Evaluating a Health Promotion Website Essay Example for Free

Evaluating a Health Promotion Website Essay Health Information Technology (HIT) has been introduced into the National Health Service (NHS) in order to improve the quality, efficiency, safety and cost effectiveness of the delivery of health care. The application of computerized information technology in health care settings has so far played a vital role in improving the accessibility of information and has replaced more labour intensive and unproductive methods (Shekelle and Goldzweig, 2009). The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC, 2009) maintain that that nurses’ skills, knowledge and practice must be guided by the best available evidence. Often this evidence is found on the internet however many sources of information can be inaccurate so a good standard of critical evaluation is required (Kim, Eng, Deering et al 1998). To evaluate the quality and reliability of a chosen website the use of a framework can be helpful such as Roberts (2012) 5 C’s website tool. This framework evaluates five areas: credibility, currency, content, construction and clarity. The website The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RC Psych, 2012 a) was chosen to be evaluated because as a mental health nursing student this will develop an awareness of how information technology is implemented and applied to practice in health care. Additionally, by using Roberts (2012) 5 C’s framework to critically evaluate this website, knowledge and skills of the quality and reliability of HIT will be acquired. Main Body RC Psych is the professional and educational organisation for psychiatrist in the UK as well as being a registered charity (RC Psych, 2012 b). Their website is aimed at improving the lives of individuals affected by mental illness through educating the public. They claim to be at the head of developing and promoting best practice in mental health services through their education, training and research projects. Additionally they are involved in the publishing of the following world-class journals; British Journal of Psychiatry, The Psychiatrist, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment and International Psychiatry (RC Psych, 2012 c). Credibility Having gained a royal charter this shows us that the organisation has been recognised by the Queen and seconded by the government to call itself a registered organisation of the highest regard. As stated by the Privy Council Office (2012) organisations granted a Royal Charter must have a solid record of achievement. 75% of its members should be qualified to at least first degree level and the work completed by the organisation must be in the interest of the public. Professor Peter Tyrer is named as the Editor, of the website, and is said to be responsible for the editorial and production aspects of its publications in addition to the production of their online continuing professional development (CPD) e-learning resources and its sales and marketing (RC Psych, 2012 d). After researching Peter Tyrer it is evident that he is highly qualified within the field of mental health and is a professor of community psychiatry for the Department of Medicine, within the Imperial College London (Imperial College London, 2012). The website offers a vast amount of information around mental health including conditions, diagnoses, treatments and types of therapies. The advice provided is produced in the form of online leaflets for the use of the public as well as professionals. Within the website there is no evidence to show that the same specific authors are used regularly for their published articles however, at the end of each article the producer, editor and sometimes an author are named in addition to any expert that has been involved in the making of it. All these leaflets are produced by the RC Psych Public Education Editorial Board that is responsible for producing 300 educational leaflets. These leaflets have been accredited by the NHS Information Standard and subsequently gained numerous awards (Byrne, 2011). They have achieved Plain English and BMA patient information awards and have received consistently positive feedback for the web versions. The editor of these leaflets is Dr Phillip Timms who is currently employed as a consultant Psychiatrist for the South London Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust as well as a senior lecturer in psychiatry at King’s College, London (BMJ Masterclasses, 2012). This site’s web address shows that it is delivered by a UK based academic body as it has an ac.uk URL. This confirms their credibility and reassures the reader that they are qualified experts able to give advice in this field (Roberts, 2010). Combining all this it is apparent that the producers of the website have appropriate qualifications and expertise to offer advice in regards to mental health and supports the credibility of the organisation and the website. Some of these points also link into the other five C’s for example, the awards that the leaflets have received show that the content and clarity of their work has been assessed and found to be of an acceptable standard. Currency When using a website for personal development reasons or to recommend to a patient the information being accessed should be the most current evidence available that has been proven in practice. In regards to the advice provided on the website RC Psych (2012 e) states that they endeavour to update it every two to three years. This is reflected in the articles by showing the date the information was last updated and the date it will be reviewed in the future. Additionally RC Psych (2012 d) state that their information derives from the best evidence available at the time of writing and is updated regularly to reflect any changes in knowledge. Another way to determine the currency of information is to consider the references used to back it up (Roberts, 2010). If the sources are dated then what you are reading may not come from the most current research so there may be more up to date evidence elsewhere. The dates of the references used throughout the website are quite varied however, they do contain many recently published articles and up to date clinical guidelines so this