This thesis focuses on the issue of regional authenticity in Barry Hannah's contemporary southern fiction (1970-2010), in the context of some recent concerns about the validity of regional studies in a postregional moment, and about the efficacy of the authenticity paradigm itself. By examining those Hannah narratives that best encourage some rethinking of conceptual understandings of the post- South and postsouthern literature, this thesis reveals the significant contribution that Hannah's fiction can make to critical apprehensions of the region as an evolving field of enquiry. The metafictional dimension of Hannah's writing is testimony to its unique value, because the putative sense of "southernness" his stories appear to dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the ways in which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Deploying sustained close analyses of the best of Hannah's fiction (the kind of attention it has conspicuously lacked), this thesis argues that the region is constantly (re-)emerging in a process of myth-making, dialogue and performance, rather than having suffered some simple historical shift from southern to postsouthern. Understanding Hannah's fiction in the ways presented is to offer the possibility of some revision in thinking, about whether the concepts "South" and "southern" have survived both the deconstructive and postregional turns of the late twentieth century, and the transnational turn into the "new" southern studies from the early twenty-first century onward. The Hannah texts included here are identified exclusively for their value in reconceptualising those issues in recent southern studies where an impasse is imagined between regional ("southern") and global ("postmodern"), to suggest it is wholly conceivable to "have it both ways."

Percorrendo um pensamento em que a ontologia, assistida pela fenomenologia, fornece inteligibilidade suficiente para a elaboração de uma ética existencialista, este trabalho pretende demonstrar como a acepção sartriana acerca da subjetividade é indissociável, para ser devidamente compreendida, do fenômeno por ele intitulado como má-fé. Essa demonstração busca evidenciar ainda como a empreitada sartriana em descrever a realidade humana como ser-Para-si, cuja existência precede a essência exaustivamente analisada na obra de que mais nos servimos (O Ser o Nada) opera uma reconfiguração no significado das noções comumente empregadas nas tentativas filosóficas de explicar a subjetividade, a saber: cogito, Eu, indivíduo, pessoa, identidade, si e sujeito. Assim, investigamos em que medida a noção particularmente sartriana de subjetividade necessariamente comporta o fenômeno da má-fé, numa consonância tal que a compreensão de ambos é reciprocamente iluminada. E se assim é, por fim, averiguamos a possibilidade (ou não) da existência autêntica, avesso da má-fé, para concluirmos com a imperiosidade do impasse que aí se instala. / Tracing the thought in which ontology, supplied by phenomenology, offers enough intelligibility for the construction of an existentialist ethics though not entering there this work aims to demonstrate how Sartrean sense of subjectivity is inseparable, to be full understood, from the phenomenon he entitles as bad-faith. This demonstration aims also to make evident how Sartre´s efforts to describe human reality as being-For-itself, whose existence precedes its essence exhaustingly analyzed in the work we based ourselves most (Being and Nothingness) functions a reconfiguration in the meaning of notions commonly used in the philosophical attempts to explain subjectivity, that is, cogito, I, individual, person, identity, self and subject. This way, we investigate to what extent Sartrean particularly notion of subjectivity necessarily holds the phenomenon of bad-faith, in such a consonance that mutually elucidates the understanding of each other. And if that is so, we finally inquired the possibility (or not) of the authentic existence, the reverse of bad-faith, to conclude with the predominance of the impasse that settles down there.

This thesis is an exploration of the role of a new course design method in the teaching practice of faculty at Brigham Young University (BYU). This method, used by teaching and learning consultants at BYU, is termed authentic purposeful design. It encourages faculty to succinctly define what their course will help students become, use principles of backward design to align all course elements to that purpose, and teach the course with its core purpose in mind. The course design and teaching methods of 3 faculty members who used authentic purposeful design were studied using a qualitative research approach. Themes emerged regarding various values and forces involved as teachers strive for excellence, as well as the roles and dynamics that authentic purposeful design can have in relation to those efforts. The study also revealed ways that the formulation and use of authentic purposeful design could be altered for greater utility by consultants at BYU and other institutions of higher education.

When the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed the 1913 production of Le Sacre du printemps in 1987 and restaged Les Noces in 1989, the reception of these ballets drew upon the prevailing ideals of authenticity that also existed in music. The period’s Early Music revival emphasized the historically-informed performance of past music, using period instruments and techniques to approach an assumedly “authentic” performance. Over the course of twenty years in the late twentieth century the repertoire performed and recorded expanded chronologically closer to the present, challenging original conceptions that the nineteenth century was the benchmark for modern music and influencing the critical reception of later artistic works, including those of the Joffrey. Because the Joffrey’s productions took place at Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, this thesis presents a reception history of them that highlights both a national and local, Iowan narrative. This history is informed by archival documents from the University of Iowa’s Special Collections on the Iowa Center for the Performing Arts and from Hancher Auditorium. Hancher’s collection of press releases, coupled with the newspaper and magazine clippings, contributed to the cultivation of the Joffrey’s public image and those of the two ballets. These works—specifically their scores by Igor Stravinsky and their original choreographers Vaslav Nijinky and Bronislava Nijinska—are seen as pioneers of modernism. Yet, the reception of their reconstructed ballets took place at the height of the Early Music movement’s popularity. Reviewers weighed in on Le Sacre du printemps’ authenticity and their discussion of Les Noces also emphasizes legacy—be it that of the Joffrey Company itself, the legacy of the sibling choreographers, or that of the two works within the ballet repertoire. A comparison of the reception of these two productions also reveals the distinctions between reconstruction and revival.

