Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-231).

The aim of this thesis is to examine advertising from the point of view of Christian ethics: how it works, what is wrong with it and how it might go right as a practice. It argues that much existing criticism of advertising is justified, but that its power to create desire might be turned towards serving the good of the education of desire, leading us towards, or strengthening, a love of God, and helping us relate to products and services based on this love. This is significant because learning to desire well is central to living a Christian life, and because advertising influences how many people desire today. In contrast to authors who simply criticise advertising, often as part of a general critique of consumer culture, this thesis offers a constructive and detailed examination of the practice itself, looking at how its techniques work and how they might be reformed into an 'art of advertising'. In making this argument the thesis draws primarily on Augustine, in addition to Plato, and modern critics of advertising. First, it describes desire, before examining how advertisements create desire, followed by an assessment of existing criticisms of this process. It then develops an account of the education of desire, identifying what an art of advertising should aim to achieve, before examining the techniques by which an advertisement might achieve this. The argument is intended to contribute to a project within Christian ethics of critiquing advertising, and presenting a workable ethical vision for the future of the industry.

Colonial narratives and nationalist rhetoric in Africa have always associated female sexuality with male desire and consumption, aberrance, or perversion. While historical narratives suggested that native women's bodies should be tamed and possessed, African nationalist narratives usually equated female bodies with land, nature, and spirituality. In different ways, both colonialists and nationalists appropriated the female body and sexuality to convey ideologies concerning the conquest of distant lands or related to the dignity of the colonized people. This dissertation examines how African women writers' representation of female desire counternarrates colonialist and nationalist tales while disturbing gender conventions and defying social norms in African contexts. By using feminist theories, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory, I examine the ways that Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: Uma Historia de Poligamia, and Ken Bugul's Le Baobab Fou reveal female sexuality while simultaneously subverting discourses that often define female bodies as sexual objects or as spiritual entities-- as the Mother Africa, a trope widespread in the speeches of the Negritude movement. Through the analysis of these literary works, I present how these African women writers have used discursive strategies about female desire to demonstrate the consequences of the colonial encounter and post-independence policies on neo-colonial women's bodies and minds as well as to reveal the exclusion of women's voices from national affairs. These works not only confront history but also interrogate the role of literature and the work of art. Through their literary works, Bugul, Chiziane, and Aidoo bring to literature characteristics of African arts, reinventing the literary in order to forge a medium that is able to give sense to African women's experience.

Many studies of American poetry view modernism as an eruption of formal and technical innovations that respond to momentous cultural and political changes, but few attempt to consider the flow and restriction of desire among these changes. This dissertation argues that American modernist poets construct models of desire based on the rejection of sensual objects and a subsequent redirection of desire toward the self and the creative mind. In addition, these models of desire result in a conception of subjects as whole, discrete, and isolated. In the first chapter, I distinguish between Walt Whitman's sensualist model of desire and Emily Dickinson's intellectualist mode that defers satisfaction. I contend that Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) develop from Dickinson's perspective of deferred satisfaction to an outright rejection of physical desire. The manner and implications of this reorganization of desire differ among these poets, as do the poetic techniques they utilize, but underlying these differences is a related refusal to pursue objects of sensual pleasure. Pound withdraws desire from the world by turning objects into static images; desire is then able to flourish in the creative mind. Stevens allows the imagination to remake the world, creating manifold abstractions for subjects who otherwise reject sensuality. The second chapter provides a close reading of Eliot's The Waste Land to show how the presentation of sexual futility leads to a poetic experience of separation as a means of spiritual reformation. The third chapter reads H.D.'s Trilogy as a contemplation of the destruction of World War II and the persistent, unified self that outlasts it. Rather than interacting with this devastated world, H.D. insists that desire must be redirected toward the effort of spiritual redemption. In the fourth chapter, Elizabeth Bishop begins to question the deliberate rejection of the world. She sees a world that reasserts itself and imagines a subject who, though still yearning for unity, must admit an inescapably physical environment. The conclusion considers how postwar American poets continue to dissolve the subject and release desire into the world, emphasizing the present moment rather than a lasting, unified self.

abstract: According to hedonism about happiness, all and only enjoyable experiences are the basic constituents of one’s happiness, and these experiences contribute to one’s happiness just to the extent that they have a greater intensity or duration. After defending this view, I show that it must be amended to count as an equally plausible theory of what constitutes one’s well-being. I then present two such amended versions of hedonism about well-being. The first, which I call objective hedonism, adds the claim that the objective worth of the things one enjoys also makes a difference to the extent to which an enjoyable experience contributes to one’s well-being. The second, which I call reliabilist hedonism, adds the claim that one’s evaluative intuitions about which things are good for one track which things have proven themselves to one to reliably lead to enjoyable experience. I conclude that reliabilist hedonism constitutes a revival of hedonism about well-being. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Philosophy 2020

