This thesis examines the potency of film dialogue as an articulator of fear in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Using extant studies on film dialogue as its groundwork,...Show moreThis thesis examines the potency of film dialogue as an articulator of fear in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Using extant studies on film dialogue as its groundwork, this thesis employs a close reading of the dialogue in Robert Eggers’ films. Ultimately, it argues that Eggers’ films utilise dialogue in order to articulate their contextual fears, rather than the visual language that predominates the horror genre.Show less
The influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the...Show moreThe influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the other. While these philosophers in an ongoing exchange broach the question of the other’s response, there remains the question if the other can also respond to what they say. Challenging the attainability of “successful” dialogue, this thesis examines the limits of thinking the response of the other philosophically. It does this through an innovative reading of “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” a remarkable text by Derrida in which he examines what it means to write a response to the works of Levinas. It shows how such a response, in view of what Levinas writes, must necessarily fail. My reading of this text shows that we must nevertheless embrace the possibility of failure, even if it means putting Levinas’s entire work at risk, since the very finitude of my own response is also what allows the other to come in and respond. Seen this way, I propose that a reading specifically aimed at the “failures” at work in Derrida’s response to Levinas can be a viable strategy not only to arrive at a better understanding of this text, but also to come up with responses of our own.Show less
In this thesis I sketch out a poetics of the love letter. With this poetics I propose that the structure of the love letter generates an uncanny form of textual presence of the lover in the text....Show moreIn this thesis I sketch out a poetics of the love letter. With this poetics I propose that the structure of the love letter generates an uncanny form of textual presence of the lover in the text. The lover’s presence is suggested by an interplay of three basic modes of address: the narratological mode of address (Bal, M.); the apostrophic mode of address (Culler J. et al.); the dialogic mode of address (Bakhtin, M. M.). This poetics of the love letter is mainly based on the close reading of the love letters of M. Tsvetajeva to A. Bachrach (1923) and the epistles of A. Chekhov and O. Knipper (1899 - 1904).Show less
