Advertising often employs metaphor because of its rhetorical utility. By drawing on analogous imagery and language, metaphor has the potential to elicit emotional responses. As the digital age is increasingly saturated with commercial messaging, advertising experts leverage the persuasive power of metaphor and emotion to produce creative, compelling, and memorable commercials. German automobile company Audi employs metaphorical language and imagery in their video advertisements to arouse consumer emotions. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of Audi’s online video commercials in order to: identify instances in their ads that employ metaphorical language and imagery; investigate how those metaphors function rhetorically; and discuss the complex rhetorical interplay between metaphor and emotion. My findings suggest that Audi leverages the power of metaphor to build audiences’ emotional investment in the brand, and therefore, be more likely to purchase Audi vehicles.

Although the term hybrid has gained much traction in literary analyses of contemporary experimental poetry, there is a notable divide within scholarly discourse wherein its uses pertain to either form or content. The term has been used by literary critics and anthologists to categorize works of poetry that combine formal techniques and practices from opposing traditions of literary history, but within cultural, postcolonial, and Asian American studies, it has served as an important term that designates sites of resistance within cross-cultural contexts of uneven power dynamics. This discrepancy in uses of the term hybrid serves as the basis for my critical investigation of experimental poetry by Cathy Park Hong, Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Monica Ong. This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary reassessment of the concept of hybridity that applies it to both formal experimentation and cultural content by examining the innovative ways in which Asian American and Pacific Islander poets use hybrid forms to represent hybrid identities and the particular social, political, and colonial contexts within which they emerge. While the term in relation to ethnic American poetry has primarily pertained to multilingual features, my study widens the scope of hybridity to not only include verbal expression but also visual forms of representation (such as photographs, illustrations, and digital renderings of images). How do these poets grapple with both text and image as a means of communicating across and confronting different types of boundaries (such as linguistic, national, cultural, racial, and ideological)? How do they utilize the page as a textual-visual space to not only represent hybrid identity but also to critique their social and political milieu? I address these inquiries by exploring the ways in which Hong, Perez, Choi, and Ong enact formal hybridity to challenge multilingualism as cosmopolitan commodity, the colonial erasure of indigenous language and culture, hegemonic narratives of history, and representations of the racial Other. This dissertation argues that their poetry demonstrates an expansive hybridity in which multilingual and mixed-media practices serve as the very means by which they negotiate the fraught conditions of migration, colonization, geopolitics, and marginalization. / English

A problem representation is a cognitive structure created by the solver in correspondence to the problem. Sketching representative diagrams in the domain of physics encourages a problem solving strategy that starts from 'envisionment' by which one internally simulates the physical events and predicts outcomes. Research studies also show that sketching representative diagrams improves learner's performance in solving physics problems. The pedagogic benefits of sketching representations on paper make this traditional learning strategy remain pivotal and worthwhile to be preserved and integrated into the current digital learning landscape. In this paper, I describe AR Physics, an Augmented Reality based application that intends to facilitate one's learning of physics concepts about objects' linear motion. It affords the verified physics learning strategy of sketching representative diagrams on paper, and explores the capability of Augmented Reality in enhancing visual conceptions. The application converts the diagrams drawn on paper into virtual representations displayed on a tablet screen. As such learners can create physics simulation based on the diagrams and test their "envisionment" for the diagrams. Users' interaction with AR Physics consists of three steps: 1) sketching a diagram on paper; 2) capturing the sketch with a tablet camera to generate a virtual duplication of the diagram on the tablet screen, and 3) placing a physics object and configuring relevant parameters through the application interface to construct a physics simulation. A user study about the efficiency and usability of AR Physics was performed with 12 college students. The students interacted with the application, and completed three tasks relevant to the learning material. They were given eight questions afterwards to examine their post-learning outcome. The same questions were also given prior to the use of the application in order to compare with the post results. System Usability Scale (SUS) was adopted to assess the application's usability and interviews were conducted to collect subjects' opinions about Augmented Reality in general. The results of the study demonstrate that the application can effectively facilitate subjects' understanding the target physics concepts. The overall satisfaction with the application's usability was disclosed by the SUS score. Finally subjects expressed that they gained a clearer idea about Augmented Reality through the use of the application.

