Ronald Schleifer

Modernism and popular music

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century modernism – whether focused on literature, music, or the visual arts – have made a distinction between “high” art and the “popular” arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas “Fats” Waller, and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high modernist art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the “popularity” of popular music in order to reconsider received and seemingly self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

The Chief Concern of Medicine: Narrative, Phronesis, and the History of Present Illness

This article proposes that the history and physical exam, which is the standard initial record for each patient, includes the category of “chief concern” to complement the category of “chief complaint.” Such inclusion would necessitate close attention to narrative features of the patients history of present illness, with particular attention to the “end” and “point” of the patients story and to the patients own sense of what constitutes health. Discernment of the ends of moral action is the key feature of Aristotles ethical category of phronesis or “practical reason,” the chief example of which is the seasoned, successful physician. To this end, the article advocates the inclusion of the study of narrative and narrative knowledge in the training and practices of physicians.

Enhancing Physician Empathy: Optimizing Learner Potential for Narrative Transportation

This article argues for the pedagogical usefulness of engaging with literary texts in the formal training of physicians and healthcare workers. It suggests that particular “skills” in reading and engaging with narrative are as readily teachable to healthcare students as are skills in reading x-rays or in diagnosing symptoms. It focuses on three phenomena associated with literary (and other forms) of narrative – namely, the recognition of characters, vicarious experience, and the experience of fellow feeling – and relates them to three categories in cognitive psychology: Theory of Mind, Narrative Transportation, and Empathy. It presents a survey of empirical studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrates the effectiveness of literary narrative in producing these psychological states, and ends by demonstrating how the teaching of a literary narrative – Bastard Out of Carolina – has enhanced these states in students planning on a career in medicine. Such enhancement, the article suggests, are produced by literary features such as imagery, defamiliarization, and patterned organization on the levels of phonology, semantics, and story structure.

The semiotics of sensation: A. J. Greimas and the experience of meaning

Abstract It has been the life-long ambition of A. J. Greimas to analyze the nature of meaning, and in his work he has consistently described meaning as a felt experience, what he calls the “feeling of understanding.” This essay examines the Greimassian investigation of meaning as experiential – which is to say sensational – as well as cognitive by analyzing, by means of Greimas’s “semiotic square,” P. M. S. Hacker’s recent exploration of the relationship between sensation and cognition undertaken in terms of the semantics of ordinary-language philosophy. That is, the essay subjects what it calls “the illusion of immediacy” in ordinary-language philosophy to the systematic analysis of the “semantic formalism” of the semiotic square in order to demonstrate that the seeming “given” of ordinary language theory – the “logico-grammatical terrain and . . . the conceptual landscape” that Hackers describes – can be profitably analyzed in terms of the interaction of semiotic constraints. It concludes by touching on the ways Greimassian semiotics is congruent with – and perhaps supported by – recent neurological understandings of sensate experience.

Medical Professionalism: Using Literary Narrative to Explore and Evaluate Medical Professionalism

Demonstration and measurement of “professionalism” have become explicitly stated goals in medical education in recent years. However, these goals have proved elusive, as neither teachers nor students always have a clear and precise definition of the features and constituent parts of medical professionalism. This chapter describes a “workshop” on professionalism in the field of pediatrics that uses literary narrative to explore and evaluate medical professionalism. In 2013, The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education asked particular specialties in medicine to define and articulate particular “milestones” (i.e., observable activities) for “core competency” areas, including competency in professionalism. The chapter sets forth schemas of narrative—a useful delineation of “features” of narrative—and traces the use of Dr. Richard Selzer’s short story, “Imelda,” as the narrative basis for workshop members to identify and discuss the professional competencies in medicine in general and in pediatrics more specifically. The chapter concludes with the results from four workshops following the procedures set forth.