The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday by William H. Galperin

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

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Wordsworth’s Double Take

The History of Missed Opportunities ◽

10.11126/stanford/9781503600195.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

William H. Galperin

Keyword(s):

Historical Perspective ◽

Missed Opportunities ◽

Second Look ◽

The Everyday ◽

History Of ◽

Dorothy Wordsworth ◽

Poetic Practice ◽

Daily Writing

It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.

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The History of Missed Opportunities

10.2307/j.ctvqsdwzb ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

WILLIAM H. GALPERIN

Keyword(s):

Missed Opportunities ◽

History Of

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Congenital Toxoplasmosis: Missed Opportunities for Diagnosis and Prevention

Journal of Tropical Pediatrics ◽

10.1093/tropej/fmaa069 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Raquel Aitken Soares Mueller ◽

Ana Cristina Cisne Frota ◽

Daniela Durão Menna Barreto ◽

Daniela Pires Ferreira Vivacqua ◽

Gabriela Bueno Loria ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Antenatal Care ◽

Congenital Toxoplasmosis ◽

First Trimester ◽

University Hospital ◽

Serological Testing ◽

Missed Opportunities ◽

Clinic Appointment ◽

History Of ◽

Acute Toxoplasmosis ◽

Made In

Abstract Objectives Identify missed opportunities for the prevention and early diagnosis of congenital toxoplasmosis (CT) in infants followed up in a reference center for pediatric infectious diseases (PID) in Rio de Janeiro between January 2007 and December 2016. Methods Descriptive study including infants with CT, diagnosis established based on Brazil’s Ministry of Health’s criteria. All data regarding the infants and their mother’s prenatal care were collected from the medical records of the Instituto de Puericultura e Pediatria Martagão Gesteira (IPPMG)—a tertiary public pediatric university hospital. The study enrolled infants aged between 0 and 12 months followed up in the PID department of IPPMG and with confirmed infection by Toxoplasma gondii in the period between January 2007 and December 2016. All patients with diagnosis of CT registered in the PID database of the IPPMG and admitted in the above-mentioned period were included in the study. Patients whose records were not available, or who went to just one clinic appointment were excluded. Results The obstetric history of all 44 women, whose infants (45) were diagnosed with CT, was analyzed. Their median age was 22 years. None had undergone preconception serological testing for toxoplasmosis. Only 20 (45%) of them started antenatal care during the first trimester of gestation, a total of 24 (55%) had more than six antenatal care visits, and 16% of those did not undergo serological testing for toxoplasmosis. None were adequately informed of preventive measures. The diagnosis of acute toxoplasmosis was made in 50% of these pregnancies but 32% of the women were not treated. Only 10 children of these mothers were adequately screened and treated at birth. Conclusion Despite the existence of national recommendations, several opportunities were missed to prevent CT during the antenatal period and to diagnose and treat this condition in the neonatal period.

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