Standards of female beauty have long been a source of debate within Western society. Determining who dictates these standards of beauty and how these standards inform individual value seemingly become more and more determined by the individuals themselves, yet there remains a high value placed on white, thin and cisgender females. This standard, although increasingly challenged remains the default for beauty in our society and within our literary culture. This thesis works to expose two modern Young Adult texts, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines and Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, for the ways in which they continue to reinforce these standards of beauty in women. While presenting challenges to these stereotypes, the standards set out in these texts ultimately portray women as defined and controlled by men. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges) Dept. of East Asian Studies, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-221).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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M.A. / When fighting against the dominance of instrumental reason, aesthetic consciousness always admitted its allegiance to ‘another state of being,’ i.e., to the explosive break with the continual inertia of linear social development. In the literature written at the turn of the 20th century this was symbolized in the ‘life of danger’ that contrasted with the normality of ordinary bourgeois life. This study shows that Baudrillard no longer believes in ‘another state of being’ with explosive force. In Baudrillard's theory of simulation, the crisis of overproduction in capitalism is to be understood as the total shift of production into reproduction. His position has consequences for the idea of the catastrophic nature of the present social situation and for the aesthetic means with which it can finally be thought. Baudrillard calls the catastrophic effect of the threat emanating from simulation an implosion not an explosion, it results from the fact that under pressure from a merely simulated reality, every social energy is expended internally in the play of signifiers, evaporating in some catastrophic process. His aesthetic fascination with events does not seem to have disappeared completely in the process. For Baudrillard, on September 11 2001, the terrorists countered simulation with simulation itself. This is what makes it a true event. What is unthinkable in this event is the use of death in a staged exchange where a whole culture could be attacked. The attack brings back death to a world that pretends it is not there. If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy. Baudrillard encounters an indifference, a void and death at the heart of thought. This leads to apocalyptic tones. For Baudrillard, one only attains to thought when one interiorizes the limit and displaces it. Thinking no longer works except by breaking down and dismantling itself. For Deleuze, on the other hand, to dissent is to affirm other modes of life. Deleuze constructs an entire philosophy of life – conceived as a philosophy of difference. This enables Deleuze to have an affirmative notion of the aesthetic impulse: the artwork as an unexpected event that actualizes the virtual. The virtual is not a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of difference (and of life) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the time of life. Pure, virtual being is real and qualified through the internal process of differentiation. Being differs with itself. It does not look outside itself for another or a force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core, from ‘the explosive internal force that life carries within itself’ (Deleuze, 1988: 105). Deleuze conceives of a discrete art with metamorphic force. Deleuze, unlike Baudrillard, manages to pull back from the capitalist void and construct a ‘desiring machine’ to manipulate capitalist simulacra.

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetics in Japanese literary discourse, with attention to the emergence of new cross-cultural perspectives, from the late 1880s through the 1920s. Modernity in Japan was marked by the rapid and often jarring juxtapositions of new techniques and ideas from Western sources against older Japanese traditions, and my project considers how literary authors envisioned and interpreted this cultural eclecticism. In particular, I focus on their reactions to Western paintings and sculptures. The visual arts seemed to offer viewers a direct access to `universal' aesthetic values though their non-linguistic nature, and thus appealed to those seeking to attain cosmopolitan perspectives. Through analyzing Japanese writers' literary responses to foreign artworks, and their ideas on vision as an avenue of information, I investigate the changing nature of representation and signification in this new age, and the role of literary language within it. I take as the main subjects of my dissertation Mori Ogai (1862-1922), the members of the Shirakaba School such as Mushanokôji Saneatsu (1885-1976) and Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) during the period of their eponymous publication Shirakaba (1910-1923), and Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892-1927). Each of these authors has been both praised and denigrated for the high-minded idealism and aestheticism of his works, in no small part because of a marked tendency to employ foreign literary and artistic references. I argue that despite assessments that their works had been composed at an intellectual remove from the social and material contexts in which they lived, the ideal of aesthetics they had upheld as a fixed and transcendental principle that allowed for their appreciation of imported images and ideas of beauty, in fact catalyzed their critical assessments of their own discursive positions within Japanese society. These writers explored the links and the disjunctions between their artistic ideals--which spanned across disparate cultural and national boundaries--and their more immediate awareness of themselves as citizens of modern Japan. They discovered that for them, any attempt at cosmopolitanism had to take place within the contexts of their Japanese realities, and any thoughts about it had to be voiced through the medium of Japanese literary language. Even visual images could not ultimately elide the viewer's conceptual frameworks, and were interpreted in light of them. What resulted was thus a distinctly hybrid outlook in which their conceptions of Japan, the world, their individual identities, and their creative and critical productions, were indelibly linked with each other.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-235).

Thesis (doctoral)--Jāmiʻat Tūnis, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 410-432).