http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21534 Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:44:05 GMT 2026-04-05T15:44:05Z https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl:443/bitstream/id/2e9671dc-a73c-4910-ba8c-a9f551e14b66/ http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21534 http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21922 The American Dream and American Greed in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: Sentimental and Satirical Christian Discourse in the Popular Domestic Tale Van Nyhuis, Alison Although Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time originally was a widely popular book in the nineteenth century, Fern and Ruth Hall were criticized after readers learned about the similarities among Fern’s life and book. Contemporary critics have recovered Ruth Hall from the literary margins and situated Ruth’s story in the context of the popular American dream story while emphasizing the book’s satirical elements. Reexamining the novel’s originally popular sentimental elements alongside the novel’s more recently popular satirical elements expands the literary critical focus from Ruth’s sentimental struggles and Fern’s satirical accomplishments to Ruth Hall’s equally important critique of American greed, especially among wealthy and socially-conscious Christians. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21922 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21921 Laying Bare: Agamben, Chandler, and The Responsibility to Protect Quigley, Gabriel This paper demonstrates the hidden similarities between Raymond Chandler’s prototypical noir The Big Sleep, and the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document. By taking up the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this paper shows that the bare life produces the form of protection embodied by Philip Marlowe in Chandler’s novel and by the United Nations Security Council in R2P. Agamben’s theorizing of the extra-legal status of the sovereign pertains to both texts, in which the protector exists outside of the law. Philip Marlowe, tasked with preventing the distribution of pornographic images, commits breaking-and-entering, withholding evidence, and murder. Analogously, R2P advocates for the Security Council’s ability to trespass laws that safeguard national sovereignty in order to prevent “bare” atrocities against human life. As Agamben demonstrates, the extra-legal position of the protector is made possible by “stripping bare” human life. This paper also gestures towards limitations of Agamben’s thought by indicating, through a comparison of these two texts, that bare life produces states of exception as the object of protection rather than punishment. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21921 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21801 Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Otto, Peggy D. Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin dynamics of desire and destruction. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21801 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21798 Towards a Non-hierarchical Space of Thought: Reading Roland Barthes’ The Neutral Myk, Małgorzata The article is devoted to The Neutral: the 1977-1978 lecture course developed and taught by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France. I argue that The Neutral is firmly rooted in the tradition that Brian Massumi defined as “nomad thought” in his foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. The essay traces the genealogy of this tradition and the term of the neutral, beginning with Maurice Blanchot’s work and his own concept of the neutral and ending with Barthes’ so far largely unexplored engagement with the texts of Deleuze. Elusive as the neutral figure is meant to remain, it emerges as a theorist’s effort to exercise a form of non-dualistic and non-hierarchical thinking. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21798 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z