This thesis takes a closer look at the phenomena of taste in relation to kitsch, art and luxury, analyzing a visual campaign, by the luxury brand Louis Vuitton. The visual campaign is made by Louis Vuitton to promote a collaboration with the postmodern artist Cindy Sherman. In her art Cindy Sherman is stepping away from modern aesthetics turning towards nostalgia and, anti- elitism. In a provocative act she brings in traits of kitsch and other pop cultural references to her art and exposes it to a conflicted art world. Using the well accommodated theoretical framework by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I seek to understand the underlying class related aspects of taste occurring in the collaboration between the two. In doing so I investigate the very use of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories it self, and I look to answer how these can help with revelation in a contemporary context. Later the use of Roland Barthes theories on modern myths, will be brought into play, when I shell decode the overall mythical story on taste, that Louis Vuitton, wishes to communicate through the campaign. It shell be concluded that Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, was very helpfull with pointing out the campaigns connection to cultural capital and different classified expressions of taste, that connects it to a growing middelclass, who wants an access to the world of luxury. In the very end I debate the question of taste looking forward, taking into consideration Bourdieu’s critics, to whom the classification of taste is a relic from the past.

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Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses have adapted their way of working to a digitally progressive and globally expanding market, where the Internet, during the past two decades, has become an increasingly integral part of almost every aspect of current western culture.  This thesis examines and demonstrates how, and why, the two auction houses have adapted their work to be published through their digital and physical channels.  This thesis also examines and analyzes how Christie’s and Sotheby’s have customized their way of presenting their auction lots to potential costumers, and how they use technological innovations to visualize materiality.  Intermediate presentations of four auction lots, available through Christie's and Sotheby's Instagram accounts, websites and physical auction catalogs, are the main focus of this thesis.  The historical and contextual information, on an increasingly technologically innovative and digitally focused art and auction market, together with predominantly Roland Barthe’s semiotic theoretical framework regarding picture’s denoted and connoted messages, are being analyzed with Anne D’Alleva’s formal and contextual methodology for pictorial analysis.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att visa på hur historiebruk migrerar och transformeras över tid. I sin bok With His Pistol in His Hand – A Border Ballad and its Hero presenterar Américo Paredes sin bild av vad Corridon är, en särskild typ av mexikansk ballad vid som sjöngs i ett område mellan Mexiko och USA från mitten av 1830-talet och drygt hundra år framåt. Jag har försökt finna passager i Cormac McCarthys bok Övergången och Sam Peckinpahs film Det vilda gänget som kan förstås som influerade av Corridon. För att kunna tolka min empiri har jag tagit hjälp av framförallt Roland Barthes Mytologier och Reinhart Kosellecks Erfarenhet, tid och historia – Om historiska tiders semantik. I diskussionen argumenterar jag för att både moralsyn och tematik i de bägge verkan visar på ett släktskap med Corridon. Vidare har jag funnit likheter i hur de gestaltar tid och hur de arbetar med mytologiska tecken för att gestalta sina berättelser och därmed sin historieförmedling. En slutsats är att verken för en dialog med sina mottagare, de skapar ett utrymme för betraktaren eller läsaren att själva dra de logiska följderna av de frågor som verken ger upphov till. / The purpose of this paper is to show how the use of history migrates and transforms over time. In his book With His Pistol in His Hand - A Border Ballad and its Hero, Américo Paredes presents his characterization of the Corrido, a special type of Mexican ballad which was sung in the area between Mexico and the United States from the mid-1830s and more then hundred years ahead. I have tried to find passages in Cormac McCarthy's book The Crossing and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch which can be understood as influenced by the Corrido. In order to be able to interpret my empirical material, I have taken the help of Roland Barthes Mythologies and Reinhart Koselleck's Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. In the discussion, I argue that both moral views and themes in my empirical material correspond with Corridon. Furthermore, I have found similarities in how they portray time and how they work with mythological signs to portray their stories and their mediation of history. One conclusion is that the book and the movie start a dialogue with their recipients, they create a space for the viewer or the reader to draw the logical outcomes of the issues that the works give rise to.

L’objectif de ce mémoire est de réfléchir aux différentes implications du récit de soi lorsqu’il nous parvient de façon fragmentée. J’ai souhaité penser la création de liens et de relations à travers la mise en distance, la discontinuité et le détour et j’ai proposé pour cette raison que ces aspects sont centraux à l’économie du récit et à l’établissement d’un rapport à soi. J’ai donc privilégié l’étude de deux livres, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) et The Argonauts (2015) par Maggie Nelson, qui offrent un portrait éclaté du sujet. Ces ouvrages sont liés l’un l’autre par une image que Maggie Nelson emprunte à Barthes, soit le vaisseau Argo. Métaphore de la métaphore pour George Kliebenstein, l’image de l’Argo permet de naviguer à travers ces récits dont les fragments se superposent plutôt qu’ils ne s’enchaînent. Cette métaphore offre une compréhension des textes dans un hors temps, au contact d’une destination à définir. Des liens s’établissent néanmoins au fil de la lecture entre l’auteur.ice et soi-mêmes. Ce dispositif littéraire constitue le projet d’étude du mémoire que j’associe à l’incarnation. Ainsi, l’écriture de soi peut être entrevue comme un acte qui permet la construction d’un rapport à soi. Le mémoire est divisé en trois sections. Dans un premier temps, les récits sont interrogés afin d’en comprendre la composante biographique tout en explorant la discontinuité de leurs présentations. Par la suite, le corps et ses représentations sont examinés dans les deux récits, ce qui permet une première apparition de l’incarnation dans ce mémoire. Enfin, la troisième section établit le rôle de la langue et de ses marges. / This study aims to examine the many implications of self-writing when it comes in a fragmented form. My intention was to consider the creation of links and relationships through distancing, discontinuity and digressions and I suggested those aspects are crucial to the narrative and giving an account of oneself. I therefore chose to focus on the study of two books, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), which offer a fragmented portrayal of the subject. These works are linked to each other by an image that Nelson borrows from Barthes, the Argo ship. A metaphor’s metaphor for George Kliebenstein, the image of the Argo allows a navigation between those narratives in which fragments overlap rather than following each other. This metaphor offers an out of time understanding of the texts heading to an undefined destination. Links are nonetheless established throughout the reading between the authors and themselves. This literary device constitutes the core of this study which I link to embodiment. Thus, self-writing can be seen as an act allowing the building of a relationship with oneself. The study is divided in three sections. Firstly, narratives are looked into in order to understand their biographical foundation while also exploring their discontinuous form. Secondly, the body and its representations are examined, enabling a first understanding of embodiment. Finally, the third section establishes the function of language and its margins.