suggests that they are committed to producing up to date information and evidence. This is seen in a leaflet on depression where RC Psyche (2012 f) cites a recently updated guideline by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE, 2009) which looks at the treatment and management of depression in adults. The currency and credibility of the website can also be reflected in its content and therefore this should also be assessed during the evaluation process. Content As well as being credible and current the content must be assessed for its objectivity, accuracy and completeness (Roberts, 2010). The content of a website can be judged by assessing what the website aims to achieve. This could be selling a product, persuading the audience to believe in something or to provide the reader with unbiased and up to date information on a specific topic (Roberts, 2010). RC Psych (2012 a) profess that they aim to improve the lives of individuals with a mental health illness. They aim to do this by educating people through making information and advice available on their website. This would indicate that it falls under the category of providing unbiased and up to date information to the public. The articles on the website are written in the third person so prevents the author from expressing personal opinion. Furthermore the leaflets produced provide links to various other sources of information on the topic being discussed. This encourages further reading which provides a complete and balanced view preventing bias and, where treatment is recommended, allows the reader to make an informed choice (Roberts, 2010). The references used within the website are taken from well known and respected sources that provide current and acknowledged recommendations such as NICE, the Department of Health (DOH) and various field related journals. This indicates that the website seeks to provide and maintain up to date, accurate and unbiased information that concurs with information available in books and journals on the same subjects. Construction The construction of a website, for example, the layout, colours, fonts, sizes and ease of access can determine whether or not a reader believes the website is of good quality or not (Roberts, 2010). A study by Lindgaard, Fernandes and Dudek et al. (2006) found that the first 50 milliseconds that the reader is exposed to a website can cause the reader to form an opinion as to whether a website is worth using or not. On first impression, the website in question looks colourful and professional. The eye is drawn to the bolder writing that states the websites purpose and there are minimal graphics to distract the reader from this. There is a lot of information on the home page of the website and could be considered cluttered, however it is divided into clear sections and appears well organised, giving clear subheadings which guide the reader to their areas of interest easily. The main colour used for the website is grey and presents a professional look. It is subtle but effective in breaking up different sections of the website without being obtrusive. The font size is varied throughout but mainly of a larger size making the website easy to read. There is no option for the reader to change the font sizing or colour which could cause some difficulty as it is not possible to suit everyone with one font size, style and colour (Roberts, 2010). As this is a registered charitable organisation it would be unfair to expect them not to promote money making offers. There are two links to buy books that are published by the royal college of psychiatrists and an option to support them in future development projects. They have presented these links as the last things you would come across on the website. Because of where they are situated it comes across to the reader that they are more interested in providing free and accessible information to educate the pubic over making money. Clarity Clarity is another important area to consider when evaluating a website. Due to our continually growing multi-cultural society it is important that websites cater for all groups in society and not just the English readers. One part of the website caters for professionals working in psychiatry and another to the public wanting to learn more about mental illness. Both sections are presented and written in a way that is understandable to the general public. In the public section they offer their advice in 21 different languages in addition to visual aids using BSL sign language as well as audio pod casts and printable versions. This shows that they have made an effort to cater for diverse cultures and needs. Unfortunately it appears that they have not taken into account the needs of people with dyslexia. Approximately two million people in the UK population are affected by dyslexia of which around 35 to 40 percent experience visual disturbances when reading (Dyslexia Action, 2012). The British Dyslexia Association, (2012) states that the reading ability of an individual with dyslexia can be negatively affected by bright white backgrounds and the use of too much text. By changing the background to an off white colour and spreading out the information over larger areas this would cater for yet another group in society. Conclusion Having the ability to access health information via the internet has given nurses the capacity to constantly improve their knowledge base and skills knowing that they are delivering the best possible care derived from the best available evidence. The RC Psych website not only offers nurses a place to go and build on their knowledge and skills but it also provides them with a safe, reliable and easily accessible knowledge base that they can confidently refer their patients to. The evaluation of this website has shown that the website contains quality, reliable evidence and could be recommended to anyone interested in the field of mental illness. In addition to this the use of the five C’s evaluation tool has provided a great foundation to the development of evaluating skills. It has given an opportunity to discover that the evidence being accessed is suitable for developing personal practice and to help educate patients and is accepted within the NMC code of conduct (Roberts, 2 010).

