https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/107633 2026-04-28T07:44:35Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/122076 Title: Representation of the athlete in sports writing Abstract: This dissertation explores sports writing with an analysis of Alex Bellos’s Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, Pete Davies’s One Night in Turin, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Kerry Howley’s Thrown, Norman Mailer’s The Fight, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ through the work of Seymour Chatman, Jonathan Culler, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Jakob Lothe, Joseph Campbell, and Donald Morrill to illustrate how there is literary value in the genre, particularly in the depiction of athletes. The first chapter highlights the aestheticisation of athletes and the ways sports writers describe the beauty that is found in sports figures’ movements and skills. In this respect, the analysis focuses on S. K. Wertz’s four qualities that contribute to the aestheticisation of sport and Walter Thomas Schmid’s application of Immanuel Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgements to form a ‘Kantian theory of sport’. The second chapter explores the depiction of the athlete as a hero and an icon. This is primarily done through an application of Joseph Campbell’s hero monomyth, highlighting the dramatic highs and lows that an athlete might experience, together with Joshua Andrew Shuart’s notion of the ‘societal hero’ and how they become popular within communities. Lastly, the third chapter then moves on to how sports writers can represent various aspects of different cultures through their depictions of athletes. This analysis centres around Stuart Hall’s systems of representation and how representation of meaning through language is identified. Additionally, this chapter also applies Roland Barthes’s semiotic view of language and representation, particularly his ideas of denotation and connotation to allow for an analysis of the representation of different cultural traits, together with instances of social struggle. Therefore, this dissertation outlines how despite it being a relatively underappreciated genre by literary theorists, sports writing still possesses literary value, especially within character analysis. This literary value is highlighted in further detail through an analysis of the aforementioned works. Description: M.A.(Melit.) 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/121988 Title: Rhetorical analysis of portrayals of immigration on Instagram Abstract: This dissertation aims to explore the different ways in which immigrants are portrayed through the work of photojournalists on Instagram, a social media application which many photojournalists make use of to publish their work on various immigration crises across the world. In particular, it will focus on the content of Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York) and his work on the 2015 immigration crisis; Anastasia Taylor-Lind and her work on the Ukrainian immigration crisis; and the content of John Moore and his coverage at the United States of America border immigration. It concentrated on the portrayals of immigration on Instagram by analysing the various descriptive and rhetorical means that the above photojournalists make use of in their work. The study provides an extended discussion of the political and social context of post-truth in which such content appears. It then concludes by discussing some important ethical issues that surround the practices of the portrayal of refugees and immigrants on social media. Description: M.A.(Melit.) 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/121987 Title: Defiance and desire : nineteenth-century female writers and their characters Abstract: This dissertation examines the strategies that women writers in nineteenth-century Britain adopted to assert their competence to write for financial gain, whilst also safeguarding their good name and social standing. They did this against a cultural status quo that sought to silence women’s voices from public discourse, consigning them to the solitude of the private, domestic sphere. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson, Susan Sniader Lanser, and Alexis Easley amongst others, the dissertation reviews how women writers negotiated their position as members, subject, or servant in society, asserted their authorial voice and authority and engaged in the emerging celebrity culture to protect or enhance their profile and reputation as women and as writers. A case study focus of Middlemarch and Miss Marjoribanks shows the challenges the heroines face to live their fullest lives whilst avoiding, or at least minimising, social condemnation. I argue that Eliot and Oliphant use their authorial voice and authority to highlight the injustice of a society determined to confine women to the domestic sphere. Finally, I demonstrate that women writers positioned themselves as literary celebrities to hack, disrupt, and disturb the cultural mainframe from below as they understood that in the Victorian era, play, as defined here by Matthew Kaiser, afforded them the power to conceive of new realities and opportunities, fulfilling both their roles in the home and their professional careers as writers. Description: M.A.(Melit.) 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/121983 Title: The video essay as a form of public discourse for persuasive purposes Abstract: The video essay is a very unique medium, where video essayists manage to balance between entertainment and information. In the wake of the rise of the Alt-Right online, the Internet became a hub for extremist content made by right-wing figureheads who spread conspiracy theories like wildfire, radicalising many into the far-right movement. Leftist content creators, known informally as LeftTube, were inspired to act in order to counteract the effects of this Alt-Right Pipeline. The most popular ones, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube, and Harry Brewis (also known as Hbomberguy), are known for creating lengthy and well-researched content, which is still entertaining and convincing. This dissertation examines the political context in which this medium arises; the community of creators aiming to deradicalise viewers and prevent future radicalisation; and finally delves into a rhetorical study of the video essay as a form of public discourse for persuasive purposes. Description: M.A.(Melit.) 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z