<p>In this dissertation I argue that the currency of the childhood obesity “epidemic” as a health crisis is derived largely from processes of representation and reproduction through which fatness has been re-calibrated as something pathogenic. I develop the position that the “childhood obesity epidemic”—influenced as it is by neoliberal notions of what constitutes a healthy individual and a vital body politic—risks exacerbating, rather than mitigating, the vulnerability of children.</p> <p>The methodology of this project uses the example of lifestyle to illustrate how consensus about the presence of an “obesity epidemic” has been built, the concept of lifestyle being read as representative of how particular constellations of anxiety regulate what counts as true in the developing body of social knowledge concerning childhood obesity. I contend that the problem of lifestyle captures the complexities of the “childhood obesity epidemic” because children are presupposed, in obesity discourses, to be more vulnerable to the sweeping set of social trends brought under the rubric of the “obesity epidemic” than adults.</p> <p>In what follows, I investigate the rationale for anti-obesity through an investigation of a series of analogous clusters, cases of persuasive ideas borne out of the moral panics subtending childhood obesity. I ask what it means that the child’s diminished capacity for autonomous decision-making is considered to be especially critical in the face of popular culture’s media “bombardment.” More broadly, I focus on the delimiting effect that anti-obesity’s politicization of lifestyle has had on recent attempts to think through the articulation of health, consumerism, environment, and the government of risk.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The intent of this thesis is to examine Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the image in both historical and philosophical terms and propose that his understanding of the image as disconnected from any sort of objective reality is an important starting point for further discussion of the photographic image. This thesis seeks to answer the question – how does Baudrillard’s theory of the photographic image shape our contemporary understanding of images, and what are the implications of his removal of the referent to reality within photographic images on mass culture, society, and the current state of image creation? This paper seeks to investigate Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy of the image and how it can be applied to various contemporary movements in photography and image generation, ultimately working towards an understanding of the photographic image as a gateway into subjective mystery rather than a confirmation of the existence or proof of an objective reality. With specific reference to the Baudrillardian ontology of the image and Baudrillard’s discussion of the disconnection between images and reality, this paper also seeks to apply Baudrillard’s severance of the referent to reality in photographic images to the contemporary state of images and discuss the alienating effect this removal has on mass culture and politics, ultimately calling for a renewal of a Baudrillardian view of the image in discussions about the image’s reality.

The Marquis de Sade has a notorious reputation amongst academics as a continuous figure of fictional and cultural studies. His characters, stories, and writings carry weight in modern interpretations of gender dynamics, pornographic aesthetics, and the alternative fantastical. This thesis will explore the Marquis de Sade’s most famous characters, Justine and Juliette, as means to define the Marquis’ significance to 21st Century Western culture production, particularly in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. Exploring the female protagonists (or main characters) of the separate works, the correlations of subjugation, constructed morality, and the constructs of femininity become important markers for understanding the Marquis’ dissemination of his philosophies on gender, violence, and indulgent sexuality that leads to conversations on pornographic aesthetics in our modern period. Despite being dead for nearly 200 years, the Marquis de Sade’s relevance parades on in ideologies regarding female identity and sexual desires of the extreme.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of technologies for externalizing human memory beyond writing, painting, and sculpting. These modes of visual representation, namely photography and cinema carried with them a purported objective representation of reality, which has been used to create classifications, divide people groups, and construct grand historical narratives used to marginalize those that do not fit within the hegemonic center. Looking to the works of writer W.G. Sebald, and filmmaker Chris Marker, we see a complication of the divide between visual and verbal texts, as each artist deconstructs their own medium’s conventions. Using theories of ekphrasis to draw connections between verbal and visual representation, we see how Sebald and Marker explore notions of memory, identity, and history as they struggle with the impossibility of representing the great traumas of the twentieth century.

