The thesis aims to investigate the relationship Comenius to Scripture and how to work with him when he wrote his work The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.

É objetivo deste trabalho, compreender como a vaidade física feminina influencia o consumo de produtos e serviços de beleza. A partir de uma metodologia qualitativa baseada em entrevistas, motivações e estratégias de consumo utilizadas pelas mulheres na modificação e melhoria da aparência física foram reveladas e organizadas em um esquema conceitual. Em termos de consumo, a vaidade física mostrou-se um conceito ambivalente podendo originar um construto positivo, a vaidade equilibrada, e um construto negativo, a vaidade extrema. A natureza controversa dos resultados encontrados motivou uma discussão final sobre os limites éticos das práticas de marketing que influenciam o auto-conceito feminino sobre beleza e aparência física. / It is the objective of this work to comprehend how the physical vanity influences the consumption of beauty products and services. Using a qualitative methodology based on interviews, consumption motivations and strategies employed by women in the search for modifying and enhancing physical appearance were revealed and organized in a conceptual schema. In terms of consumption, the physical vanity turned up to be an ambiguous concept, originating a positive construct, balanced vanity, and a negative construct, extreme vanity. The controversial nature of the results motivated a final discussion about the ethical limits of the marketing practices that influence the female self concept about beauty and physical appearance.

É objetivo deste trabalho, compreender como a vaidade física feminina influencia o consumo de produtos e serviços de beleza. A partir de uma metodologia qualitativa baseada em entrevistas, motivações e estratégias de consumo utilizadas pelas mulheres na modificação e melhoria da aparência física foram reveladas e organizadas em um esquema conceitual. Em termos de consumo, a vaidade física mostrou-se um conceito ambivalente podendo originar um construto positivo, a vaidade equilibrada, e um construto negativo, a vaidade extrema. A natureza controversa dos resultados encontrados motivou uma discussão final sobre os limites éticos das práticas de marketing que influenciam o auto-conceito feminino sobre beleza e aparência física. / It is the objective of this work to comprehend how the physical vanity influences the consumption of beauty products and services. Using a qualitative methodology based on interviews, consumption motivations and strategies employed by women in the search for modifying and enhancing physical appearance were revealed and organized in a conceptual schema. In terms of consumption, the physical vanity turned up to be an ambiguous concept, originating a positive construct, balanced vanity, and a negative construct, extreme vanity. The controversial nature of the results motivated a final discussion about the ethical limits of the marketing practices that influence the female self concept about beauty and physical appearance.

É objetivo deste trabalho, compreender como a vaidade física feminina influencia o consumo de produtos e serviços de beleza. A partir de uma metodologia qualitativa baseada em entrevistas, motivações e estratégias de consumo utilizadas pelas mulheres na modificação e melhoria da aparência física foram reveladas e organizadas em um esquema conceitual. Em termos de consumo, a vaidade física mostrou-se um conceito ambivalente podendo originar um construto positivo, a vaidade equilibrada, e um construto negativo, a vaidade extrema. A natureza controversa dos resultados encontrados motivou uma discussão final sobre os limites éticos das práticas de marketing que influenciam o auto-conceito feminino sobre beleza e aparência física. / It is the objective of this work to comprehend how the physical vanity influences the consumption of beauty products and services. Using a qualitative methodology based on interviews, consumption motivations and strategies employed by women in the search for modifying and enhancing physical appearance were revealed and organized in a conceptual schema. In terms of consumption, the physical vanity turned up to be an ambiguous concept, originating a positive construct, balanced vanity, and a negative construct, extreme vanity. The controversial nature of the results motivated a final discussion about the ethical limits of the marketing practices that influence the female self concept about beauty and physical appearance.