Essay example --

The Rise, the Fall, and the Climbing: The Native American Experience Education: â€Å"the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.† Such a term has different applications to various societies and cultures. The typical ego-centric viewpoint of Western education: textbooks, institutions, curriculums, and degrees overshadow the broader sense of this definition. Education captures a wider lens of more than just standardized test scores and the classroom; but interwoven tapestries of ancestral roots, cultural heritage awareness, and life lessons well-learned and passed on to the next generation of Native American boys and girls. To begin with, the branding of ‘gender inequality’ was inapplicable to men and women in various Aboriginal tribes. In fact, they could be described as a kinship with mutual contribution and expectance. Men were responsible for hunting and defense; therefore they were public representatives of their tribes. Women, on the other hand, functioned as the ‘backbone’ of the community, owning the family’s housing and household goods, farming and gathering of foodstuffs, and even serving as members of the counsel in political matters. Such opportunities and skills were passed down to their offspring, who would be raised as productive members in their collectivist society with a strong cultural heritage and confidence in their identity that promised self-efficacy among the sexes. This leads us to the most important role that both genders shared: instruction and education. Again, setting aside our own view of education, both men and women served as ‘teachers’, or storytellers; orally... ...ircle and there's nothing you can do about it† (Alexie 163). The reused books, the recycled mentality-it is all a harsh cycle that most Native Americans at present feel â€Å"there’s nothing you can do about it.† Taking a retrospective look into the differences in females and males, we find that women have proven to be leaders, both before and after assimilation. But even at present, Native American women are the high-profiled victims of physical and sexual abuse, addiction, and pregnancies. Yet, they fuel their hope and future through education: adopting the Western view and reconnecting with their own cultural foundation. Men, also in the frame of Alexie, struggle among the disparaging HUD homes, the painfully accessible bottle, and failure, but if there is a word that will conclude the rise, the fall, and the climbing of the Native Americans, resiliency is the word.

