In modernity, probably more than ever, “knowledge” has become the object of an intense desire. The tensions underwriting this modern desire for knowledge are inscribed in the very term, curiosity, which is at the centre of this dissertation. A venerable motif, curiosity anchors the specifically modern desire to know within a longstanding philosophical, theological and literary tradition. By the 19th century, “curiosity” is certainly an anachronistic paradigm. Yet, inscribed in curiosity, there are two conflicting dialectics which can be found at the heart of modernity’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge: one the one hand, the dialectic between curiosity as a disenchanting desire to see through into the innermost secrets of things, and curiosity as a “thing”, the product of a fetishist desire arrested on the glittering surface of things. On the other hand, curiosity is beset by the dialectic between the desire for a “totalizing”, meaningful vision and the compulsive drive of an increasingly specialized, meaningless pursuit of knowledge. This dissertation examines a series of Modernist narratives which expose this double dialectic. The protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph are all caricatural, anachronistic, curieux ultimately seeking an “absolute knowledge” that cannot be embodied. The moment it seems to have been attained, it is reified, “objectified” into a fetish, a “curiosity”. Yet, these narratives are not only about curiosity; they are in fact true vortexes of curiosity: that of the protagonists of the narratives as well as that of the authors and the readers themselves. As a result, these narratives also speak to the paradoxical location of literature within culture: literature appears simultaneously as the privileged site of all – ultimately phantasmic – totalizing, meaningful visions of the world, as well as a marginal locus, a monstrous cultural residue.

In modernity, probably more than ever, “knowledge” has become the object of an intense desire. The tensions underwriting this modern desire for knowledge are inscribed in the very term, curiosity, which is at the centre of this dissertation. A venerable motif, curiosity anchors the specifically modern desire to know within a longstanding philosophical, theological and literary tradition. By the 19th century, “curiosity” is certainly an anachronistic paradigm. Yet, inscribed in curiosity, there are two conflicting dialectics which can be found at the heart of modernity’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge: one the one hand, the dialectic between curiosity as a disenchanting desire to see through into the innermost secrets of things, and curiosity as a “thing”, the product of a fetishist desire arrested on the glittering surface of things. On the other hand, curiosity is beset by the dialectic between the desire for a “totalizing”, meaningful vision and the compulsive drive of an increasingly specialized, meaningless pursuit of knowledge. This dissertation examines a series of Modernist narratives which expose this double dialectic. The protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph are all caricatural, anachronistic, curieux ultimately seeking an “absolute knowledge” that cannot be embodied. The moment it seems to have been attained, it is reified, “objectified” into a fetish, a “curiosity”. Yet, these narratives are not only about curiosity; they are in fact true vortexes of curiosity: that of the protagonists of the narratives as well as that of the authors and the readers themselves. As a result, these narratives also speak to the paradoxical location of literature within culture: literature appears simultaneously as the privileged site of all – ultimately phantasmic – totalizing, meaningful visions of the world, as well as a marginal locus, a monstrous cultural residue.

Sustainability in the fashion industry has become a widely discussed issue. Various actors in theindustry, brands, designer labels, fashion magazines and other media sources, as well asconsumers all contribute to this matter. Although a considerable amount of research has focusedon consumer behavior and consumption patterns, the way the fashion industry affects thesefactors has been neglected. Moreover, many studies show that consumers claim to beecologically conscious, but that they disregard this aspect when consumption actually occurs.This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between consumersand institutions and how it affects sustainable fashion consumption. The understanding of theseprocesses is done using several approaches such as Kawamura’s (2005) theory about the fashionsystem and Arnold and Thompson’s (2005) view on consumer culture theory. To obtain adeeper insight into the fashion industry, qualitative interviews with fashion mediarepresentatives and consultants within sustainability development are conducted. To ascertainthe consumer perspective a focus group discussion is moderated. Findings show how a wholesystemapproach is needed for the fashion industry to become a more sustainable environment.

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Stereotypical gender roles have probably existed as long as human culture and are such a natural part if our lives that we barely take notice of them. Nevertheless, images of what we perceive as typically masculine and feminine in appearance and behavior depend on the individual’s perception. Within each gender one can find different stereotypes. A commonly assumed idea is that men are hard tough, while women are soft and vulnerable. I find it interesting hoe stereotypes function and how they are preserved almost without our awareness. Once I started reading and researching the topic of stereotypes it became clear to me that literature contains many stereotypes. The intension of this essay is to critically examine the stereotypical gender roles in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams in 1947. It is remarkable how the author portrays the three main characters: Stanley, Stella and Blanche. The sharp contracts and the dynamics between them are fascinating.

