<p>Although many perspectives suggest that authenticity is important for well-being, people do not always have direct access to the psychological processes that produce their behaviors and, thus, are not able to judge whether they are behaving consistently with their personality, attitudes, values, motives, and goals. Even so, people experience subjective feelings of authenticity and inauthenticity, raising the question of factors that influence people’s judgments of whether they are being authentic. The present studies used descriptive, correlational, experimental, and experience sampling designs to examine possible influences on self-judgments of authenticity, including the congruence between people’s behavior and inner dispositions, the positivity of the behavior, their personal beliefs about authenticity, features of the interaction, and trait authenticity. Studies 1A and 1B examined the role of people’s beliefs about authenticity in self-judgments of authenticity. Studies 2A and 2B investigated the criteria that people use to judge their behavior as authentic versus inauthentic and challenged those criteria to see whether self-perceived authenticity was affected. And, Study 3 used an experience sampling design to study people’s experiences of state authenticity in daily life. Together the studies offer insights into the determinants of self-perceived authenticity and show that many factors that influence people’s feelings of authenticity are peripheral, if not irrelevant, to actual authenticity.</p> / Dissertation

When do children begin to realize that the authenticity of an object is not inherent to an object itself, but instead depends on the information one has about the object in question? In two studies I investigated elementary school children’s reasoning about authenticity violations. How we reason about authenticity violations, or cases in which the purported history of an item is shown to be false, is important in that it provides an example of how people can reason about the underlying, non-obvious features of objects. Participants (N= 64, ages 7-9) were first asked to rate the value of a series of everyday objects using a Likert scale (one to ten). Next, information about the individual history of these objects was presented and participants were asked to re-rate them and provide explanations for their ratings. Using a between-subjects design, participants were then informed that the information they had been given about the objects’ histories was the result of intentional deception (Study One) or a mistake (Study Two) and were again asked to re-rate the objects and provide explanations for their ratings. Results from value ratings and explanations from both studies indicate that elementary school children are sensitive to the authentic nature of objects as well as intentional and accidental violations of authenticity. I propose that reasoning about associative essences, a novel term described in this paper, can be productively examined using violation of authenticity paradigms, providing insight into the development of reasoning about authenticity. / text

This dissertation examines the politics of labor, gender, and heritage in Turkey's carpet industry, drawing on thirteen months of comparative, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among carpet weavers, manufacturers, designers, exporters, and tourists. The project contributes to the debates on globalization of work and labor, in particular stressing the importance of gendered and place-specific analyses of discourses, practices and material flows. It also argues for a historically situated, genealogical understanding of agency and subject formation through the nature of relationships that develop between the actors participating in the Turkish carpet industry and the ways in which both transparency and secrecy are employed as strategies of survival within diverse sites of production and sale by culturally-defined agents.As Turkey implements social reforms vying for membership to the European Union, the culmination point of the modernization and secularization processes that started even before the formation of the nation-state, the structural economic shifts result in increasingly complex gendered power relations and negotiations in Turkey's carpet industry. This dissertation argues that a detailed analysis of Turkish carpet industry in global economic competition discloses that globalization needs to be understood as a productive discursive practice that is heavily implicated in disciplinary programs and in the ubiquity of power politics that define and justify productivity and liberalism as emancipatory universals to be emulated and ultimately reached. Yet, as this study shows, both men and women taking part in the Turkish carpet industry actively participate in several balancing acts that traversed presupposed boundaries such as public and private, informal and formal and were experienced in thresholds that constantly questioned these naturalized boundaries. Investment in fictive kinship ties as well as friendships proposed relations that depended on networks of allegiances assembled with bonds of obligation and proper ethical conduct, which resisted easy incorporation into globalist, liberal narratives of "free" individuals and workers dis-embedded from the local and assembled into the global.

This thesis analyzes elocutionary theory and practice on a national, literary, and individual level, placing emphasis on the ways in which the eighteenth century treatises of elocutionist Thomas Sheridan address, and ultimately promote, speaking as both a public (or performative) and private (or authentic) act. Moreover, the thesis extends a consideration of the impact of elocutionary theory on various historical moments throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. Beginning with the works of elocutionist Thomas Sheridan and concluding with an analysis of recent pedagogical theories and narratives within the field of composition studies, this thesis also defines the impact of Sheridan's theories on the construction of Irish national identity. It presents nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish theatre as a compelling case study in order to argue that performance?a key theoretical concept in elocutionary theory?remains essential to the study and investigation of voice in the contemporary English classroom. Focusing on the dramatic works of Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brian Friel, this thesis contends that Irish drama, in addition to presenting a forceful illustration of the ways in which Sheridan's elocutionary theories have been adapted and challenged on the national and civic level, provides current scholars access to recent dramatic representations of authenticity and voice as well as the virtues/pitfalls of performativity. Wilde, Shaw and Friel specifically present linguistic performance as a process of negotiation and exchange, using the stage to reflect and construct Irish national and civic identity. Each playwright offers a lens through which to reevaluate ongoing debates over language acquisition, particularly as such debates arise within the context of composition studies. Through a careful examination of elocutionary theory and its various influences across a variety of historical moments, this study encourages contemporary composition scholars and pedagogues to reconsider the role of authenticity and performance within the writing classroom, prompting students and teachers to explore writing as an expression of both the public and private self. In doing so, this thesis argues that scholars and teachers will become better equipped to address discussions of voice, authenticity and performance in their writing classrooms.

