Adolescents feel confusion all the time on the way to become mature adults. In ancient time, children were guided to go through adulthood ceremony to ease safely the unsettled and risky mind at the adolescent stage. It is a pity that Internet Café and on-line games nowadays becomes a battlefield for young people to fight with their confusion and conflicts in mind hoping for gaining inside happiness and calm. However, on-line games are not products designed to help adolescent inner growth but commercials, which aim to profit. Internet Café, though, is not an ideal place to develop one¡¦s identity, offers a possibility of exciting exploring journey. Nevertheless, in a cement jungle, limited space drives children to go into a virtual fascinating playground to discover ¡§Who am I?¡¨ Campbell stated the theme of ancient myth to present contemporary phenomenon. The myth claims that children are born to be heroes. Heroes search for inner growth, self-identity and conquer challenges in fate of their own. No one can escape from the risky life journey (transformation from adolescent to adult), even though we do not expect it, it comes to us eventually. It is an innate thirst to success in perilous life voyage. This research adapted qualitative in-depth interviews with forty-four young people in eleven Internet Cafés in Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County, exploring twelve individual cases in profound reflection of their lives, which the whole observation and interviews have been lasted eight months long (September, 2005-April, 2006) and still, some of them kept intensive contact with me. Most heroes in the cases stepped into Dark Forest-Internet Cafés since grade 3 or 4 and had undergone 4 to 5-year attempt and gradual transformation in mind in addition to the helping hand from Goddess of Happiness (significant others), heroes will come back to real world along with the grace (self-awareness) of the trial in Dark Forest. They will live freely and happily and become masters of two worlds, the Forest and outside world. Heroes who do not break through the spell of Dark Forest would still wait for the guidance of Goddess of Happiness or worse, they would be trapped in jails and dangers and lost contacts with outside world. The research discovers that the main cause of attaching to on-line games comes from school; the secondary cause comes from family. On one hand, the harvest of young people in on-line games contains positive compensation on missing adulthood ceremony passing smoothly rebellious and confusing stage of life journey. On the other hand, the negative influence would be suffering from bad health attributing to staying up all night; bad school performance, unsatisfactory interaction with teachers and parents and much more, some of the young people can not even finish junior high schooling.

The strong part of Horkheimer and Adorno&rsquo / s philosophy is their critique of the Enlightenment. They argue that the consequent of the Enlightenment has been the destruction of the Enlightenment itself. There are two main reasons in the background of this destruction. First of them is the destruction of individual because of the understanding of reason in the Enlightenment. Individuals cannot define their existence beyond the determined roles of society any more. The second reason is the certain distinction between the human beings and nature. The epistemology of the Enlightenment makes nature an object of knowledge and views the world as a summation of facts. This understanding makes subjects passive in providing the objectivity of knowledge. Accordingly, the subject is alienated from his or her knowledge. Horkheimer and Adorno&rsquo / s critical thinking provides possibility for the human autonomy. It tries to understand human beings and society in a dialectical process. It considers the relation between parts and the whole as a mutual relation. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the relation between subject and object is neither an absolute duality nor an absolute unity.

This thesis studies metaphor, myth and their imaginative aspects in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The thesis argues that a comprehensive understanding of metaphor and myth cannot be done in the works of these poets without seeing them as faces of the same coin, and taking into consideration the role of the creating subject and its imagination in their production. Relying on Kantian, Romantic, and modern Neo-Kantian ideas of imagination, metaphor and myth, the study tries to indicate that imagination is an inherently metaphorizing and mythologizing faculty because the act of perception is an act of giving form to natural phenomena and seeing similitude in dissimilitude, which are basically metaphorical and mythological acts. In its form-giving activity the imagination of the speaking subjects of the poems studied in this thesis sees objects of nature as spiritual, animate or divine beings and thus transforms them into the alien territory of myth. This thesis analyzes myth and metaphor mainly in two regards: first, myth and metaphor are handled as inborn aspects of imagination and perception, and the interaction between nature and imagination are presented as the origin of all mythology / second, to show how myth is something that is re-created time and again by poetic imagination, Romantic mythography and re-creation of precursor mythologies are analyzed. In both regards, poetic imagination appears as a formative power that constructs, defamiliarizes and re-creates via mythologization and metaphorization.

This thesis aims to investigate women&amp / #8217 / s double-way relation to consumption, as both consumers and commodities. The major goal of the study is to examine the historical construction of women as pimary consuming class and how this relationship of women to consumption has evolved through time. Moreover, it is claimed that display of women as visual objects of male gaze in visual iconography, ideologies of beauty and body politics on women&amp / #8217 / s appearances resulted in commodification of women in the modern consumer culture. Additionally, a brief analysis of Turkish print advertisements for the period 1930-1970 is attempted with a view to demonstrating how Turkish middle-class women have been incorporated into newly emerging consumer culture and how this integration process has been perceived by advertisers.