Yayoi Kusama Biography

Yayoi Kusama  is 82 years old. But when she is wheeled in, on her blue polka-dotted wheelchair, she looks more like a baby, the sort you might see played by an adult in a British pantomime. Her face is large for a Japanese woman and at odds with her smallish frame. Apart from her intense, saucer-shaped eyes and the arc of deep red lipstick across her mouth, there is something masculine about her features. She wears a lurid red wig and a dress covered in engorged polka dots. Coiled around her neck is a long red scarf decorated with worm-like black squiggles.When she is out of the spotlight, without her splashy red wig and garish outfits, she looks like a nice, grey-haired old lady. But in public situations Kusama’s art and Kusama the artist converge. It is as if the patterns she has obsessively replicated since childhood have seeped off the canvas and into the three-dimensional world of flesh and blood. Rarely has an artist so clearly articulated the art of the Sixties as the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The significance of her work has to do with the specific time period in which she grew up and her perception of art is determined by an inner energy.Her work also transcends earlier established and traditional border lines between disciplines of art and between art and life itself. Kusama’s career is rooted in her Japanese origin. Born in Matsumoto in 1929 she studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Kyoto. In 1957 she moved to New York, which was at the time the world center of contemporary. This move was based on her early awareness that only in New York could she continue her development as a contemporary artist.During the years she lived in New York it become apparent that compared to the conventional image of the Japanese woman, she was a human dynamo of creative energies and abundant human resources. The results of these first years in the art of Kusama were large paintings, one of them 33 feet long, of white nets which, without center and compositional features, obsessively covered the canvas with such intensity that one had the feeling the nets could continue beyond the borders. â€Å"My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvasses I was covering them with.They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was standing at the center of the obsession over the passionate accretion and repetition inside me. † (Kusama) These early works with their radical and hypnotic repetitive energies were first exhibited in small, unknown galleries in New York and Washington. It wasn’t long before they made an international impact and were shown in the Monochrome Painting Exhibition in the Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverjusen, Germany in 1960.This international exhibition was a comprehensive documentation of a new concept in the arts after World War II and included works by Lucio Ponatana and Piero Manzoni from Italy, Mark Rothko from the USA, Yves Klein from France, and Otto Piene an d Guenter Uekcker from Germany. Yayoi Kusama was the only representative from Japan, and her work was a unique and independent articulation of the new art. The early Sixties in New York were years of experimentation, and one of the prime innovators in context became the Japanese immigrant Kusama.She expanded the thematic core of her work into themes like sex obsession and repetitive imagery which only much later were related to terms such as Pop Art and artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein. Since 1962 Kusama has created soft sculptures, sometimes also referred to as a sewing-machine sculptures, and pieces of phallic furniture which gave expression to her underlying obsessive motif of sex.In connection with one of her early shows in the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York in 1963 she said â€Å"these new types of sculptural works arose from a deep driving compulsion to realize in visible form the repetitive image inside of me. When this image is given fre edom, it overflows the limits of time and space. People have said that presents an irresistible force†¦that goes by its own momentum once it has started. † It is evident that the artist liked to be part of these new works of sculpture as she often posed in the nude on her own creations of phallic furniture.The Infinity Nets helped Kusama stay absorbed in her life. She wasn’t concerned about Surrealism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, or whatever, just staying in her own head. I interpret the dot motifs as representing a hallucinatory vision. Proliferating dots append themselves to scenes around Kusama, trying to flee from psychic obsession by choosing to paint the very vision of fear, from which a person would ordinarily avert their eyes. The dots make you lose yourself and then that makes you face more of what’s real within your mind.Kusama said â€Å"I paint them in quantity; in doing so, I try to escape†. Mirror Room (Pumpkin) was an installation with a neat conflation of two of her mirror installations from the mid 1960s, the Peep Show and the Infinity Mirror Room, the 1993 Mirror Room (Pumpkin) consisted of a large gallery papered floor to ceiling with a yellow and black polka dot pattern. In the centre of the space