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This thesis aims to explore lesbian desire and sexual identity in Lydia Kwa¡¦s This Place Called Absence, beginning with the textual subversion of heterosexual norm, evolving through the author¡¦s mapping of butch/femme desire and concluding with the protagonist¡¦s formation of self-identity. Chapter One discusses how the text subverts the heterosexual norm through the erotic chaos created by queer characters. I will apply Judith Butler¡¦s notions of heterosexual matrix and gender performativity to look into the textual strategies of subversion. The appropriation of gender is not only a strategy of queer politics, but also the primary means by which lesbians articulate desire. To illuminate Kwa¡¦s mapping of lesbian desire, I apply Teresa de Lauretis¡¦s theory of lesbian fetishism in Chapter Two to examine how butches and femmes in the novel express their desire through manipulating gender signs. The masculinity fetishes are prone to social misunderstanding as penis envy and thereby arouse male hostility. The anxiety of lesbian characters with the paternal phallus will be the focus of the second part of the chapter. Chapter Three looks into how the protagonist establishes positive self-identity through reversing social stigma to empowering self-image in queer coalition. The queer coalition comprising gays and lesbians, nevertheless, cedes its place to equalitarian women¡¦s community at the end of the novel. The problems of the concept of universal women for lesbians will be discussed in the latter part of the chapter from the perspectives of Butler and de Lauretis. After probing into textual details, I will argue that the protagonist, in spite of her desire for female solidarity, ultimately identifies with queer coalition. In conclusion, I will regard the novel as a lesbian counter-discourse by summarizing its strategies of displacement, resignification and reversal of the heterosexual symbolic and foreground the multiplicity of desire and differences among lesbians against the reification of heterosexual symbolic.

It¡¦s common to see sex indicated advertisements on TV. Some of them have overemphasized the element of sex attraction. It¡¦s interesting to find out how receivers response to such kinds of advertisements. This thesis studied the relationship among advertising cognition, advertising attitude and buying desire in sex indicated TV advertisement. Research result shows advertising cognition apparently affects advertising attitude. Advertising attitude apparently affects buying desire. Population characteristic partially affects advertising attitude. Within relationship between advertising cognition and advertising attitude, advertisement acceptance and ethic were discussed. For advertisement acceptance, product related to sex or not doesn¡¦t apparently affect acceptance. Lower product involvement gets higher acceptance. Higher sex indication gets lower acceptance. More graceful advertisement has better acceptance. For ethic influence, no matter high product sexual relationship, high product involvement, or high sexual indication, receivers think they will have worse impact to ethic. However, more graceful advertisement has less ethic impact. Within relationship between advertising attitude and buying desire, receivers have higher buying desire while they have higher advertisement acceptance, but ethic impact doesn¡¦t affect their buying desire. From population point of view, there is no difference in advertisement acceptance no matter the receiver is male or female, also no matter whether the receiver has child or hasn¡¦t. However, female receivers think sex indicated advertisement affect ethic more than male receivers. Receivers who have child also think it affects ethic more than the one who have no child.

The thesis aims to read Zora Neale Hurston¡¦s Their Eyes Were Watching God to discuss how and why the white male dominant society marginalizes and subordinates black women by means of silencing their voices, restricting their freedom to explore themselves and the world around them, and suppressing their recognition of their sexual desires and bodily needs. The black woman, or in a sense, the mule of the world, could not always do and act according to her own desire. Instead, they are required to keep silence whenever a community¡¦s voice (usually the male one) is generated and furthermore to play the secondary role as a good wife whose sole purpose in life is merely to meet her husbands¡¦ demands. On the one hand, black female body, which has always been brutally beaten, closely examined, and sexually exploited in the hands of white/black men, is the very site of white supremacy and male dominance. On the one hand, it also serves as an outlet for black men to vent the humiliation, anger and shame that they have suffered in the predominantly white America. The black woman, therefore, is doubly marginalized in terms of both her race and sex. In the first chapter of this thesis, I argue that Janie¡¦s disturbing silence is the inevitable result of her failure to find an ideal listener. In a male-centered society, not only is Janie denied a voice to articulate her desire, but she also fails to find an empathetic listener. Pheoby¡¦s ¡§hungry listening¡¨ unquestionably satisfies Janie¡¦s deep longing for self-revelation. Nonetheless, such a hungry audience is not always available even when a black woman chooses to voice her desire. Black female voice, in this respect, badly needs an ideal listener who is willing to keep his/her ears as well as heart open. The second chapter, moreover, engages with the major issues about why and how the heroine sets off on a quest for love and respect, freedom and possibilities. Janie, on the one hand, has to go to the far horizon not so much in time and space as in soul and spirit. That is, Janie must embark on a female quest to redefine herself aside from male definitions. On the other hand, Janie also brings back to the black community what she has experienced and learned in her self-fulfillment journey and thus enriches her community with her hard-won knowledge and discovery. Janie¡¦s journey from self-doubt to self-fulfillment, from silence to speech, I would like to suggest, will be continued by anyone who sincerely responds to her life story. The third chapter is concerned with the issues of black female body. In this chapter, I argue that black female body has always been the object of oppression and the target of male dominance and white supremacy. Nevertheless, if black female body could be the site on which the patriarchal law is inscribed, it could also be an agent to speak for what remains unspeakable; more crucially, it could also provide the female subject access to experience that which is both pleasured and pleasuring.