Since 2014, Airbnb has been the poster-child for an impassioned debate over how to best regulate short-term home rentals (STR’s) in New Orleans, Louisiana. As critical perspectives toward on-demand economic practice become increasingly common, it is important to understand how the impacts of STR platforms like Airbnb extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally conceptualized as the economic (i.e., pressure on housing markets). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which Airbnb recalibrates the spatial and temporal rhythms of everyday neighborhood life for people external to the formal trappings of an STR contract. Drawing in particular on theories of authenticity and feminist political economy, I argue that locals’ emotional labor of “playing host” is necessarily enrolled into the creation of value for Airbnb, and is essential to the reproduction of the platform’s business model and marketing rhetoric.

The folklore collections amassed by Jean-François Bladé in nineteenth-century southwestern France are problematic for modern readers. Bladé's legacy includes a confusing combination of poorly received historical works and unimportant short stories as well as the large collections of proverbs, songs, and narratives that he collected in his native Gascony. No writer has ever attempted to study any of Bladé's informants in detail, not even his most famous narrator, the illiterate and "defiant" Guillaume Cazaux. Rather than dismissing Bladé as a poor ethnographer whose transcripts do not reflect what his informant Cazaux said, I propose taking Bladé's own confusion about authenticity seriously. This confusion suggests that Bladé was trapped between three competing models that depicted the authenticity of folklore as residing in either the audience or folklorist, or the tradition, or the performer. The texts of Cazaux's legends that Bladé published were not just invented by Bladé, but forged in a dynamic interaction between the folklorist, Cazaux, and the force of tradition. When Cazaux described his beliefs in witchcraft to Bladé, he did not just reveal his own worldview; he also relied on the power of anonymous forces and silence to threaten and coerce the folklorist. The legend texts that Bladé published are not simply monovocal re-writings of some things Cazaux said; they enact a conversation between the two men about place and time. This conversation is a very limited example of an important question that has occupied historians: the "modernization" of the rural population by national forces. Although Bladé and Cazaux had very different backgrounds and education and only knew each other for ten years, their memories are intertwined for posterity.

What does it mean to say that something is “temporal” or that something “exists” in time? What is time? And how should we interpret the “ontology” of time? One important strand in twentieth century thought and the philosophy of time has given these fundamental questions a neat and tidy set of influential answers—according to this view, time itself is understood to be a kind of series, and the basic ontology of time is taken to consist of events, together with either the tenses, which get interpreted as special sorts of second order properties known as “A properties” (i.e. the properties of being either Past, Present, or Future), or with special sorts of second order relations, known as “B relations” (i.e. the relations of “earlier than”, “later than”, or “simultaneous with”) which are typically referred to as tenseless. According to this particular view, taken together, A properties and B relations are understood to exhaust the ontology of time. This is an interpretation that has been typically found throughout much of the philosophical literature on the metaphysics of time throughout the twentieth century despite the fact that both of these prospective temporal ontologies had already been shown early on to face a major problem—McTaggart's paradox (1908). According to the paradox, regardless of whichever ready-made ontology we ultimately opt for, we still are led to the same ineluctable conclusion—that time is unreal. For the better half of the twentieth century, philosophers of time, science, and language have struggled with this paradox in different ways, in various attempts to wrest their own preferred categories of temporal being from its grasp, in order to redeploy them in the course of developing a number of competing metaphysical accounts of time, which get characterized technically, as either “A” or “B” theories of time, depending primarily on whether their respective ontology remains either tensed or tenseless. What has thus emerged over the course of the past century, has been a growing preference among philosophers for interpreting temporal ontology along strictly A theoretical or B Theoretical lines, which has rendered this particular strand of thought a highly influential one with respect to a large portion of our contemporary understanding of temporal ontology, which remains one that ultimately boils down to a choice between A properties or B relations, as evidenced by Broad (1923), Smart (1963), Prior (1970), Mellor (1985), Oaklander and Smith (1994), Inwagen and Zimmerman (1998), Smith and Jokic (2003), Sider (2011), Tallant (2013), etc. Further evidence of this view can also be located not just within both A and B theories of time—which include both tensed and tenseless theories—but also within theories of presentism and eternalism, as well as within recent relationalist and substantivalist accounts of time. In the dissertation, it is argued that a common background assumption within these various accounts of time, perhaps one of the most basic and most wide-spread, turns out to be fallacious. More precisely, an extended argument is developed against the common and basic assumption found within these views that it is appropriate to depict time as consisting of either an A series or a B series in the first place. This metaphysical assumption is referred to as the “SER thesis”. The dissertation aims to show that any such serialized interpretation of time fails to be sufficiently distinguishable from what are merely formalized spatial representations or spatializations of time, and that when viewed from the standpoint of developing a viable metaphysics of time, any such formalized spatializations ultimately appear to result in something like a contradiction. Some objections are then raised to this main line of argument, where it is further shown, that the most intuitive strategies for replying to it are unsuccessful in the end, and serve only to supply us with various ways of masking the real problem, since each of these strategies seem themselves to commit some form of the ignoratio elenchi or red herring fallacies. In the remaining portions of the dissertation, a revisionary approach to the question of temporal ontology that seems capable of avoiding some of these problems is briefly sketched out. This approach employs the resources of a hermeneutic phenomenology of temporality to try and help us get outside of the standard view that is supplied by the A-B tradition and provide us with an alternative starting point. This approach draws heavily from the work of McTaggart's early twentieth century contemporaries Henri Bergson (1889) and Martin Heidegger (1927).

