Epiphany Meaning and Examples

Epiphany Meaning and Examples An  Epiphany is a term in literary criticism for a sudden realization, a flash of recognition, in which someone or something is seen in a new light. In Stephen Hero (1904), Irish author James Joyce used the term epiphany to describe the moment when the soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant. The object achieves it epiphany. Novelist Joseph Conrad described epiphany as one of those rare moments of awakening in which everything [occurs] in a flash. Epiphanies may be evoked in works of nonfiction as well as in short stories and novels. The word epiphany comes from the Greek for a manifestation or showing forth. In Christian churches, the feast following the twelve days of Christmas (January 6) is called Epiphany because it celebrates the appearance of divinity (the Christ child) to the Wise Men. Examples of Literary Epiphanies Epiphanies are a common storytelling device because part of what makes a good story is a character who grows and changes. A sudden realization can signify a turning point for a character when they finally understand something that the story has been trying to teach them all along. It is often used well at the end of mystery novels when the saluteth finally receives the last clue that makes all the pieces of the puzzle make sense. A good novelist can often lead the readers to such epiphanies along with their characters.   Epiphany in the Short Story "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield In the story of the same name Miss ​B rill discovers such annihilation when her own identity as onlooker and imagined choreographer to the rest of her small world crumbles in the reality of loneliness. The imagined conversations she has with other people become, when overheard in reality, the onset of her destruction. A young couple on her park bench- the hero and the heroine of Miss Brills own fictive drama, just arrived from his fathers yacht . . . - are transformed by reality into two young people who cannot accept the aging woman who sits near them. The boy refers to her as that stupid old thing at the end of the bench and openly expresses the very question that Miss Brill has been trying so desperately to avoid through her Sunday charades in the park: Why does she come here at allwho wants her? Miss Brills epiphany forces her to forgo the usual slice of honeycake at the bakers on her way home, and home, like life, has changed. It is now a little dark room . . . like a cup board. Both life and home have become suffocating. Miss Brills loneliness is forced upon her in one transformative moment of acknowledgment of reality. (Karla Alwes, Katherine Mansfield. Modern British Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. by Vicki K. Janik and Del Ivan Janik. Greenwood, 2002) Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom's Epiphany in Rabbit, Run They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. Let me go first, Rabbit says. Til you calm down. His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesnt care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasnt heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfathers color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but hes fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. Thats it! he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, Thats it. (John Updike, Rabbit, Run. Alfred A. Knopf, 1960) The passage quoted from the first of John Updikes Rabbit novels describes an action in a contest, but it is the intensity of the moment, not its consequences, that [is] important (we never discover whether the hero won that particular hole). . . .In epiphanies, prose fiction comes closest to the verbal intensity of lyric poetry (most modern lyrics are in fact nothing but epiphanies); so epiphanic description is likely to be rich in figures of speech and sound. Updike is a writer prodigally gifted with the power of metaphoric speech. . . . When Rabbit turns to Eccles and cries triumphantly, Thats it! he is answering the ministers question about what is lacking in his marriage. . . . Perhaps in Rabbits cry of Thats it! we also hear an echo of the writers justifiable satisfaction at having revealed, through language, the radiant soul of a well-struck tee shot. (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction. Viking, 1993) Critical Observations on Epiphany It is a literary  critics job to analyze and discuss the ways authors use epiphanies in novels.   The critics function is to find ways of recognizing and judging the epiphanies of literature which, like those of life itself (Joyce borrowed his use of the term epiphany directly from theology), are partial disclosures or revelations, or spiritual matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. (Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, 2nd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) The definition Joyce gave of epiphany in Stephen Hero depends on a familiar world of objects of use- a clock one passes every day. The epiphany restores the clock to itself in one act of seeing, of experiencing it for the first time. (Monroe Engel, Uses of Literature. Harvard University Press, 1973)

How to Use the STDEV.S Function in Excel

How to Use the STDEV.S Function in Excel The standard deviation is a descriptive statistic that tells us about the dispersion- or spread- of a set of data. Just like using many other formulas in statistics, the calculation of a standard deviation is a fairly tedious process to do by hand. Fortunately, statistical software speeds up this calculation considerably. Statistical Software There are many software packages that do statistical calculations, but one of the most readily accessible programs is Microsoft Excel. Although we could use a step-by-step process using the formula for a standard deviation for our calculation, it is possible to complete this calculation using one Excel function. Populations and Samples Before moving on to the specific commands used to calculate a standard deviation, it is important to distinguish between a population and a sample. A population is the set of every individual being studied. A sample is a subset of a population. The difference between these two concepts means the difference in how a standard deviation is calculated. Standard Deviation in Excel To use Excel to determine the sample standard deviation of a set of quantitative data, type these numbers into a group of adjacent cells in a spreadsheet. In an empty cell type what is in the quotation marks STDEV.S(  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹Following this type the location of the cells where the data is and then close the parentheses with ​). This can alternatively be done by use of the following procedure. If our data is located in cells A2 to A10, then (omitting the quotation marks) STDEV.S(A2:A10) will obtain the sample standard deviation of the entries in cells A2 to A10. Rather than typing the location of the cells where our data is located, we can use a different method. This involves typing the first half of the formula STDEV.S(, and clicking on the first cell where the data is located. A colored box will appear around the cell that we have selected. We then drag the mouse until we have selected all of the cells that contain our data. We finish this by closing the parentheses. Cautions There a few cautions that must be made in using Excel for this calculation. We need to make sure that we do not mix up out functions. The Excel formula STDEV.S closely resembles STDEV.P. The former is typically the necessary formula for our calculations, as it is used when our data is a sample from a population. In the event that our data constitutes the entire population being studied, then we would want to use STDEV.P. Another thing that we must be careful about concerns the number of data values. Excel is limited by the number of values that can be entered into the standard deviation function. All of the cells that we use for our calculation must be numerical. We must be sure that error cells and cells with text in them are not entered into the standard deviation formula.