This thesis explores the motif of gastronomy in Fitzgerald's critically undertreated second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. Within the discussion of the leisure class, Fitzgerald scholars often focus on Jay Gatsby's parties, but they seem to neglect Anthony Patch and company's fancy for food and drink in Ivy League supper clubs of Manhattan, vaudeville theaters, and houses of languor in Upstate New York. Building upon George J. Searles's article "The Symbolic Function of Food and Eating in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned," this thesis examines the meaning of Fitzgerald's pervasive "prandial allusions" and character psychology with regard to dining. Whereas Searles posits that Fitzgerald "employed depictions of food and eating as symbols of his characters' shallowness and frivolity" (14), this thesis explores the possibility that Anthony Patch craves "pleasant episodes" of dining and specific culinary combinations because he interprets them as the essence of social ritual and corporeal comfort. Because many critics hold that The Beautiful and Damned lacks coherence and sputters as a pre-Gatsby creation, this thesis suggests that the novel can be read as Anthony's quest to assert and cling to his own brand of decadence, which is tragically distinct from that of his wife Gloria's.

Le restaurant traditionnel suit une formule sur laquelle les dîneurs peuvent toujours compter pour leur repas. Les dîneurs entrent dans la salle à manger, souvent avec une réservation, et le maître d’hôtes leur montre la table. Puis ils regardent la carte et commandent les plats qu’ils veulent au serveur. Les convives à table discutent de la vie ou du travail pour le reste du repas. Le restaurant décoré et arrangé selon un thème qui crée une ambiance dans la salle. Il y a des serveurs et des serveuses pour faciliter le rapport entre les chefs et les personnes à table dans la salle. Après un plat, ou deux, ou trois, le repas est fini et l’expérience au restaurant est finie quand les dîneurs retournent à leurs vies quotidiennes hors du restaurant. Le restaurant est vraiment une expérience, même si c’est pour un déjeuner rapide ou un repas de cinq heures à un restaurant de la haute gastronomie.

This dissertation explores the necessary and sufficient conditions to solve a variant of the dining philosophers problem. This dining variant is defined by three properties: wait-freedom, eventual weak exclusion, and eventual bounded fairness. Wait-freedom guarantees that every correct hungry process eventually enters its critical section, regardless of process crashes. Eventual weak exclusion guarantees that every execution has an infinite suffix during which no two live neighbors execute overlapping critical sections. Eventual bounded fairness guarantees that there exists a fairness bound k such that every execution has an infinite suffix during which no correct hungry process is overtaken more than k times by any neighbor. This dining variant (WF-EBF dining for short) is important for synchronization tasks where eventual safety (i.e., eventual weak exclusion) is sufficient for correctness (e.g., duty-cycle scheduling, self-stabilizing daemons, and contention managers). Unfortunately, it is known that wait-free dining is unsolvable in asynchronous message-passing systems subject to crash faults. To circumvent this impossibility result, it is necessary to assume the existence of bounds on timing properties, such as relative process speeds and message delivery time. As such, it is of interest to characterize the necessary and sufficient timing assumptions to solve WF-EBF dining. We focus on implicit timing assumptions, which can be encapsulated by failure detectors. Failure detectors can be viewed as distributed oracles that can be queried for potentially unreliable information about crash faults. The weakest detector D for WF-EBF dining means that D is both necessary and sufficient. Necessity means that every failure detector that solves WF-EBF dining is at least as strong as D. Sufficiency means that there exists at least one algorithm that solves WF-EBF dining using D. As such, our research goal is to characterize the weakest failure detector to solve WF-EBF dining. We prove that the eventually perfect failure detector 3P is the weakest failure detector for solving WF-EBF dining. 3P eventually suspects crashed processes permanently, but may make mistakes by wrongfully suspecting correct processes finitely many times during any execution. As such, 3P eventually stops suspecting correct processes.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 19, 2010). Thesis advisor: Dr. Kathleen Warner Slane. Includes bibliographical references.

This research focuses on dining experience as an example of experience marketing. In this study, the qualitative research method has been used to derive particular concepts involved in the dining experience from the bodies of reviews. Similarly, quantitative content analysis method has been used to provide rich and valuable information about the concepts explored from the qualitative data. Inferential statistics has been used in the study to test hypotheses about the relationships between elements in the dining experience context. The results indicate that food quality is the most important predictor of the dining satisfaction while service quality may not be an effective factor to create satisfaction. Moreover, social needs in dining experience are more evident in dinners than in lunches. The results of the study reveal the effectiveness and applicability of the online review analysis in bringing new insights from dining experience to contribute to the field of experience economy. / viii, 127 leaves ; 29 cm

Commissioned in 1865 for London’s South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), the Green Dining Room was conceived during an exciting period in Victorian Britain, when idealistic artists and architects elevated the status of the decorative arts in fine art circles, promoted the ideal of joy in labour, and sought beauty in the everyday. The Green Dining Room is considered a quintessential example of an early decorative scheme by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., a collective of artists who helped to inspire Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement through their products and their principles of art manufacture. It is adjoined by two other refreshment areas: one designed by James Gamble (a salaried employee of the museum) and the other by Edward Poynter (a promising young painter with an affinity for the decorative arts). The three rooms manifest varied, even conflicting, opinions on the cultivation of design. They indicate how different design professionals hoped to see their art progress. However, the rooms were not simply artistic statements. They were also functioning dining areas for the use of guests and employees of the museum. By assessing the aims of the South Kensington administration, the ambitions of the designers who contributed to the museum’s fabric, and the impressions of Victorians who witnessed the results, I will illustrate how the Green Dining Room occupies a unique position in the history of nineteenth-century design reform. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-07 21:35:05.076

Thesis (M.Arch (Prof)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / Abstract in English.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Anthropology Department, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Charles E. Brewer, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Program in Humanities. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 27, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p.227-235) and index.