Pierre Loti est encore considéré par bien des lecteurs comme désuet, voire complètement démodé. Or le démodé est en réalité une caractéristique essentielle de l’homme et de son style. Cette étude démontre que le temps est une clef de lecture fondamentale pour aborder l’œuvre de Loti et comprendre une esthétique qui trahit sa relation au monde, plus temporelle que géographique. Loti n’est rien moins qu’obsédé par le temps, par un temps qui engendre inexorablement la perte – une perte tout à fait ambivalente puisqu’elle est positive dans sa négativité, désirée comme redoutée. Le passé est rassurant parce qu’intangible. Cette recherche explore l’enfance de Loti comme souvenir rétrospectif, construction littéraire et création d’un mythe personnel. L’enfance est le paradis perdu que Loti regrettera toujours avec une profonde mélancolie, tandis que ses voyages ultérieurs formeront une recherche d’Éden, mais d’un Éden qui apparaît toujours déjà en ruine. L’essai propose aussi une analyse de l’élaboration d’une identité hétéronymique : c’est par les pouvoirs de la littérature, du transvestissement, du divertissement nocturne et des scénographies du moi que Julien Viaud devient Pierre Loti. Ce nouveau soi, concourant et non concurrent de l’autre, doit être vu comme une construction comblant les pertes de sa propre vie. De manière similaire, la mort de son frère aîné détermine sa recherche d’une mâle altérité, tant fictive que réelle, tout comme elle innerve son œuvre de nouvelles disparitions qui rejouent l’originelle. L’étude analyse également la mise en scène de l’échec dans différents romans de l’auteur, la mort des héros amenant à une démonstration de la fascination de Loti pour la mort. Enfin, l’œuvre de Loti est passée au crible de la mélancolie de son regard, de la nostalgie de son écriture et de la fadeur de son style, dans le but de révéler l’ampleur de sa prédilection pour le passé, toujours préféré au présent ou à l’avenir. Et cela parce que le passé, même chimérique, est le seul refuge contre la vanité de l’existence. / Pierre Loti is still considered by most readers as old-fashioned. But being old-fashioned, or even moreout-of-fashion is an essential characteristic of Loti’s mind and stylistics. This study aims at showing how time isa fundamental key in reading Pierre Loti’s books and in understanding his aesthetics, which betray his rathertemporal than geographic relationship to the world. Loti is not less than obsessed by time: time goes by in apermanent flow that generates loss – an ambivalent loss which is both positive and negative, desired and feared.The past is comforting because intangible. This research explores Loti’s childhood as a retrospective memory, aliterary construction and a mythologizing of self. Childhood is a paradise lost which Loti will always regret witha deep melancholy as his own travels can be seen later on as a quest for Eden, but for an Eden that will alwaysappear already ruined. Then, the essay suggests an analysis of the construction of a heteronymic identity: JulienViaud becomes Pierre Loti by the powers of literature, travesty, parties’ entertainment and scenographies of theself. This other self, completing, not competing with the other one, can be considered as a construction fulfillingthe losses of his own life. In the same manner, the death of his older brother determines his search of fictive andreal manly otherness, as well as it innervates his work with further disappearances replaying the original one.Therefore, the essay highlights the staging of failure in different novels of the author, the death of heroes leading to an explanation of Loti’s fascination for death. At last, Loti’s work is being looked over through thecriteria of melancholy of sight, nostalgia of writing and blandness of stylistics, in order to unveil the width of hisfondness for things past, always preferred to the present ones, or to events to come. An this because the past –even if chimerical – is Loti’s only refuge against his feeling of the vanity of life.

The academic publishing sector in South Africa is facing many changes and challenges in a post- 1994 democracy. Most of these changes were brought about by the Higher Education Act No 101 of 1997. Challenges and new trends include new business and threats from multinational corporations; a limited buying market at higher education level; a need for localised content; new emerging technologies in publishing and knowledge distribution; the merging of 36 higher education institutions into 22; escalating book production costs and book prices; a non-book buying and book reading culture; illegal photocopying and widespread copyright infringement; changing student and lecturer profiles including the language of instruction; increasing pressure on academics to publish research; inefficient student loan schemes; decreasing library acquisition budgets and the transformation of the publishing industry itself in terms of BBBEE. Within the midst of all these challenges, publishers are faced with a new trend, that of selfpublishing of academic textbooks, which lecturers then prescribe to their own group of students. Self-publishing implies that authors undertake all processes related to publishing on their own, including the financial risk of publishing a book. There is a multitude of literature available on self-publishing, but very little focuses on this trend within the academic environment. A literature survey of self-publishing provided various reasons and conditions for the existence of the phenomenon. The researcher made use of two questionnaires that were sent to academic campus bookshops and academic self-publishing authors. From the results of these two surveys it is evident that academic self-publishing is an increasing trend in the higher education environment of South Africa. Reasons for self-publishing collected from the literature survey were supported by the empirical research findings from the two surveys. The main reasons for self-publishing in the academic environment include financial incentives; a volatile author-publisher relationship; issues of copyright and control; possible rejection suffered by authors; technological advances and a sense of community service among academics and lecturing staff. The study was able to prove the existence of academic self-publishing in the higher education environment of South Africa. Academic self-publishing is most apparent in the academic fields of Business, Economics and Management Sciences to the extent that it could have far-reaching financial impact on markets that are traditionally lucrative for commercial publishers. Commercial publishers are encouraged to engage with author associations and seek out possible new alternatives to satisfying author needs in a changing market place. / Dissertation (MIS)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Information Science / unrestricted

