Search results for ""Author Dr Richard Robinson""

Deep down, we're just like animals. Some of us are selfish like apes. Some are chaotic like ants. . . And somehow the two clash and coalesce in 'antagonistic harmony'. A fascinating look at the evolutionary psychology, instincts and tactics of the workplace.My Manager & Other Animals examines the evolutionary psychology of work, focusing on the office, workshop, corporation or government department, and the complex and fascinating evolutionary tactics that have developed to deal with working life.37 years ago Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene and it didn't take long for the business community to latch on to the 'selfish' part and adopt it as an industry standard. After all, it fitted in with the notion that, since we are all descended from apes, we should be like them: selfish, aggressive and competitive. More recently, astounding discoveries in human and animal behaviour (particularly ants) have shown that, in all animals, cooperation and altruism is more common than we think and more useful than we could imagine. It seems we contain an inner ape and an inner ant. How confusing; they seem like opposites, because co-operation means helping others, competition means swatting them. What are we, ape or ant? This book shows that ant and ape are both important. Co-operation without leadership is random, leadership without co-operation is slavery. The result of these two colliding is the mad mad mad world of work and life, lovingly described in the book.

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John McGahern’s work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with ‘making it old’ rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern’s statements about the ‘presence’ of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern’s six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern’s fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGahern’s fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as ‘low’ modernism, the complexity of McGahern’s time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGahern’s narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.

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