<p>Ireland has long been famous for its rich traditional music. Yet the recent global success of Irish pop, rock and traditional music has transformed the Irish music scene into a world centre attracting musicians, tourists, fans and the music industry from both Ireland and abroad. This ethnographic study of young musicians in Dublin and Galway in the late 1990s analyses the Irish music scene in terms of identity, authenticity and transnationality contextualised in contemporary Ireland.</p><p>The study explores the making of Dublin and Galway into central places in the Irish music scene. It identifies musical links between the cities, and how for the young musicians, Dublin has become a 'springboard' and Galway a 'playground'. These cities provide the local arenas where young folk and popular musicians negotiate individual and collective lifestyles, identities and musical genres. By developing the concept of 'musical pathways', the study shows how these mobile musicians constantly interact with different musical sounds and scenes.</p><p>The idea that Irishness has to emanate from traditional music is challenged by a diversity of musical genres and pathways of the musicians. Some musicians embrace a certain construction of Irishness while others reject it, but they are all involved in this process in one way or another. Contrary to older generations of traditional musicians, a global awareness is more important among the young musicians than a 'restricted' view of Irishness. As the young musicians are interested in multiple musical ideas and influences, they are often reluctant about a 'narrow nationalism'. They make use of the fact that the musics of the contemporary world are very much interconnected.</p><p>This study discusses transnational processes of the Irish music scene in the late 1990s primarily on local and national levels in Ireland. This reveals how globalisation has contributed to the popularity of Irish music, yet without controlling its pathways completely. In Ireland the past is still in the present.</p>

<p>Records are a subset of information and recordkeeping requirements demand that a record is managed with maintained authenticity and reliability, i.e. with high quality. Records are evidence of transactions and are used and managed in daily work processes. Records may be preserved for anything from milliseconds to eternity. With computer based information systems the electronic record was born: a record that is born digital. With electronic records problems regarding maintenance of authenticity and reliability have been identified. Electronic records are no longer physical entities as traditional records were. An electronic record is a logical entity that can be spread over different locations in a computer based information system. In this research the aim is to improve the possibility of reaching high quality in recordkeeping systems, i.e. to maintain reliability and authenticity of electronic records, which is necessary if electronic records are to be usable as evidence of transactions. Based on case studies and literature studies, a recordkeeping quality model is presented: a predictive model for attaining quality in recordkeeping. The recordkeeping quality model consists of four major concepts which are interrelated with each other: Electronic records, Records use, Electronic record quality, and Multidimensional perspective. The model is proposed for use when designing and developing computer based information systems which are required to be recordkeeping, systems which manage electronic records. In this research two results beside the recordkeeping quality model are emphasized. The first is that quality in recordkeeping must be seen in a multidimensional perspective, and the second is that recordkeeping systems are information systems with a partially unknown purpose.</p>

<p>What are the social conditions that enable depression to play a significant societal role in contemporary Western societies? This is the leading question of the dissertation. As an alternative to those who claim that contemporary depression is constructed by the exorbitant consumption of antidepressants, it is stated that both depression and the consumption of antidepressants is</p><p>possible due to contemporary social conditions. Inspired by the analysis of modernity by Wagner, and on the basis of the theoretical concept of third modernity as proposed by Carleheden, it is claimed that an ethical conduct of life that demands authentic self-realization has been institutionalised in</p><p>our historical epoch. By analysing how authentic self-realization is being realized in the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello), it is being concluded that the socializing parameters of third modernity are those of being able to be active, flexible, polyvalent, adaptable, versatile etc. selves. Hence, authentic self-realization in imbued with these normative demands. In relation to the phenomenon of depression this is interesting, because contemporary depression can be understood, not as a subjective condition, but as a phenomenon of lack. What is being applauded in the society of today is just what depressive individuals lack, namely the ability to act in accordance</p><p>with the normative claims of self-realization. Depressed individuals are in that sense failed selves (Ehrenberg) who represent and informs us about the “other side” of contemporary normative self-realization requirements. In other words: Within present-day society the institutionalized demands for authentic self-realization and depression have become each others antithesis. This socially demanded form of self-realization – which is put under the scrutiny of normative critique (Taylor) – is thus exactly what allows for depression to play such a significant role in present-day Western societies.</p><p>Keywords: third modernity, new spirit of capitalism, authenticity, self-realization, depression, normative critique.</p>