http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/10309 2026-06-25T13:54:06Z 2026-06-25T13:54:06Z Eliya Haider, 01-117221-007 http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/21334 2026-06-23T08:30:05Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Drowning in Silence: Intoxication as a Masculine Response to Emotional Repression and Social Expectation Eliya Haider, 01-117221-007 This study reads Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) as a psychological anatomy of masculine repression and its corrosive impact on emotion, identity, and love. Through the unnamed narrator’s hunger, delusions, and failed intimacy, Hamsun portrays a man crushed by the social demand to appear strong, rational, and self-sufficient. The narrator’s physical starvation becomes the external symptom of an inner famine—the emotional emptiness produced by silence. Drawing on Cleary (2022) on emotional constraint and father–son detachment, Liaqat et al. (2020) on normative male alexithymia, and Ahmmed and Khan (2024) on the sociocultural training of endurance, the thesis argues that Hamsun’s protagonist embodies the long-term psychological cost of hegemonic masculinity. Unable to name or share feeling, he converts emotion into bodily sensation hunger, dizziness, nausea until pain replaces language. His longing for Ylajali, defined by oscillations between tenderness and withdrawal, reveals how repression destroys the possibility of love: affection becomes another arena for control, vulnerability a threat to pride. His “intoxication” through starvation and delirium thus serves both as metaphor and symptom of breakdown. Situating Hunger within modernist and psychological frameworks, the study shows how masculine stoicism, when internalized, mutates into alienation, hallucination, and emotional paralysis. Ultimately, Hamsun anticipates modern psychology’s findings on men’s silence, exposing how the performance of strength isolates the self and makes even love impossible. Supervised by Ms. Nadia Rehman

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Hamza Siddique, 01-117221-028 http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/21331 2026-06-23T07:50:16Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Language and Emotion: Sentiment Analysis of Donald Trump’s 2024 Victory Speech Hamza Siddique, 01-117221-028 This dissertation examines the interplay of language, power, and emotion in the 2024 presidential victory speech of Donald Trump. It seeks to ascertain the phenomena of ideology and emotion in political language in relation to audience perception during the age of the internet. To this end, the research adopts a mixed methods approach to the speech, along with the emotional reactions it triggered on YouTube, employing Norman Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. It scrutinizes the rhetoric of Trump’s speech, including emotional word choice, the “us” and “them” binary, and the repetition of phrases, which illustrate the center of populist discourse and argumentation. It depicts Trump as a moral defender of “ordinary Americans” against a “corrupt elite,” which intensifies the ideological warfare of the society.1,000 YouTube comments were examined to determine ‘audience sentiment’ in relation to emotional reaction and to identify the primary emotion expressed in each comment. The results demonstrated the predominant expressions of joy, trust, and anticipation, which are in line with Trump’s speech and populist rhetoric. Notably, a smaller but non-negligible percentage of comments included anger, sadness, and disgust, which indicates emotional and ideological polarization. The findings illustrate the expansion of political discourse from the speech, acted upon in a digital space, which has the power to amplify both supporting and opposing comments, creating an emotionally charged discourse.The study concludes that within current digital communication, exercising political power goes beyond the use of language to the feelings it triggers and disseminates on the Internet. By applying CDA to sentiment analysis, this research sheds light on the interrelation of emotive engagement, political populism, and emotional polarization in the digital sphere Supervised by Dr. Tehseen Zahra

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Bushra Nadeem, 01-117221-030 http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/21333 2026-06-23T08:27:10Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Subverting Laughter: Unveiling Transgressive Humor and Shaping Public Perception in Stand-Up Comedy Bushra Nadeem, 01-117221-030 Satire has always served an important role in shaping public opinion, undermining authority, and focusing the spotlight on social issues. Satire has changed a lot in stand-up comedy, what used to be intelligent, thoughtful humor has become more provocative and sometimes even controversial content. Drawing upon Relief Theory and Public Opinion Theory, this research attempts to analyze the satirical humor in stand-up comedy and focuses on comparing an older generation of stand-up comedians with contemporary comedians, including American (George Carlin with Hasan Minhaj, Max Amini), Pakistani (Amanullah Khan, Umer Sharif with Tabish Hashmi), and Indian (Johnny Lever, Raju Srivastav with Saurabh Rawat, Madhur Virli, Sumit Mishra, Harsh Gujral, Pranit More, Munawar Farooqui). Relief Theory claims that humor relieves psychological tensions in society, while Public Opinion Theory asserts that the public opinion towards the issue is formed by the media. Satire was first used by older comedians to provoke critical thinking, and nowadays, modern comedians employ exaggerated, provocative humor with a notably higher entertainment factor than a critical one. This study will analyze exaggeration, absurdity, social criticism, and audience perception of comedy through thematic analysis of verbal speeches. This research is significant because it indicates whether modern stand-up comedy continues to be a form of powerful social criticism or has become a medium for controversy-driven entertainment rather than intellectual discourse. Supervised by Mr. Usama Javed

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Imran Qadeer, 01-117221-011 http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/21332 2026-06-23T07:53:45Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Nature vs.Nurture: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Violence in the Secret History Imran Qadeer, 01-117221-011 This study performs a psychoanalytic examination of violence in Donna Tartt's The Secret History through the paradigm of Nature vs Nurture that remedies a critical gap in scholarship that heavily centres on structural or Gothic elements. Utilising the Freudian, post-Freudian and Object relations theories, the study documented how inherited psychological pathologies of Thanatos subject of Henry Winter's Narcissism, trauma-based dissociation of Richard Papen, and failure of individuation of Macaulay twins predisposed the characters to moral collapse. The analysis showed that these intrinsic drives (Nature) were systematically licenced (by the external environment - Nurture) by the external environment (mostly Julian Morrow's amoral elitist pedagogy and the isolating Gothic environment). This environment served as a moral suspension mechanism that supplied intellectual justification for latent aggression. The major finding is that the two murders were just the inevitable result of this deterministic collision where the philosophical licence(Nurture) was wedded to the psychological drive(Nature). Richard's unreliable narration was translated into a clinical defence mechanism against trauma. The thesis comes to the conclusion that the novel is a profound commentary on the psychological fragility of humanity when allowed intellectual permission to manifest itself in collective violence and psychological ruin. Supervised by Ms. Nadia Rehman

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