Tom Wolfe was a founding father of New Journalism, revolutionizing journalistic reporting by introducing literary tools of storytelling. The literary influence on New Journalism is well-covered by journalism scholars, but Wolfe was also a fiction writer, and as such he actively tried to rally his generation of fiction writers behind him for a New Social Novel, more grounded in reality and reporting. His post-postmodern novels also amalgamate journalism and literature, but how and to what extent journalism influenced his fiction writing is a story yet untold.  Wolfe provided a normative blueprint for how to achieve verisimilitude in fiction, in his literary manifesto: “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”. At about the same time, he started writing the novel A Man in Full. Using A Man in Full as an application of his ideas of the ideal novel, this thesis investigates how Wolfe constructed the reality effect in his fiction and foregrounds the origins of Tom Wolfe’s literary voice, focusing on onomatopoetic language, statuspheric minutiae, expressive punctuation, and Wolfe’s characteristic wake-the-dead prose style. I argue that Wolfe did reinvent verisimilitude in literary realism, but not in the way that he intended, through reporting and status details, but rather through language.

First published in 1989 in Spanish and then in 1992 in English, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate is one of the best known Mexican literary works in the United States. Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, Esquivel's novel has inspired great diversity of critical analysis among critics and scholars. Based on the author's comment regarding her intention to tell entertaining stories, critic Jay Corwin warns against the search for hidden layers to her work. Using as a framework Barthes's notion of the "death of the author" as well as cultural theory's argument that "discourse writes through the author", this work unfolds a diverse array of discourses, such as that of feminism, patriarchy, and parody, that liberate Like Water for Chocolate from the despotism of a single authority controlling the truth of the text and show that the readers are capable of intervening in the work's meaning.

Denna uppsats tar en blick på hur smak och klass speglas i vår samtida medievärld som präglas av populärkulturella referenser. Genom en kvalitativ semiotisk analys har Klarnas reklamfilm Get Smoooth (2019) analyserats utifrån Roland Barthes semiotiska teorier om hur mening tillskrivs genom visuella koder, i samband med Pierre Bourdieus teorier om hur klass och smak reflekteras genom visuella medel. Här riktar även undersökningen fokus på hur färgen rosa kan besitta delade meningar, beroende på frågor kring genus och sexualitet. Klarnas reklamfilm använder den amerikanska rapartisten Snoop Dogg som frontfigur i en fiktiv, luxuös rosaklädd värld som ska representera deras ekonomiska kredittjänster. Med hjälp av den utvalda teorin och relaterad forskning så studeras det valda materialet för att belysa en större förståelse för hur smak och klasstillhörighet blir representerat genom media och dess effekter. Undersökningen visar på flera semiotiska tecken för två klasstillhörigheter: låg och högklass. Här var Bourdieus teorier ett stöd i avkodningen av dessa tecken och hur kampanjen kan kopplas till ett kulturellt kapital och uttrycka av smak som kopplas till det två olika klasstillhörigheterna. Resultatet av undersökningen är att Klarnas reklamfilm kan ses som ett som ett bevis på det Baumann menar med att våra preferenser om smak inom samhällets fält är i konstant förändring. Slutligen förs det en diskussion om hur rosa har central påverkan i hur smak uttrycken kopplas till det populärkulturella samhället vilket kopplas till senare kritik till Bourdieu.

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The portfolio of compositions comprises six pieces: a chamber opera, an orchestral piece and four shorter chamber works. These pieces are diverse and distinct from one another but collectively explore aesthetic tensions relating to tonality, aura and ontology. The largest piece is a chamber opera setting Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which has been flexibly scored as a series of fragments in order to reflect the quality of her text. The remaining pieces draw influence from poetry, landscape and the environment. They all encompass a series of material contrasts but attempt to simply contain these tensions in some way, leaving them partially unresolved. The thesis is a re-assessment of the music of the Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov, in particular, his 'metamusic' approach to composition that treats pre-existing styles as a form of musical metaphor. Through a series of comparisons with landscape and photography, I offer new vantage points for approaching the aesthetic issues present in his work, relating to aura, imitation and historical reference. The metaphors of landscape and photography might appear far removed from his work, but mediated by the work of the artist Gerhard Richter, offer a basis for critically analysing Silvestrov's approach. Furthermore, by drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and the geographer, Stephan Harrison, I demonstrate how concepts from other disciplines can be recast in order to be effective for approaching both Silvestrov and Richter. As a form of conclusion, I consider the role of photography in the production of CD covers and how this relates to the reception of Silvestrov's metamusic in a commercial setting.

The purpose of this study is to examine a brand’s green marketing and its consumers’ perception of it in order to compare these views. The idea is to find a potential gap and what effect it may have on the brand. A case study has therefore been made with the grocery market brand Coop with focus on organic food. The material used consists of texts from Coop’s website to represent their brand. The topic of all texts is organic production and its relation to Coop. To analyze the consumers’ perception of the brand, interviews has been made. Lloyd F. Bitzer’s theory of the rhetorical situation and Roland Barthes’ theory of myths, adapted to rhetoric and argumentation by Eric Bengtson, have been applied. The findings show that there is a gap between Coop and the consumers’ perception of it: Coop has an elaborate myth in all their texts about being the protectors of the Earth, while the consumers only regard the company as somewhat aware of the environment. This stands even though the company and the consumers both believe sustainability to be an important issue.

This diploma thesis discusses modern myths that appear in the selected audiovisual commercials. The commercials are part of the advertising campaign for a Galaxy Note 3 device produced by Samsung Company. The campaign was launched in the fall of 2013 and continued through the spring 2014. As Samsung is also one of the official partners of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, some of the analyzed content is dedicated to the relationship between the two. Semiotics and marketing communication provide a broad theoretical framework for the later semiotic analysis. The chapter on semiotics discusses the modern perspective on the sign theory, offering Ferdinand de Saussure's and Charles Sanders Peirce's points of view. The main focus of the thesis is, however, on the process of the so-called secondary signification and modern myths creation introduced by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies. The marketing communication chapter then introduces several theoretical starting points in the field, various marketing models, and the communication mix with the focus on advertising, its components and potential psychological effects. In the final part, selected commercials are introduced along with the plot description and a semiotic analysis of the environment, characters, individual elements, images, colors and the...

Main focus of my Master's Thesis is to conduct a research of mythological elements and themes that appear within the narrative structure of selected episodes of BBC television series Doctor Who, deriving from the initial hypothesis that such mythological patterns are still recurring and repeating even in the structure of stories produced by modern show-business industries, which renders their content intrinsically more attractive for any audience. We analyse selected episodes from both arks of the Doctor Who's story individually - the old one, which began in the sixties, and the new one, which is considered to be a reboot of the original series and aired in 2005. The originally intended educative element of the series and its sudden disappearance is also a part of our research. Main analysis of our paper consists of a semiotic analysis of the text of the television series utilizing the point of view of the critical reader that was introduced by Umberto Eco, and deriving from the definition of modern myth that appears in works of Roland Barthes, archaic myth, studied for example by Carl Lévi- Strauss, and Jungian archetypes.