This study approaches myths as patriarchal narratives and ideological tools and it argues that representations of women from an androcentric perspective in Greek mythology are also observed in the Bible. This study argues that patriarchy as a universal ideology has produced the same gender stereotypes beginning from Ancient Greece. Consequently, Western literature, which has the Classical and Biblical tradition as its main source, has reinforced the same female images throughout its history. Besides, it is suggested that, the Western canon failed to create alternative female models for the binary opposition of submissive wives versus the female evil figure and the main stereotypical characteristics had not been challenged until the emergence of feminist criticism. This study thus aims to discuss myths as one of the foremost sites of the construction of ideological subjects and it analyses the rewritings of Greek, Old Testament and New Testament myths by contemporary women writers in fiction / namely Margaret Atwood&rsquo / s The Penelopiad, Marion Zimmer Bradley&rsquo / s The Firebrand, Anita Diamant&rsquo / s The Red Tent, India Edghill&rsquo / s Queenmaker, Gail Sidonie Sobat&rsquo / s The Book of Mary and Mich&eacute / le Roberts&rsquo / The Wild Girl and it explores the textual strategies that are employed by women writers in order to subvert and revise the patriarchal ideology in myths, to come up with alternative definitions of female identity and to weave gynocentric myths.

La tesi di dottorato indaga l'evoluzione del mito di Elettra dalla fine dell'Ottocento ai giorni nostri, attraverso una prospettiva prevalentemente drammaturgica, ma con attenzione anche verso la letteratura e il cinema: l'idea che domina la ricerca è quella di osservare le relazioni fra questa vicenda e, in particolare, questo personaggio, e il periodo storico in cui vengono rielaborate le sue riscritture, al fine di porre in rilievo la metastoricità del mito e le sue relazioni con l'antropologia e la psicologia. Il percorso prende in esame, complessivamente, trentacinque testi, tre pellicole cinematografiche e vari riferimenti culturali tesi a scoprire, almeno in parte, la funzione del mito nella contemporaneità. / The doctor degree thesis investigates the Elektra's myth evolution from the last years of the nineteenth century to our times, through a dramatic perspective, but also taking heed of literature and cinema: the prevailing idea of the research is observing the relationships between this myth and, above all, Elektra's character, and the historical period of re-writing. The analysis is on 35 texts, 3 films and many others cultural references to discover Elektra in the contemporaneity.

Texte remanié de : Dissertation : Romanistik : philosophische Fakultät der Universität Bonn : 1984. / Bibliogr p. 241-271. Index.

Texte remanié de : Dissertation : Philosophie : Universität Zürich : 2007. / Bibliogr. p. [201]-214. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Michigan University, 2009. / "14-62709." Bibliography: leaves 54-59.

This thesis is prompted by a curiosity about the popularity of the image of Peter Pan. Realising that the familiar and ubiquitous image is as much a product of consumer culture as it is the result of multimodal adaptations and reinterpretations of J. M. Barrie?s Peter Pan, this study attempts to shovel aside present-day conceptions of Peter Pan stories, so as to unearth the bedrock, to see Peter Pan as it was when it was new, back in its own time. To do so, this study goes back to the original Peter Pan texts. Picking out elements that signal the presence of certain literary modes, this thesis explores how the Peter Pan narratives engage with these modes, genres and traditions. One of the motives of the thesis is to rescue Peter Pan from ghettoization in the cosy category of “children?s literature”, and through critical attention to take it seriously as an important work in the literature of the early twentieth century. Chapter I situates Peter Pan in the pastoral tradition. Adducing William Empson?s concept of the pastoral as the process of “putting the complex into the simple”, this thesis argues that Peter Pan portrays two competing pastoral spaces and lays claim to the tradition by challenging its parameters of innocence. The chapter also invokes Bakhtin?s idea of carnival, asserting that the Peter Pan texts are “carnivalesque” in both their self-referential play with narrative and generic conventions, and with various more or less satirical and transgressive themes. Chapter II traces elements of Pan myths in the texts, and argues that the texts engage with the late-Victorian and Edwardian interest in myth by re-envisioning an avatar of Pan that would take its place amongst other literary Pans of the era, such as those of E. M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, Elizabeth Browning, and Arthur Machen. The final chapter sets Peter Pan in the midst of a battle of modes of representation and vision, with R. L. Stevenson championing romance and Henry James politely standing for realism. The chapter argues that while the Peter Pan texts belong more to romance, they play with the boundaries of each by critiquing both modes, all the time showing up and relishing the artificiality of narration. The chapter then picks up on the sense of play, pervading Peter Pan’s engagement with every literary mode that has been discussed, and examines the social meanings and aesthetic instances of play against the backdrop of Edwardian England. Throughout the chapters, by dint of its spirit of play, Peter Pan problematizes the modern family and deconstructs the hierarchy of generations, along with the fundamental anthropological categories of childhood and adulthood, categories which were coming under scrutiny and pressure from the modernizing forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century. With its sustained exploration of the structure of generations, Peter Pan addresses a problem of modernity in spite of its fantasy setting, and there is a case therefore for considering it under the rubric, elaborated by Nicholas Daly, of “popular modernism”. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy