples ranging in age from 20-69 years was taken from different cities of Pakistan. To measure the depression, Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock & Erbaugh, 1961) was used. The results indicated that childless couples tend to demonstrate higher levels of depression as compared to that of childbearing couples. Findings of the gender differences suggested that infertile females tend to have higher levels of depression as compared to infertile males. The data provided evidence that education, age, income, family system and rural/urban area do not play any important role in deterioration of sadness of infertile couples. The findings further showed the positive role played by language for depression that implies the sample of Urdu language is more likely to be de...

The paper examines how the disappointment of ex-resistance fighters can illuminate the grey zone of founding-the ambiguity of beginning anew against the background of systemic violence that eludes the predominant linear visions of transition. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Hannah Arendt's insights into the ambiguity of beginning anew as a practice of attunement that takes oppressive practices as points of departure for democratizing political action. I explore how the ex-resisters' stories of disappointment can invigorate this practice, focusing on their ability to reorient political action towards reframing unjust relationships in a way that guards against systematic exclusions in the future. The paper demonstrates the political relevance of disappointment on the example of a South African ex-resister's memoir, Pregs Govender's Love and Courage. Govender's narrative discloses how experiences of disappointment can orient the ex-resisters' efforts to confront the complexities of founding obscured from the official story.

Increasingly popular in the neoliberal university, community-engaged service-learning (CESL) courses offer rich yet contradictory opportunities for LGBTQ studies students to synthesize queer critiques of community and identity with experiences in LGBTQ communities. Much CESL scholarship has focused on the tensions between benefits to community and to students, prioritizing either radical social change or student satisfaction. Beside such debates, I propose the queer ethical, pedagogical, and political value of disappointment in the tedium and contradictions of community itself. Such queer disappointment, I contend, might enable students to cultivate the emotional and critical capacities to engage in community work on sustainable, dedramatized, and unentitled terms.

Scholars’ multifarious attempts to interpret Hesiod’s tale of Pandora’s jar have become scarcely less well-known than the myth itself. Ten years ago, Jenifer Neils offered a concise summary of the four major positions over which scholars continue to battle: "(1) The first is the most positive reading, and in my opinion the most un-Hesiodic, namely, that Elpis is positive, that is, Hope, and is stored in the jar for mankind. (2) The second is that Elpis is good but is being kept from mankind as an additional punishment. (3) The third possibility is that Elpis is the last of the evils in the jar, that is, false hope, [and] is reserved for man or (4) from which man is being spared." While Neils herself espouses the fourth of these options—a position which I hold to be untenable when placed against the background of Hesiod’s characteristic “archaic Greek pessimism”—her simple outline does nevertheless provide a helpful starting point for thinking about the range of interpretations this passage of Hesiod’s Works and Days has inspired. In light of such a plurality of scholarly views on the subject, this paper will attempt to offer one possible reading of the way in which Hesiod’s myth of Pandora fits into the larger picture of his narrative as a whole. When his famous personification of ἐλπίς is read alongside her less well-known appearance in the middle of the Works and Days, and when both of these passages are placed within the context of the typical archaic Greek conception of ἐλπίς and its related verb ἔλπω, Hesiod’s myth of Pandora can be read as an artful, poignant expression of the fated plight of man, poised as he is forever between hope and disappointment.

This paper explores the emotion of disappointment in organizations and develops a new line of theorizing inspired by psychoanalytic object-relations theory. Existing literature frames disappointment as a threat to organizational effectiveness, as both a response and an anticipation of failure and as an emotion that needs to be managed in order to prevent it from damaging organizational morale and performance. This only captures part of the complexity of disappointment and leaves unexplored its potential contribution to organizational and individual learning and even creativity. The paper develops a theoretical framework which depicts disappointment in three configurations or positions, and it establishes the potential of disappointment acting as an integrative emotion within organizations. The framework accounts for an apparent contradiction in organizational members' experience of disappointment – that it is, at the same time, seen as ‘of little concern’ to individuals, and yet...

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga.

It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

Recent fMRI studies have investigated brain activity involved in the feeling of regret and disappointment by manipulating the feedback participants saw after making a decision to play certain gambles: full-feedback (regret: participant sees the outcomes from both the chosen and unchosen gamble) vs. partial-feedback (disappointment: participant only sees the outcome from chosen gamble). However, regret and disappointment are also characterized by differential agency attribution: personal agency for regret, external agency for disappointment. In this study, we investigate the neural correlates of these two characterizations of regret and disappointment using magnetoencephalography (MEG). To do this, we experimentally induced each emotion by manipulating feedback (chosen gamble vs. unchosen gamble), agency (human vs. computer choice) and outcomes (win vs. loss) in a fully randomized design. At the behavioral level the emotional experience of regret and disappointment were indeed affected by both feedback and agency manipulations. These emotions also differentially affect subsequent choices, with regret leading to riskier behavior. At the neural level both feedback and agency affected the brain responses associated with regret and disappointment, demonstrating differential localization in the brain for each. Notably, feedback regret showed greater brain activity in the right anterior and posterior regions, with agency regret producing greater activity in the left anterior region. These findings extend the evidence for neural activity in processing both regret and disappointment by highlighting for the first time the respective importance of feedback and agency, as well as outlining the temporal dynamics of these emotions.

This paper intends to analyse how the value reverse in picaresque literature, proposed by the text Periquillo el de las Gallineras (1668), by the Madrid writer Francisco Santos, is related to the attempt of some of Spanish Renaissance writers and intellectuals, in proposing a philosophical synthesis between Stoicism and Christianity. This movement is known today as neo-Stoicism, which is characterized by: ascetic heroism, severity in the customs,
controlling the passions and the virtue-based and rational conduct. Having society
education as a main goal, principally the courtiers in the practice of
disappointment, the neo-Stoicism eventually becomes the most important
political and moral seventeenth century Spanish option.

Abstract: The present research examined the neural substrates subserving regret and disappointment and investigated the effects of regret and disappointment on future choices. Study 1 used a behavioral paradigm to distinguish the subjective experience of regret from disappointment for use in ...