stood a mirrored box the size of a small room, with a single window in a manner reminiscent of the 1965 Peep Show.At the opening of the exhibition Kusama appeared in the room dressed in a long sorcerer’s robe and peeked hat, both of which matched her surroundings and caused her to merge with them in a manner that recalled early interactions with her Infinity Nets and Accumulations. Visually a part of the installation, Kusama was also an active agent, offering tiny yellow and black polka dotted pumpkins to anyone who entered the space.These little pumpkins were a direct reference to the 2,000 lire mirror balls that the artist had outrageously hawked from her Narcissus Garden at her first Venice Biennale. In recent y ears, the practice of Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has developed in astounding ways. Already, she has transcended gender and generation, coming to resemble no less than some eternal being liberated from the cycle of reincarnation. But, come to think of it, Kusama has defied categorization for a long time, perhaps even transcending our very notion of art.In the Asian view of the cosmos — in particular, the ancient Indian cosmology of the Vedic period — the fundamental principle of the universe involves that of Brahman, enveloping the entire cosmos, and Atman, the self, with the two connected by an invisible energy; while the unification of Brahman and Atman allows an escape from reincarnation and the endless cycle of life and death. This is an idea widely accepted by Brahmanism, Hinduism and the Jains.In Buddhism, however, though the idea of reincarnation and escape from its cycle by attaining nirvana is accepted, the Buddha stressed the cosmic connectedness of al l things as causal interdependence, or pratityasamutpada. This way of thinking, which views human existence, consciously or unconsciously, as one part of the whole of creation believes in an invisible connectedness or relationship of cause and effect, and could also be described as the spatial concept underlying everything Eastern. Contemplating Yayoi Kusama’s practice in light of this cosmic view, we begin o see how her awareness of existence shares this same vast sense of scale. The hallucinations, both visual and auditory, Kusama experienced from her younger years have been attributed to a nervous disorder known as depersonalization syndrome. Those afflicted are said to perceive and experience the self as if observing from outside, divorced from their own mental processes and corporeal body. This is also explained by Kusama’s comment that, through the acts of painting and performance, ‘I have released this into a chaotic vacuum’;  Ã¢â‚¬Ëœthis' being t he mysterious something that only she can see and hear. I do find the small works on paper from the Fifties and Sixties has this world in a grain of sand, this minute but galactic quality to it. When looking, you have that feeling of, ‘my God what scale am I? ’ You get lost in this extraordinary cosmos and then are taken aback when you consider that they’re only four inches wide. I think these macroscopic realms are really extraordinary. And they’re incredibly beautiful. I was completely stunned when I first saw them. I managed to see her exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.I think it’s extraordinary that somebody so young, so far away and brought up in such a traditional environment was so able to absorb the influence of Miro and Ernst and Klee whose work she probably only saw in reproduction, then taking it all on and going on to produce work of such originality and in such great quantity. What I love is the idea that all the dayglow â€Å"br andiness† of her spots all comes back to this incredible energy from her early twenties. She also staged dozens of Happenings—what you could call â€Å"Body Festivals†Ã¢â‚¬â€in her studio and in public spaces around New York.Some were sites of authority, such as MoMA or Wall Street. Other sites, such as Tompkins Square Park and Washington Square Park, were associated with New York’s psychedelic hippie culture. She played the role of high priestess and painted the nude bodies of models on the stage with polka dots in five colors. When a Happening was staged at Times Square under her direction, a huge crowd flocked to it. Yayoi was never nude, publicly or privately. At the homosexual orgies she directed, she always stayed at a safe place with a manager in the studio to avoid being arrested by police.The studio would have been thrown into utter confusion if she had ever been arrested. The police were primarily after a bribe. When she was arrested while direc ting a Happening in Wall Street and taken into police custody, they demanded that she pay them if I wanted to be set free. Bribes ranged from $400 to $1,000. Since she paid them every time I was arrested, my Happenings ended up as a good out-of-the-way place for them to make money. Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe. This is magic.Nudity was central to Kusama’s work in those years: in addition to the Happenings, she opened a fashion boutique offering clothes she designed that were â€Å"nude, see-through, and mod. † The shop had private studios and nude models available for body painting or photographing. Kusama also opened the Church of Self-Obliteration in a SoHo loft, appointing herself the â€Å"High Priestess of Polka Dots† so she could officiate at a wedding of two gay men in 1968. She designed a large bridal gown that both men wore. Minimal art, or Minimalism, was one of the major artistic tendencies to emerge from the United States in the 1960s.Though never a unified movement — the majority of the artists associated with it actively rejected the term — it described a significant trend toward interrogating the communicative authority of the artist and the exalted status of the art object by reducing it to its basic components. The term is notoriously slippery, but it has generally come to be associated with the reductive paintings, sculptures and ‘specific objects’ — neither paintings nor sculptures — of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, Richard Serra and Frank Stella, occasionally extending to Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Anne Truitt and others.Unlike many of their abstract expressionist predecessors, the minimalists steadfastly avoided emotionally charged gestures, often to the point of having their works industrially produced. Minimalism did not e merge in isolation, developing in dialogue with Pop art, color field painting and concrete art. Nor was its prominence particularly long-lasting; indeed, part of the tendency’s importance was the influence that its questioning of artistic convention had on subsequent developments like conceptual art and Postmodernism.When Kusama arrived in New York in 1958, the city’s powerful art scene was still in thrall to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. The net paintings she began producing shortly after her arrival, and first exhibited the following year, were therefore received as a major revelation. Abstract expressionist critic Dore Ashton called her show a ‘striking tour de force’, while Sidney Tillim declared the artist ‘one of the most promising new talents to appear on the New York scene in years’.Though never a ‘pure’ monochrome painter, Kusama was one of the few artists working in the city who proposed that a surface could be r educed to a single, undifferentiated field, unbroken by figuration or abstract compositional devices. As Donald Judd observed on first encountering the works, her net paintings took the expansive color fields of ‘cooler’ abstractionists like Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman as a point of departure, but added something entirely new. In his review of the exhibition for  Art News, Judd described the paintings as ‘strong, advanced in concept and realized’.He continued: â€Å"The space is shallow, close to the surface and achieved by innumerable small arcs superimposed on a black ground overlain with a wash of white. The effect is both complex and simple. Essentially it is produced by the intersection of two close, somewhat parallel, vertical planes, at points merging at the surface plane and at others diverging slightly but powerfully. † (Pollock) Unlike Abstract Expressionism, the optical effects of the net paintings’ undulating f ields owed more to the material qualities of the painted surface than to any illusions of pictorial depth.Nor was their composition bound by a relationship to the painting’s frame; they were, as Kusama herself described them, ‘without beginning, end or centre’. The nets propagated according to their own internal logic, a system in which they could go on reproducing themselves across an entire room if it weren’t for the edge of the canvas, which, as a limit, was purely physical, rather than structural. This suggested that painting might be considered as a phenomenal, rather than illusory, practice — a painted surface could be thought of as a single plane of a three-dimensional object, rather than a two-dimensional pictorial ‘window’.Kusama is engaged in a never-ending mission to release the microcosms within herself to the outside, in order to project it on the macrocosms and the infinite space to which our imaginations do not extend. By facing up to this endless mission, Kusama herself is also elevated to the status of eternal being, so to speak — one who, though but a speck of dust in the universe, also has a bird’s-eye view of the entire universe.It is her infinite consciousness that transcends the time, generation, gender, region and culture, as well as the various vocabularies of contemporary art. It is also the reason Yayoi Kusama is so well-received around the world — and the reason why the force driving her is like an eternally bubbling spring. Bibliography Chadwick, Whitney, and Dawn Ades. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Kusama, Yayoi, and Lynn Zelevansky. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968.Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998. Kusama, Yayoi. Yayoi Kusama: Recent Works. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1996. Kusama, Yayoi, and David Moos. Yayoi Kusama: Early Drawings from the Collection of Richard Castellane. Birmin gham, Ala. : Birmingham Museum of Art, 2000. Kusama, Yayoi, and Bhupendra Karia. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective. New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts, 1989. Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. , 2006.

