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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Chris Hall is an assistant professor of English at the University of the Ozarks, in Arkansas, where he teaches and researches at the intersection of twentieth-century literature and media with critical theory. His work articulates formations of identity as the politics of the living, and his writing on this subject has appeared recently in Angelaki, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Previous publications on media, politics, and philosophy have been published in Games and Culture, SubStance, the European Journal of Political Theory, and elsewhere. Hall is currently working on a monograph on the biopolitics of global modernist literature, and he is coeditor of The Metal Gear Solid Series: Critical Essays and New Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse poses a challenge to the movement of thought as a matter of identity, community, and biopolitics. The crucial question here, which this article reads as an opening for reimagining the terrain of gender and publicness, is how to grapple with Mrs. Ramsay’s meditation on the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” into which she retreats from her communal life. The article dwells with Mrs. Ramsay within this space and in doing so exposes life’s banal, daily surface to the dark otherwise lurking within the realm of Mrs. Ramsay’s thinking, an otherwise that, when thought as an ethics in its own right, has the capacity to reach beyond the novel and its history by remaking gender, race, species, and the terrain of the public—and life—itself.

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