For the readers of White Noise, the first issue he or she has to deal with is the relationship between the society and the individual. But DeLillo was never straightforward in Jack¡¦s narrative. From time to time, the reader is asked to judge by themselves about the authorial intention and the narrator¡¦s attitude toward the characters¡¦ suffering. As both the narrator and a character, Jack Gladney typifies the tension of locating the hope of resistance in a seemingly hopeless situation. As the narrator, Jack¡¦s attitude toward the corrupting force of the society would seem to vacillate among indifference and affirmation. Yet, his indifference would appear to be sarcastic or even accusatory if one remembers that he or she is reading one of DeLillo¡¦s novels. The interpretive deadlock, then, can be summarized into the following question: if DeLillo intended to posit the possibility of resistance through the process of writing and reading, how can it be realized in the protagonist with whom the reader is invited to identify? Numerous approaches are adopted by the critics, and yet the enigmatic ending of the novel continues to challenge the results of their efforts. With ease, Jack Gladney returns to his normal routine after he nearly kills a man, but it is indicated that he is never the same person as exhibited in the previous chapters. To determine the nature of transformation and its implication for the existence of hope, this thesis sets out to dissect the important elements in the last chapter. As the novel ends in Jack¡¦s shopping, the chapter two of this thesis traces the influence of capitalism on the characters. It is found that the characters¡¦ enjoyment of the consumerism is correlative with a fundamental imperfection in their sense of self. In narrating the stories about him, Jack Gladney cannot hide his anxiety for failing to be a good professor, husband and father. From a Lacanian perspective, the disjointedness reveals the failure of the system to provide all his needs. Still, Jack and others are spurred to immerse harder in the ever-revolutionizing mode of enjoyment, endlessly deferring from confronting the void inherent in all their pursuits. Before Jack returns to shop for the last time in the novel, however, he is infected by toxic substance that causes him to eye the capitalist system with suspicion. During the outbreak of the disaster, the New Age belief system, painful enjoyment and environmental crisis are associated with the oppressive force of capitalist development. They all reappear in the end of the novel, yet they are no longer threats for Jack; instead, he finds them enjoyable. In the chapter three of this thesis, my analysis recounts how the characters¡¦ reluctance to depart from their routine of enjoyment contributes to their intentional disavowals of the injuries the system brings to them. In Jack¡¦s case, the biopolitical control that results in the elevation of the status of medical science and enjoyment causes him to resubmit himself more violently to the system. He becomes a killer and enjoys seeing himself as such who seems to contribute to all the subjects in the capitalist society. It is after such sad transformation that the final chapter begins, suddenly deflating the emotional turbulences accumulated throughout the previous chapters. The enigmatic vacuum is still accompanied by signs of Jack¡¦s transformation. However, the omnipresence of death in the chapter seems to weaken the certainty for a pessimistic future of suffering in the capitalist system. Waiting before the checking out point, Jack is in fact facing to the end of vicious circle symbolically. The unfathomable death corresponds with the impossibility the reader encounters when interpreting the text. As the readers cannot determine what will happen after the terminal, they are actually freed from chopping the text for constructing hopes that will be contradicted by the remaining paragraphs at one point or another, while they have to put down the novel and go on living with the similar situations the novel portrays. Herein resides the hope: externalizing the deadlock of life for the reader, the end of White Noise testifies the ongoing procession of human history that cannot be anticipated beforehand.