Impossible intimacy: discovering the cultural interplay between new and the old worlds in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Tese de mestrado em Estudos Anglísticos apresentada à Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 2008Não foi de toda alietória a escolha da obra Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov como ponto de partida para esta tese. Apesar de ser um livro muito tratado, continua pela sua complexidade a exercer um fascínio imanente sobre os seus leitores. No cerne deste livro encontram-se fundidos séculos de tradição literária, onde são reinventadas velhas fórmulas e conceitos estéticos, com um sentido de humor implacável e inteligente característico de Nabokov. Um dos tópicos primordiais desta obra coincide com a preocupação fundamental desta tese: desvendar a dialéctica entre a Europa e a América representada pelos personagens aparentemente antiéticos Humbert, o erudito cavalheiro europeu, e Lolita, a rude ninfeta americana. Simultaneamente, esta tese busca as ligações culturais entre os dois continentes, tendo como pano de fundo uma época muito agitada o pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial. Um grande número de académicos já anteriormente se debruçou sobre este tópico, em especial Ellen Pifer, que no seu ensaio Nabokov's Novel Offspring argumenta que o nome de Lolita está hoje irreversivelmente ligado à noção de juventude americana sexualizada, enquanto Humbert, por sua vez, é conectado com o langor e nostalgia de uma sociedade europeia em colapso.A questão do abismo intercontinental é recorrentemente associada às diferenças intrínsecas presentes nos dois protagonistas de Lolita. Esta suposição não é de todo desprovida de sentido, afinal os personagens principais deste romance são verdadeiramente díspares a primeira é uma vivaça adolescente americana, enquanto o segundo é um melancólico académico europeu. Assim, estabelece-se um dos pontos-chave que permeará toda esta tese: a relação de contrastes entre Lolita e Humbert, bem como aquilo que Pifer apelidou da divisão entre o mundo das crianças e o mundo dos adultos (85). Tal dialéctica será correlacionada com a fascinação americana pela relação familia

PURSUING ORGANIZATIONAL SPIRITUALITY: SOME LESSONS FROM A FINANCIAL SERVICES CORPORATION

There has been scant investigation about workplace spirituality focusing on organizational level. Thus, this paper tries to fulfill this gap by recognizing that organizations have been increasingly forced to address other issues than their traditional concerns. Rather, it suggests that companies should be open to embrace other values such as spiritual principles through organizational re-orientation. Accordingly, this paper presents the case study of Serasa Experian, one of the world’s leading economic and financial analysis and information firms. In addition, it proposes a simplified conceptual framework in which both corporate social responsibility (CSR) and internal marketing concept (IMC) constitute the key constructs of a spiritual organization. Finally, the findings suggest that Serasa Experian has pursued an organizational spirituality orientation, yet it has somewhat lost its impetus toward it. Overall, evidence shows that its features, values, and feats are typical of an organization in which spirituality is more than a word, even though it is unaware of it.corporate culture, corporate social responsibility, employees, internal marketing, virtues, workplace spirituality.

INTERNAL DEMARKETING: CONSTRUCT, RESEARCH PROPOSITIONS AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

To a large degree, organizations strive for marketing and selling themselves as good employers. However, by a wide range of actions, practices, mistakes, and premises they can most notably demotivate rather than motivate their workforces. On the face of it, this paper proposes a conceptual framework where (1) internal demarketing (ID) is regarded as a sort of corporate illness that is (2) closely associated with high and middle managers’ actions, decisions, and behaviors that (3) are capable of triggering negative perceptions at work settings that (4) can potentially lead to the decrease of productivity and/or poor organizational performance. Thus, some constructs are posited as determinants of ID manifestation such as psychological contract violation, people devaluing, quality of work life unconcern, poor leadership, blurred vision, the spread of distrust, and lack of corporate communication. Also, the potential consequences of ID are addressed, namely the lack of commitment, employee dissatisfaction, and employee silence.distrust, internal customers, internal marketing, organizations, vision.

Medical diagnosis system and method with multispectral imaging

A skin diagnosis system includes a scanning and optical arrangement whereby light reflected from each incremental area (pixel) of the skin is directed simultaneously to three separate light filters, e.g., IR, red, and green. As a result, the three devices simultaneously produce three signals which are directly related to the reflectance of light of different wavelengths from the corresponding pixel. These three signals for each pixel after processing are used as inputs to one or more output devices to produce a visual color display and/or a hard copy color print, for one usable as a diagnostic aid by a physician

Breast Cancer Risk After Ovarian Stimulation for In Vitro Fertilization

The study by Dr van den Belt-Dusebout and colleagues1 investigated a debated aspect of reproductive medicine: breast cancer risk following ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization (IVF).2-5 The authors concluded that “these findings are consistent with absence of a significant increase in long-term risk of breast cancer among IVF-treated women”.1 However, some important points should be discussed. For about 23 % of women, sub-fertility diagnosis and number of IVF cycles were collected using a questionnaire since medical records were not available. This high rate threatens the reliability of results. It is not possible to compare a detailed report of official medical records with data deriving from subjective memory of treatments received many years before. This may be a strong bias, because reproductive medicine, IVF strategies and the pharmacological protocols have changed rapidly in the last decades. Dates of diagnosis and histology were reported but unfortunately not disease staging. It would be interesting to investigate if ovarian stimulation with the use of IVF techniques can promote the occurrence of biologically different types of breast cancer, as in the case of tamoxifen-related endometrial cancer, a neoplasia with better prognostic profile and outcome. Also, the authors reported that breast cancer risk decreased with more IVF cycles (7 or more compared with 1-2). They suggested as potential explanations that women treated with more IVF cycles received more hCG or had longer periods of down-regulation with low estradiol and progesterone levels, or the women requiring more IVF cycles were inherently different. It is difficult to provide a definitive conclusion since the clinical outcomes of IVF cycles were not reported. The decreased risk in women treated with many IVF cycles also could be related to the improvement of ovarian function after repeated endocrine stimulations. Infertility and infertility-related nulliparity must be considered as risk factors for breast cancer, and prolonged treatment of anovulatory or poor ovulatory cycles could be one approach for restoring normal ovarian activity and reducing breast cancer risk