Literary realism, that is, texts that seek to represent the actual in literature while achieving a sense of verisimilitude, have historically been analyzed and defined by a number of critics. These critics have, with differing approaches, attempted to make comprehensible what it is that constitutes the realist text. In their process of doing so, many have dismantled this specific category of text and isolated its distinguishing components. This study has sought to challenge and elaborate on three of the most influential, scholarly voices that have articulated such ideas about the realist text: Ian Watt, Eric Auerbach and Roland Barthes. The purpose has been to add to this field of knowledge by increasing our understanding of what it is that constitutes literary realism. This has been done by analyzing three realist works that have been previously examined by these critics, and then, by studying two further realist works, more recent in time. These works are, in the order that they have been approached and analyzed: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (Published in 1722), Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (Published in 1877), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Published in 1925), Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (Published in 2006) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Published in 2022). As a result, the study has found that technology is a recurring textual element that functions as a coherence-making narrative device in these realist texts, and as a consequence, has laid bare a blind spot in these above-mentioned critics’ definitions of literary realism. Thus, the study suggests that technology should be understood as a distinguishing element in the literary text. The selection of works has, in turn, allowed for the study to both compare and contrast these texts, and to trace the effect that the technological development in the reality preceding the literary text can be said to have on these texts themselves. Here, the study has found that new technologies in the reality preceding the text often occur as new coherence-making textual devices in these literary works, and thus, that the technological development in the actual affects the realist text itself.

Women are generally underrepresented in media and have historically been degraded to stereotypical roles in media content. Sweden is a country that has actively worked with equality between the genders since the 1970s. The country's progress in equality piqued the scientists interest in the extent of gender stereotypes in Swedish media content. This study examines whether there is a gender based variation in the framing of individuals in said content. The aim is to map the extent to which these gender stereotypes shape the communication in the images of 238 Swedish companies on their “about us”-pages. The images are analyzed to determine how individuals are portrayed based on their perceived gender. The study has a theoretical foundation in gender theory, representation theory, Roland Barthes mythologies and framing theory. These 4 theories form the basis for both the quantitative and the qualitative analyses in the paper. The content analysis applies mixed methods, consisting of a quantitative and qualitative component. The census method formed the basis for the quantitative part, whereas the study’s criteria limited a list of companies with an annual revenue of over 500 million SEK. The sampling method for the qualitative part is a systematic random sampling. The analytical tools that are used for the qualitative analysis includes theories about colors and non-verbal communication, along with semiotic concepts such as connotation, denotation and anchoring. Despite Sweden actively addressing gender equality issues, the study’s results indicated that Swedish company websites to some extent depict women and men differently, even though the numerical representation is equal. Some companies seem to reinforce gender stereotypes while others challenge them. Companies’ visual communication generally portrayed women as more accommodating, affirming the camera with a smile. Men, on the other hand, were generally depicted as more distant and reserved, with a more averted gaze than the women. The findings suggest that people’s perception of gender stereotypes and gender can be influenced by the websites they consume, potentially impacting how gender stereotypes are reinforced or challenged in society.

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Seriemediet inkorporerar lingvistiska och ikoniska tecken för att uttrycka etiska, moraliska, sociala och politiska budskap, vilka kan slätas över av en underhållande och tilltalande form. Detta gör mediet lämpligt för en retorisk analys. Ett omdiskuterat ämne inom seriemediet är dess gestaltning av kvinnor, å ena sidan i form av stereotypa könsroller och underrepresentation av verkligt intressanta kvinnliga karaktärer, å andra sidan sexualiserande porträtteringar, våld och övergrepp. Denna uppsats undersöker hur våld mot kvinnor gestaltas i mötet mellan olika typer av bilder och texter i ett och samma serieförfattarskap. Undersökningen genomförs med hjälp av Roland Barthes ”Rhétorique de l’image” (1964) och teorin om the male gaze som Laura Mulvey diskuterar i artikeln ”Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1975). Analysen inspireras av en komparativ metod beskriven av Lennart Hellspong i Metoder för brukstextanalys (2001). Uppsatsen granskar utdrag ur Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke och The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen av Alan Moore, en av vår tids mest ansedda författare inom seriemediet, också känd för att porträttera våld mot kvinnliga karaktärer.  Uppsatsens påvisade en ambivalens i porträtterandet av våld mot kvinnor i utdragen ur Alan Moores graphic novels, samt behovet av att problematisera såväl Alan Moores serier som Laura Mulveys the male gaze, men också möjligheten att använda hennes och Barthes teorier inom retorikdiskursens och seriemediets ramar för att granska hur samspelet mellan bild och text kan uttrycka olika typer av budskap och attityder.