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:30:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Gonzaga de Macedo.pdf: 3194045 bytes, checksum: 194da81c2fb39b2567c36755e9f3764b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-25 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This dissertation had as its aim to build a visual history from the images produced by the Teutonic Danish traveler Paul Harro-Harring, who came to Brazil in 1840. Through a series of drawings and watercolor paintings, this traveler and artist portrayed landscapes and scenes from slave-related daily life in Rio de Janeiro. Our research treated such images as a visual source to a certain manner of producing and assigning meaning to the world, building our interpretation and interaction with its images in the core of a historiography tradition named Visual Studies. Visual Studies carry in their theoric outline the term visuality , which refers to the way a certain look will perceive and attribute meaning to the visible. Thus, the Visual Studies address on culture and the visual dimension in every kind of cultural production in a determined historical-cultural context. From these references, it was aimed to establish a relation between the landscape and nature conceptions in the romantic painting with the Rio de Janeiro‟s scenery created by the artist. There was a description and interpretation of images that pictured slave trade scenes and the cultural relationships between the slaves among themselves and with their landlords. To do such a study, it was considered not only the imaginary and the cultural background of the artist, but also the tension of the experience lived by him in 1840‟s Rio de Janeiro. It is concluded that his perception of the world, his political and philosophical conceptions on culture notions, nation and men and also the concrete conditions of the slaves‟ existence feeded his perception and constellated the visuality present in his images / Esta dissertação teve por objetivo construir uma história visual a partir de imagens produzidas pelo viajante teuto-dinamarquês Paul Harro-Harring, que veio ao Brasil em 1840. Por meio de uma série de desenhos e aquarelas esse viajante e artista retratou paisagens e cenas do cotidiano escravagista no Rio de Janeiro. Nossa pesquisa tratou essas imagens como fonte visual para uma dada maneira de produzir e atribuir sentido ao mundo e as diferenças culturais, construindo nossa interpretação e interação com suas imagens no interior de uma tradição historiográfica denominada Estudos Visuais. Os Estudos Visuais carregam, em seu arcabouço teórico, o termo visualidade que se refere à maneira como um determinado olhar vai perceber e atribuir significado ao visível e ao sensível. Assim, os Estudos Visuais, debruçam-se sobre as culturas e a dimensão visual contida em todos os tipos de produções culturais em um determinado contexto histórico-cultural. A partir dessas referências buscou-se estabelecer a relação entre as concepções de paisagem e natureza, no espírito da pintura romântica, com as paisagens do Rio de Janeiro elaboradas pelo artista. Foram descritas e interpretadas as imagens que retratavam cenas do tráfico negreiro e das relações culturais dos escravizados entre si e com os senhores. Para tanto, considerou-se, para além do imaginário e bagagem cultural do artista, a tensão das experiências por ele vividas naquele Rio de Janeiro de 1840. Conclui-se que a sua visão de mundo, suas concepções políticas e filosóficas acerca de noções de cultura, nação e homens, bem como as condições concretas de existência dos escravizados, nutriram o seu olhar e constelaram a visualidade presente em suas imagens

Le présent travail interroge l’œuvre de Goffredo Parise (Vicenza, 1929 – Treviso, 1986) à partir du primat qu’il accorde à la vue dans chacun de ses écrits. Une recherche des causes au fondement d’une telle poétique ainsi que des implications qui en découlent a ainsi été menée dans un cadre d’interprétation dépassant les frontières purement littéraires au profit d’instruments méthodologiques empruntés à la philosophie (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, en ce qui concerne les liens avec la phénoménologie, et François Jullien, pour ce qui est du rapport à l’Orient), à l’anthropologie visuelle et à la critique d’art (Georges Didi-Huberman). Cette étude s’est développée selon deux axes principaux : d’une part, l’analogie entre la réflexion philosophique et la poétique de l’auteur, qui a montré la validité d’une relecture de l’œuvre de Parise à travers le prisme du primat de la perception ; d’autre part, les affinités qu’entretient l’écriture de Parise avec la pratique picturale, qui ont, une fois de plus, prouvé à quel point la production de l’auteur ne peut être contenue dans des frontières strictement littéraires mais exige le recours continuel à des instruments interprétatifs issus d’autres champs de recherche. / This research focuses on the work of Goffredo Parise (Vicenza, 1929 – Treviso, 1986) seen under the perspective of the primacy of the visual element, which can be traced in every text he has ever written. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, François Jullien’s thinking and Georges Didi-Huberman’s visual anthropology, the thesis aims to trace the origins of Parise’s poetics and its relationships with philosophy and visual arts. The first strand of the research deals with the intersections between Parise’s work and the philosophy of perception, while the second one investigates the similarities between Parise’s poetics and painting. This leads to the conclusion that Parise’s work requires broader instruments of analysis than traditional literary critique.