Jack Kerouac's spontaneous prose method was inspired in part by his use of drugs while writing. While there is abundant biographical evidence that Kerouac used drugs frequently, little attention has been paid to their effects on the development of his style. This thesis attempts to demonstrate that the altered states of consciousness produced by Kerouac's drug use should be considered in conjunction with historical, cultural, and biographical forces in tracing the evolution of Kerouac's creative growth. As a member of the Beat Generation, Kerouac used drugs both as a social statement of rebellion and for artistic insight. In fact, he consciously entered into a well-established tradition of writers looking to drugs as modern-day muses. Within this legacy, drugs were commonly viewed as chemical gateways to a transcendental realm of visionary truth that the artists could enter and return with, thus becoming a literary seer. Kerouac, who believed that the ossification of standardized written English into rigid forms of grammar and sentence construction curtailed its potential for complete communication, sought a prose style that would allow for a maximum of authenticity and fidelity to organic thought with a minimum of revision. Kerouac used drugs like amphetamine, marijuana, and alcohol, each of which offered unique modes of perception, to enter into new frameworks of consciousness, and then recreated these altered states in writing. These three substances—amphetamine, marijuana, and alcohol—served as the basis in the development of Kerouac's style. Amphetamine, in the form of the over-the-counter drug Benzedrine, gave Kerouac the energy for his legendary typing marathons, allowing him to write On the Road in three weeks and The Subterraneans in three days. While writing On the Road in particular, Kerouac began formulating the stylistic approach that he subsequently dubbed "spontaneous prose." Its basic tenants, including a de-emphasis on revision, limited punctuation, and long sentences, were encouraged by Benzedrine's stimulant properties, which tended to focus Kerouac's attention on the exterior world of events, temporality, and movement. His amphetamine-induced texts attempt to communicate accurately by confessing the minutia of surface details. Kerouac's spontaneous style, however, soon evolved into the "sketching" technique seen in Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax, partially as a result of his marijuana-induced desire to share subjective perceptions truthfully. Rather than focusing on the exterior world, the marijuana texts look inward for authenticity. Marijuana helped Kerouac facilitate this inner orientation by its pharmacodynamic tendency to induce dream-like, associative states; when reproduced textually, these impressions seemed to resemble the unconscious structures of Kerouac's mind, which he shared hoping for complete communication via the universality of shared experience. Kerouac used both the amphetamine and marijuana modes to varying degrees and interchangeably for most of his career, and with the first section of Desolation Angels, written in sobriety, achieved their greatest synthesis, demonstrating that drugs were not the props to his style, but rather the impetus—even in the absence of drugs, Kerouac's prose retained its own essential, idiosyncratic features. Finally, in the latter part of Kerouac's career, alcohol proved that drugs could also negatively affect his style, as shown in Big Sur and Vanity of Duluoz. Their return to a plainer prose—some would say poorer prose—was no doubt the result of rampant alcohol abuse, and the unfortunate end to Kerouac's life and writing.

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Alors que les individus dans la société contemporaine sont unis non par une propriété mais par un devoir et par une dette, par un manque, par une limite prenant la forme d’une charge pour celui qui en est affecté, la postmodernité rend à la mort et à l’absence toute sa densité. À travers la répétition, entre jubilation et désespérance, les artistes figurent la temporalité de l’épreuve par une écriture qui travaille l’instant. Ils racontent ces évènements infimes qui sont les plus fragiles, les plus précaires, ayant pourtant une forte efficacité. Il s’agira ici d’étudier les nouvelles postures devant l’événement historique, quand l’artiste se tient au plus singulier. / While individuals in contemporary society are united not by property but by a duty and a debt, a lack, by a limit taking the shape of a responsibility for the one who is affected, postmodernism returns to death and absence all its density. Through repetition, between jubilation and despair, the artist represents the temporality of the event. His writing works the moment. He tells these tiny events that are the most fragile, the most precarious, having nevertheless a strong efficiency. This thesis will try to study the new postures in front of the historic event, when the artist stands in the most singular.

Still life arise from interactions related to a particular situation, location and experience. They are composed of objects that are located on a given place, of my own and borrowed or donated by my "partners". Reflect the time memory. They are a physical reminder of the experience. Still Life is manipulated, staged, composed of various artifacts that are symbolic bearer of facts that preceded them, Images may affect the perception of emotions associated with the concept of beauty, transience, decay, evoking a feeling of emptiness, to reflect the time - an irreversible momentum. Photos show a banal, everyday objects, often so obvious and neglected, What remains for us ... What remains ... What goes around ... What is gone ... Similar scenarios acquire different meanings, finding what is already absent,