Addressing the meaning of Martin Heidegger's much-discussed concept of 'authenticity',this study challenges the view, put forward by Charles Guignon and others, that that concept chiefly concerns the significance that an individual life can acquire. Emphasizing the crucial distinction between relational and transcendant meaning, the study sees that distinction as critical to Heidegger's treatment of authenticity, and, more broadly, to the manner in which authenticity figures in the situating of Being and Time in the general context of nihilism and belief Drawing on arguments put forward by Hubert Dreyfus, and especially attuned to Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger, the study repositions the concept at the point where Heidegger's existential analytic and the all too human desire for deeper meaning meet. The result serves at once to clarify the concept and refine understanding of its place in larger histories.

Sleepwalk, Dance, Repeat is a one-act play with existentialist themes such as absurdity, death, and authenticity. Existentialism deals with subjective human experience in a meaningless, incomprehensible world. We are condemned to label everything around us, but the world is such that we can never be satisfied with our labels because they do not capture individuality. Everyone, to some degree, feels the need to understand what's going on, but we are always missing some piece of the puzzle. Thus, absurdity is the normal state of affairs for us. It is the result of our trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. The protagonist, Rose, is an existentialist hero in that she gradually accepts the inability to comprehend. My goal in writing this play was to breathe new life into existentialist ideas and introduce them to others in a way that sparks significant introspection.

Most people seem to have the intuition that self-deception is always and obviously wrong. In this thesis, I make the case that under certain circumstances, self-deception can actually do a great deal of good and ought to be morally permissible – especially in cases where it would be life-threatening, dehumanizing, or cruel to insist on complete authenticity. I argue that self-deception can be rational and that it can also sometimes be morally permissible to allow the self-deception of others to go unchallenged, especially in cases where the opportunity to exercise compassion, empathy, and kindness towards each other takes precedence over a concern for truth. I then confront self-deception’s staunchest opponents, the Existentialists, who maintain that self-deception is never morally permissible because it conflicts with their supreme value, authenticity. I focus specifically on the work of Nietzsche and Sartre and identify the various problems that arise from their objections to self-deception. I conclude this thesis with some suggestions as to why so many people might have come to believe that authenticity is the supreme value, when a closer investigation suggests that it probably is not.

This dissertation intends to study the quest for the authentic life in both Aldous Huxley¡¦s Brave New World and George Orwell¡¦s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this dissertation, I attempt to examine how Huxley and Orwell criticize the modern trend toward dehumanization and how both writers assert the value of the authentic life in their individual dystopian novels. In the twentieth century, the rise of totalitarianism and the development of science and technology threaten the independence of the individual. In their respective dystopian novels, both Huxley and Orwell reflect this crisis of the death of individuality in the modern world and warn us against it by portraying the quest of the characters for an individual meaningful life. On the other hand, the rise of existentialism also reflects the human desire to live a life of authenticity in this excruciating modern condition. Philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre all try to assert the value of the individual authentic life in this modern world where traditional values seem no longer sufficient to guide the individual in his life. Thus, it seems that the four authors Heidegger, Sartre, Huxley and Orwell all share the concern for the freedom of humans in the modern world. To them, an authentic individual life has a value in itself. It overrides the past utopian concern for rational order that overlooks the freedom and independence of the individual. The introduction focuses on presenting the major tents of Heidegger¡¦s and Sartre¡¦s ideas on authenticity. In his Being and Time, Heidegger mentions the characteristics of a life of fallen-ness, the individualizing effects of anxiety, the call of conscience and the authentic life. And in his Being and Nothingness, and Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre emphasizes the freedom of the individual to define himself through his own free choice of actions. In their individual philosophical works, both of them emphasize the freedom of the individual to take the initiative to create an authentic life. Chapter two focuses on a comparison between three works, Plato¡¦s The Republic, Huxley¡¦s Brave New World and Orwell¡¦s Nineteen Eighty-four. In my discussion of their similarities and differences, we try to point out both Huxley¡¦s and Orwell¡¦s reflections on the modern world and their implied criticism of Plato¡¦s utopian ideals which can be taken advantage of by the modern dictators. Chapter three treats Huxley¡¦s dystopia Brave New World as essentially an anti-existential world in which there exists no possibility for the individual to lead a truly authentic life. Through the characters¡¦ rebellion, Huxley suggests to the reader that the true authentic life consists in the quest for beauty, love and truth. Chapter four focuses on the protagonist¡¦s quest for the authentic life in Orwell¡¦s dystopia Nineteen Eighty-four. By starting a diary to keep a faithful record of the past, by developing a love affair and joining the Brotherhood to revive the past authentic life, Orwell¡¦s protagonist Winston Smith actually serves as the novelist¡¦s alter ego to express his ideal for the individual authentic life.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

Addressing the meaning of Martin Heidegger's much-discussed concept of 'authenticity',this study challenges the view, put forward by Charles Guignon and others, that that concept chiefly concerns the significance that an individual life can acquire. Emphasizing the crucial distinction between relational and transcendant meaning, the study sees that distinction as critical to Heidegger's treatment of authenticity, and, more broadly, to the manner in which authenticity figures in the situating of Being and Time in the general context of nihilism and belief Drawing on arguments put forward by Hubert Dreyfus, and especially attuned to Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger, the study repositions the concept at the point where Heidegger's existential analytic and the all too human desire for deeper meaning meet. The result serves at once to clarify the concept and refine understanding of its place in larger histories.