Thesis advisor: John Baldovin / Traditionally, Church teaching has examined the Eucharist in metaphysical terms (‘what is it?’: substance, presence, and causality) and its liturgical celebration as a sacrifice (a re-presentation of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross). Prompted by Vatican II’s exhortation to the faithful for ‘full, conscious, active participation’ in the liturgy (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 14, 27, 30), this dissertation re-interprets the Eucharistic liturgy and participants’ role in it through the root metaphor of gift: a gift of desire, which impacts participants’ desires, relationships, and selfhood. It proposes a ‘relational approach’ to the Eucharist by asking: What is going on ‘relationally’ in the Eucharistic celebration? How might the Eucharist impact our desire, relations, identity? How does or ought the liturgy of the Eucharist concern relationships between the participants and others? What specifically does the Church celebrate in its liturgy of the Eucharist? Louis-Marie Chauvet’s ‘symbolic exchange’ model of the Eucharistic Prayer, when put in conversation with both Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of gift and René Girard’s mimetic theory, yields an understanding of the Eucharist as God’s gracious and scandalous gift of divine desire. The gift is gracious as an embodied expression of divine love, and also scandalous as it challenges recipients’ autonomy with a radical call to charity demanding an existential response. This dissertation upholds Christ’s self-gift as the ultimate decision to love in a perfect reversal of sacrificial violence, which Christians are called to imitate. It emphasizes the liturgy’s structure as a dynamic event of being encountered by God’s gift of himself and reception of this gift through particular responses. This understanding aims to re-appropriate traditional Catholic teaching on the Eucharist in more contemporary terms. It aims to explain how ‘fully conscious and active participation’ in the sacred mysteries occurs, that liturgy and life may be more richly interrelated. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Advertisements are today a large part of our daily lives, making marketing increasingly complex and hard to navigate for companies seeking to catch our attention. One way of engaging with consumers is with the help of celebrities, via so called celebrity endorsements. Previous research on women has shown that celebrity endorsements of exclusive brands seems to have a positive effect on the consumer’s attitude towards the ad, but no impact on its purchase intention, brand attitude or how luxurious the brand is perceived. Furthermore, several studies have shown that there are large differences between men’s and women’s purchase behaviors. However, there is a lack of previous research with regards to celebrity endorsements targeting men. With this in mind, our purpose with this study has been to analyze what celebrity endorsement for exclusive brands targeting men contributes with. The research question is “What does a celebrity contribute with when promoting exclusive brands to men?”. The study was conducted using a quantitative method based on existing theories about celebrity endorsement, meaning transfer model, consumer behavior and brand equity. The data that emerged from our survey was also analyzed based on the study’s chosen theories. After an analysis of the empirical data, the following conclusions have been made: Male consumers prefer celebrity endorsements over regular advertisements with a noncelebrity; however, celebrity endorsements are not perceived as more exclusive. Celebrity endorsements targeting men contributes to an increased brand awareness and creates positive brand associations when the right celebrity has been chosen; brand loyalty and perceived brand quality are not affected. Celebrity endorsements for exclusive brands targeting men does not necessarily lead to an increased desire for the brand.

Participatory planning and design is a subject that has been around for quite some time. It has been theorized by several authors and put in practice by many practitioners. After going through some of the literature and studying in detail some real-life participatory experiences, it’s still hard to tackle the subject because of its complexity. I could have tried to simplify it and look into one type of participation, but instead I tried to understand it in all its complexity and diversity, maybe leaving some unsolved questions. Throughout this semester I studied four different cases of participatory planning/design and I analyzed and compared them. These are located in Paris (France), Medellín (Colombia), Banjarmasin (Indonesia) and Gothenburg (Sweden). I looked at them through some of the concepts I found in the literature, like for example the idea of desire treated by Doina Petrescu in some of her texts.  After extracting some conclusions from the case studies I got involved in a real-life participatory process carried out in the School of Architecture at KTH to include students, teachers and others in the design of a new location for the school. I took part in one of their meetings and I had three parallel workshops in English with the participation of some students. This helped me experience and understand better what participation really means and implies. I put myself in the role of a facilitator who initiates a process, and therefore carries it out. I learned about the importance of the invitation to participate and how important it is to be clear on the activities and questions posed to the participants.

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