WHAT IS “CONTEXT,” AS USED BY GLADWELL? HOW DOES STOUT UTILIZE THE IDEA OF CONTEXT IN HER OWN ESSAY?

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Description:
Reading:
? Malcolm Gladwell, “The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime.”
? Martha Stout, “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday.”

In “The Power of Context,” Malcolm Gladwell provides us with a lengthy psychological profile of Bernie Goetz. Traditionally, it seems we tend to look for all of the classic “signs” of a diseased mind that Gladwell offers up to explain crime and other atrocities. As we remember, though, Gladwell is not content with this answer. “[T]here is a world of difference between inclined toward violence and actually committing a violent act,” he writes. To make that leap, “something extra, something additional” is needed; Gladwell locates that “extra” in the Power of Context, one of the concepts used to organize his essay (161).

Martha Stout also offers up a number of psychological profiles in “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” but as a psychologist, she understandably puts more stock in the value of one"s past experiences than Gladwell. At the same time, however, based on the title of the book the selection comes from (The Myth of Sanity), she, too, is trying to debunk what she sees as an old-fashioned idea, and trying to get at new ways of thinking about old problems.

WHAT IS “CONTEXT,” AS USED BY GLADWELL? HOW DOES STOUT UTILIZE THE IDEA OF CONTEXT IN HER OWN ESSAY?

Other questions to consider: In what forms does “context” appear? Does she bring in to play new ways of thinking about the concept that go beyond Gladwell"s usage? Moreover,

HOW DOES THE POWER OF CONTEXT, AS YOU UNDERSTAND IT, FACTOR INTO WHAT STOUT REFERS TO AS “DISSOCIATIVE EXPERIENCES”?