The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze how the contemporary western society is reflected in the modern dystopian works' perspective. Key problems and aspects defining today's western society, e.g. consumerism and the role of science and technology, are specified in the introductory part of the thesis. The next part concerns with dystopian creation. Firstly there is focus on dystopian genre characteristics and its roots and typology. Secondly there is introduced a triad of classical dystopian works' representatives: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Every work is shortly introduced with its synopsis in the beginning and key features of described visions of society follow afterwards. Then the thesis speaks about chosen modern dystopian works' representatives in detail: The Matrix by the Wachowskis, Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent by Veronica Roth. After the synopsis summary of each there is an analysis of key features, a comparison with classical dystopias and a search for parallels in the contemporary western society. Questions how modern dystopias reflect modern society and how they correlate with classical dystopias and expert literature concerning contemporary social phenomena are answered in the conclusion of the thesis.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-27T13:49:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AZIZE MARIA YARED DE MEDEIROS.pdf: 632127 bytes, checksum: ff4b65477993129c93063a23fbbd58d3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-14 / The objective of this study is to investigate the permanent process of searching for the holy through experience within New Age s context. It also tried to look for the causes of the beginning of that phenomenon in the rationalistic western society. It was tried to clarify the relationship between a highly scientific, technological and informative society and a Movement that aims to live a mystical bodily and emotionally experience outside conventional religions. It was also studied how western rationalistic thought was built, its influences in religions and in which way it was established in the world what we call post-modernism. It was possible to analyze how this Movement fits in global and pluricultural contemporaneous societies. The study showed that this is an urban peregrination Movement without a settled place keeping as the main goal the own search itself. The results indicate that this Movement has within its essence the proposal of living according to an epistemology that accepts emotions and body sensations as the necessary basis to obtain knowledge and give meaning to the world. The New Age Movement has revealed itself as a constructor of a post-modern ontology where Being is defined especially by feelings. / Este trabalho teve por objetivo investigar o permanente processo de buscar o sagrado, via experimentação, no universo do Movimento Nova Era. Pretendeu também investigar as causas do surgimento desse fenômeno em meio à sociedade ocidental racionalista. Para tanto, buscou-se esclarecer a relação entre uma sociedade altamente científica, tecnológica e informativa e um Movimento que procura viver uma experiência mística corporal e emocionalmente fora do espaço das grandes religiões organizadas. Investigou-se como foi construído o pensamento racionalista do ocidente, suas influências nas religiões e de que modo estabeleceuse o que chamamos de pós-modernidade. Foi possível analisar de que maneira o Movimento se insere no contexto das sociedades contemporâneas, globalizadas e pluriculturais. A investigação mostrou que se trata de um Movimento de peregrinação, urbano, sem espaço fixo, cujo objetivo principal é o próprio processo de buscar. Os resultados indicam ser esse um Movimento que contém implicitamente, em seu bojo, a proposta de viver uma epistemologia que reconhece as emoções e as sensações corporais como a base necessária para obter conhecimento e atribuir significado ao mundo. O Movimento Nova Era revelou-se construtor de uma ontologia pós-moderna, em que o Ser é definido sobretudo pelo sentir.

L'approche criminologique de la délinquance du mineur permet de mettre en lumière les facteurs jouant un rôle dans le processus délinquantiel. Si certaines analyses s'attachent à démontrer l'influence déterminante de l'environnement familial sur la délinquance du mineur, ces propos méritent d'être nuancés. La famille est le modèle de socialisation primaire de l'enfant. Un contexte familial, régi des comportements déviants ou une autorité défaillante, entraînerait dès lors des conséquences criminogènes pour l'enfant. Pour autant, celui-ci ne reproduit pas automatiquement le schéma familial et bénéficie d'une intégration sociale.Dès lors, les analyses multifactorielles de la délinquance mettent en évidence l'importance des autres facteurs environnementaux dans le passage à l'acte du mineur, celui-ci évoluant par la rencontre d'agents extérieurs à la famille.L'influence des facteurs tels que l'école et les groupes de pairs peut se manifester de telle sorte que cette hypothèse remettrait en cause la théorie selon laquelle la famille est un facteur déterminant. Si ces analyses se justifient, elles demeurent incomplètes, soulevant alors la question du lien entre la délinquance juvénile et le fonctionnement de la société occidentale. / A criminalogy approach makes it possible to highlight decisive factors of the delinquency process (ou the criminal process). Some analysts aims to prove the importance of familial context on juvenile delinquency although these explanations seems insufficient. Family is the primary socialisation instance and familial background with deviant behaviors and defaulting authority could thus have an impact on juvenile delinquency. One can observe however that children sometimes do not reproduce the family scheme and are socially integrated. Consequently, a multi-factors analysis of delinquency points up the importance of other contextual factors, among them the external agents to the family encounters, in explaining the first acts of delinquency. Influence of factors as education and peer group imply the questioning of the familial background considered as a key factor of juvenile delinquency. If verified, these analysis remain nonetheless an incomplete explanation, while raising the question of the causal relationship between juvenile delinquency and the workings of Western society.

This master's thesis deals with the identification and the analysis of the changes in society which lead to questioning the basic principles of human rights from the point of view of Czech non-profit organisations. In this study, it is important to divide the definition of human rights into their legal aspect, i.e. as rights of people, and their institutional aspect, i.e. as the moral imperative of equality and liberty. The latter is the main objective of this study, and is in this thesis labelled as the human rights. While the legal aspect of human rights is hard to change and to challenge, the institution of human rights is confronted by both the politics and the public. Because of their unique position between the political and the public spheres, non-profit organisations who advocate the human rights were chosen as the research sample. The dimensions of the researched phenomenon are divided into decreasing political influence of countries promoting the human rights, and increasing distrust in the legitimacy of the human rights. Findings from the research uncover the unequal intensity of the potential reasons of the changing attitudes towards the institution of human rights, and we can identify the political sphere as the creator of the boundaries in which the public reacts. As a result, this...

The core of House M.D. is its assertion that current Western civilization lives in a perpetual state of dissonance: we desire to have the rawness of emotion but we can only handle this rawness when we combine it with intellect, even if that intellect lies to us. This is the ontological paradox that the televisual text grapples with. Through the use of archetypal analysis and allegorical interpretation, this thesis reveals that dissonance and its relationship to contemporary Western society. Through House M.D. we realize that there are structures to the paradoxes that we live and there are paradoxes in our structures. Dr. House is a trickster in an allegory of American capitalist culture. The trickster metaphorically pulls away from society the rules protecting cultural values. Dr. House and House M.D. participate in revealing the cultural disruption of the current moment of Western society. While playing on the genres of detective fiction and hospital dramas, House M.D. is an existential allegory exposing the paradox that we can never be free while still seeking our own self-interest.

This study of contemporary jazz discourse and gender applies the techniques of critical discourse analysis, inspired by M.A.K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and Norman Fairclough's qualitative critical discourse analysis, to explicate the unequal distribution of power in society as represented by the institutions of jazz and mass media, in discourse about jazz vocal artists. Specifically, the study focuses on the way the genres of jazz CD review, jazz performance review, and interviews with jazz artists – disseminated via the institutions JazzTimes and Live New Orleans – represent the artists' identities, roles, achievements and skills. Following Norman Fairclough and the feminist scholar Mary Talbot, the study assumes that institutions of mass media not only discursively construct the gender of jazz vocal artists, but also represent the performers' achievement and skills from a hegemonic standpoint, reflecting the commonsense assumptions about women and men and their roles in patriarchal society.