Things Everyone Should Know-Chemical and Biological Weapons essays

Things Everyone Should Know-Chemical and Biological Weapons essays In every life time one will experience the effect of a weapon, whether it is that of a car, knife, gun or even the horrors of a bomb or the possible threat of chemical and/or biological agents. No matter what the source of destruction, it causes the downfall of some type. Some believe that a car accident or a gun is more dangerous and destructive to life, however that common person does not understand the unfamiliar hazards and irreversible effects that these viruses and bacterium can cause. Currently the United States has been struggling with the thought of anthrax and other weapons of biological threat infecting their loved ones and our nations world status. Chemical and biological weapons developed by the United States scientists have not only protected the United States against a massive chemical and/or biological attack, but have also cost the United States millions of dollars and thousands of lives in the production and the investigation of chemical and biological weapons. The use of chemical and biological weapons date far back in the history books, even before writing was around. At least 3,000 years ago, chemicals were added to fires to create fumes that would choke and sicken the enemy. Greek fire was a chemical weapon, perhaps invented in A.D. 660 by a Greek engineer named Callinicus (Pringle, pg 14). The Greek fire caused the Arab and Russian enemies to weaken on the port city Constantinople producing a Greek victory. The term biological warfare is a more recent development in the weapons of mass destruction era. Only until the nineteenth century did scientist prove that germs cause infectious disease. (The term germs includes bacteria, viruses, and rickettsia.) In the 19th century, citizens only knew that disease spread through a sick person, a human corpse or an animal carcass. An easy way to poison an enemys population was to simply p...

Definition and Examples of an Implied Author

Definition and Examples of an Implied Author In reading, an implied author is the version of a writer that a reader constructs based on the text in its entirety. Also called a  model author, an abstract author, or an inferred author. The concept of the implied author was introduced by American literary critic Wayne C. Booth in his book  The Rhetoric of Fiction  (1961): However impersonal [an author] may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner. Examples and Observations [I]t is a curious fact that we have no terms either for this created second self or our relationship with him. None of our terms for various aspects of the narrator is quite accurate. Persona, mask, and narrator are sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker in the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who may be separated from him by large ironies. Narrator is usually taken to mean the I of the work, but the I is seldom if ever identical with the implied image of the artist.(Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1961)Too often in my early work, I suggested a total communion between two utterly confident, secure, correct, and wise human beings at the top of the human heap: the implied author and me. Now I see an implied author who is manifold.(Wayne C. Booth, The Struggle to Tell the Story of the Struggle to Get the Story Told. Narrative, January 1997) Implied Author and Implied Reader A classic example of mismatching in kind is The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. The implied author intends that the implied reader will react to the horrifying account of the Chicago meatpacking industry by taking socialist action to improve the workers lives. In other words, the implied reader of The Jungle already cares about workers in general, and the implied author intends that building on that old value, the reader will primarily be motivated to adopt a new valuesocialist commitment to helping Chicago meat workers. But, because most actual American readers lacked sufficient concern for workers, a mismatch occurred, and they failed to react as intended; The Jungle ended up moving them only to agitate for improved sanitation in meatpacking.(Ellen Susan Peel, Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction. Ohio State University. Press, 2002) Controversies As our study of implied author reception will show, there is no consistent correlation between the contexts in which the concept has been used and the opinions that have been put forward regarding its usefulness. In interpretive contexts, both supporting and opposing voices have made themselves heard; in descriptive contexts, meanwhile, the implied author has met with near-universal hostility, but even here its relevance to textual interpretation occasionally attracts a more positive response.(Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Mà ¼ller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Trans. by Alastair Matthews. Walter de Gruyter, 2006)