themes of cervantes don quixote Essay - 534 Words

Themes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes’ greatest work, The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote De La Mancha, is a unique book of multiple dimensions. From the moment of its creation, it has amused readers, and its influence has vastly extended in literature throughout the world. Don Quixote is a county gentleman disillusioned by his reading of chivalric romances, who rides forth to defend the oppressed and to right wrongs. Cervantes presented the knight-errant so vividly that many languages have borrowed the name of the hero as the common term to designate a person inspired by magnificent and impractical ideals. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Cervantes’ theme throughout the novel is consistent and straightforward. Despite the†¦show more content†¦For example, Don Quixote forbids himself from thinking any impure thoughts about his love- the Dulcinea del Toboso. This suggests that the knight-errant values his belief in moral justice over his personal pleasure or happiness. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Don Quixote’s constant effort to bring about reform also brings up the theme of Quixotism. Quixotism is the universal quality of any visionary action. It is an attempt to make an ideal state reality, but like all ideals, it will never happen in a world where absolute values cannot survive. Quixote’s quixotic vision can be seen when he envisions the windmills to be â€Å"thirty or more lawless giants (110),† and when he approached and addressed the two prostitutes at the inn as ladies of quality. Don Quixote, though he often triumphs over disillusions, must eventually face reality and dies doing so. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Throughout Cervantes’ The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote De La Mancha many themes are portrayed. Most evident is Cervantes’ belief that the chivalric codes of the Golden Age have been lost and that their restoration would be beneficial to society. Portraying Don Quixote’s virtues of bravery, respect, justice, politeness, loyalty, and reverence for God and others as signs of madness only serves toShow MoreRelatedTransformation of Reality as Portrayed in Don Quixote 1220 Words   |  5 PagesTransformation of Reality as Portrayed in Don Quixote Throughout his novel, Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes effectively uses the transformation of reality to critique and reflect societal and literary norms. In three distinct scenes, Don Quixote or his partner, Sancho, transform reality. Often they are met with other’s discontent. 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After five years of slavery, he was ransomed;Read MoreMiguel de Cervantes: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha1794 Words   |  7 PagesMiguel de Cervantes: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha The indisputable literary value of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (usually abbreviated to Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes places his work at the top of the global canon of literature. Internationally recognised as Cervantes’s masterpiece, the work was published in the early seventeenth century during the European Renaissance period, hallmarking the Spanish Golden Age of literature as â€Å"the first modern novel†Read MoreAnalysis of Cervantes Techniques in His Literary Works Essay666 Words   |  3 Pagesplot. However Cervantes seems to ignore this trait, constantly interrupting his stories at critical moments. This technique not only builds suspense and tension, but also helps prove a point about the readers; they are not just passive audience members, but rather participants in this sometimes convoluted story. While some critics have scrutinized Cervantes for having placed tales that seem almost â€Å"out of place,† it is clear that these tales do in fact incorporate some of the larger themes that CervantesRead MoreMiguel Cervantes1543 Words   |  7 PagesMiguel Cervantes Miguel Cervantes and William Shakespeare, two authors at the pinnacle of the cultural rebirth of Europe during the 1500s, ironically died on the same date (this fact is a bit confused by the distinction between the Julian and Gregorian calendar. Indeed they both died on the date of April 23, 1616, but England had not converted to the Gregorian Calendar, so they did not die on the same day, but they did on the same date, as Spains Julian calendar correlated Cervantes death toRead MoreThe Quest Narrative: Don Quixote and The Wasteland1868 Words   |  7 Pagesfunctions in Don Quixote and The Wasteland A quest is a journey in the course of which one advances spiritually and mentally, as well as physically travelling miles. The quester leaves the familiar for the unknown. The nature of the goal may not be clear at first and may only become fully apparent at the end of the quest (Irwin 2011). In Don Quixote, a middle-aged man, driven half-mad by reading tales of medieval knights, attempts to recreate the world of chivalry in contemporary Spain. Quixote setsRead MoreComparing Alices Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll and Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes1671 Words   |  7 Pagesstep of letting go of childish ways and moving on to more mature things. The need for such a dramatic transformation is questioned by Miguel de Cervantes and Lewis Carroll in their texts, Don Quixote and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. While the texts follow two contrasting characters, they are brought together by the theme of fantasy. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is an old gentleman of noble lineage who becomes tired of the monotony and the lack of meaning in his life. Through his maddening and compulsive