https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/1048 2026-04-05T12:23:34Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/2833 Title: Spectral reality, spectral feeling : photographed corporeality and the aporia of indifference Abstract: This dissertation starts with the assumption that the photograph of real suffering incites real feeling on the basis that photography is believed to give us real information about the world. Although it appears as if photography can circumvent the issue of mediation, both Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard suggest that the knowledge of reality gained by the Western spectator through photography is often that of a spectral reality, whereby the viscerality of violated bodies is subsumed by virtuality. The distinction between reality and the Lacanian understanding of the Real can thus be brought to bear on photography’s capacity to represent the corporeality of violence and death and the susceptibility of this reality to derealisation. Photography’s empirical unreliability may fail to incite what is deemed to be a morally appropriate reaction to the violence the spectator is exposed to. This dissertation thus situates itself in the popular debate surrounding photography’s capacity for (de)sensitising its viewer in order to take issue with the critical treatment of the spectator’s indifference. The second movement of this dissertation thus focuses on the spectral sense of feeling elicited by the image of violence to investigate the contemporary ontology of indifference and its relation to photographed corporeality. This leads to the unsettling of the assumption that the spectator’s indifference is an anomaly which ought to be countered and for which blame can be apportioned. This dissertation argues, following Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, that indifference to photographed violence should be considered a definitive characteristic of spectatorship and it must be understood as such if ethics is going to seriously contend with the problem of indifference. The widespread sense of indifference on the part of the spectator of photographed violence is thus reviewed through the aporetic nature of indifference and the challenges it poses to what may be called an ethics of corporeality, posited by Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, which relies too heavily on the supposed impact that the sight of abjection has on its viewer. Description: M.A.ENGLISH 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/2791 Title: Size matters : a study of English proficiency levels of educated Maltese English speakers through lexical competence Abstract: There exists a lack of measurable evidence of proficiency levels of English in Malta. This thesis represents a pilot study which examines the potential for measuring the levels of English proficiency of a small cohort of bilingual educated Maltese subjects. In an effort to measure L2 vocabulary depth, breadth and to gain insight into the cohort’s mental lexicon, the research focused on word association in the cohort’s native Maltese and their L2, English. The results of this thesis suggest that further study into the correlation between Maltese and English responses to word association tests are likely to shed light onto the structure of the mental lexicon that holds both languages. However, before such tests can be attempted, this research shows that further development of the tests are needed, especially with regard to the choice of stimulus words in the Maltese word association test, the test format to reduce priming and a revision of the categorization system to suit Maltese/English responses. Description: M.A.ENGLISH 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/2784 Title: ‘None but lost heads on none but lost bodies’ : nihilism and affirmation in J.M. Coetzee Abstract: J.M. Coetzee (1940-) is one of the most important and serious writers of the last couple of decades. Indeed, the introduction argues that Coetzee is the most appropriate choice for this study on nihilism and affirmation in the world precisely because (among other things) of his seriousness. It is a seriousness that is born out of an apprehension of the world darkened by the very instability that existence brings. These are spaces of possibility in which narratives about ‘happ(i)ness’, about what happens to us in life take place, namely the tragi-comic as rehearsed in millennia of instability. This instability will mostly be understood in light of Schopenhauer’s idea of the Will which sees humans as the embodiment of a struggling, suffering energy that animates everything in the world. In relation to both Coetzee’s work and several philosophical texts, the first chapter deals with the question of birth as an accidental affair of the highest order which determines, both on an individual and social level, how we view life; birth is seen as the primary attachment to life which may incline one towards either affirmation or anti-natalism. In relation to this, the second part of this chapter also deals more directly with the problem of nihilism as found in several of Coetzee’s works and tries to see how these problems may relate to existence on as a bare a level as possible, once they are stripped of their intellectual veils—Elizabeth Costello and The Master of Petersburg feature most prominently in this part. The following chapter then deals with the two inter-related themes of ‘Abjection’ and ‘Resignation’, as well as ‘Singularities’. Among the subjects considered in relation to Coetzee’s work in the first two sub-chapters are (broadly construed) the problem of evil, loss and forgetting, and death. Through close reading and further exemplification, a pattern emerges that strongly signals the tragic-comic nature of both Coetzee’s world and ours. In the third sub-chapter of ‘Singularities’, Benjamin Noys’ take on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of the figure of the refugee in relation to bare life is reapplied, this with the intention of aiding in the reading of various characters in The Childhood of Jesus and other of Coetzee’s works, the argument being that it is precisely in such socially dispossessed, disaffected and bare states that these figures find their own individual ‘affirmation’. Finally, the concluding chapter retraces the various interlinked arguments and leitmotifs throughout the dissertation. It draws a line around both Coetzee’s characters and landscapes, which are deeply reflective of our own, and assays the myths of human thinking there present—in particular instances and in deeply significant ways—as active agents of needless suffering, chaos and abstrusion in human life in general. It suggests that we might be better served in finding the ‘good life’ in what the philosopher John N. Gray calls ‘coping with tragic contingencies’, rather than in the false myths and failed projects that populate human history. In this respect a brief reflection on quietism is also offered. Description: M.A. ENGLISH 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/2779 Title: V.S. Naipaul : no place to call home Abstract: This study aims to explore how V.S. Naipaul, a rootless wanderer engages with the questions of homelessness, uprootedness, lack of identity and the world after empire in seven key texts: The Enigma of Arrival; A House for Mr Biswas; The Mimic Men; A Bend in the River; Half a Life, Magic Seeds and The Middle Passage. These texts draw on Naipaul’s background - his childhood in the Caribbean island of Trinidad; and what he describes as his ‘second’ childhood in Britain - followed by extensive periods of travel in India and the US. Drawing on postcolonial theory this study refers to the position of the migrant figure in a state of exile with no place to call home. Description: M.A.ENGLISH 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z