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Virginia Woolf (Modern Fiction Studies, vol 50, n°1, Spring 04)

Virginia Woolf (Modern Fiction Studies, vol 50, n°1, Spring 04)

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

Modern Fiction Studies publishes engaging articles on prominent works of modern and contemporary fiction. Emphasizing historical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches, the journal encourages a dialogue between fiction and theory, publishing work that offers new theoretical insights, clarity of style, and completeness of argument.

Volume 50, Number 1, spring 2004

Special Issue:  Virginia Woolf

CONTENTS:

Doyle, Laura (Laura Anne) ,  Introduction: What's Between Us?

Abstract: The Introduction offers the question "what's between us" as one way of summing up Virginia Woolf's questions. Woolf draws us into a tingling, Brownian zone of encounter and registers the aesthetic, ontological, and ethical force of encounter in that zone. The essays chosen for the issue treat not only the sexual, economic, national, and imperial dimensions of Woolf's rendering of these encounters but also, by way of such philosophers as Emmanuel Levinas, the ethical dimensions.

Hussey, Mark, 1956- ,  Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Woolf

Abstract: This essay addresses the implications of Margaret Thatcher's explicit criticism of Bloomsbury in her memoir, The Path to Power. Thatcher and Woolf circulate as icons of opposing cultural politics in a struggle that has persisted from the 1920s until now. Woolf's attitudes to middlebrow culture, exemplified by the representation of London suburbs in her writings, are antagonistic to Thatcherite thinking, a worldview that holds sway not only in critical attitudes to Woolf and Bloomsbury but also in the public posture of American politicians. Woolf's attitudes to class form a resistance to such postures.

Levy, Heather.,   "These Ghost Figures of Distorted Passion": Becoming Privy to Working-Class Desire in "The Watering Place" and "The Ladies Lavatory"

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction is a critically neglected field. Class is the determining factor that influences how women occupy private and public space and articulate desire in Woolf's 1906-41 shorter fiction. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts in The Monks House Papers as well as the Berg Collection, this new reading establishes the oscillating patterns of elision, idealization and contempt that mark stagings of working-class and lesbian bodies and desires in Woolf's prototypical shorter fiction including "The Watering Place" and "The Ladies Lavatory."

Seshagiri, Urmila.,   Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse

Abstract:  Wide-ranging aesthetic and political racialisms inform Virginia Woolf's narrative technique in To the Lighthouse (1927), producing radical departures from literary tradition. In dismantling patriarchy's social and novelistic conventions, To the Lighthouse extends the English formalist doctrines that lauded autotelic art-forms from East Asia, Africa, and South America. The novel's narrative fluidity and abstraction re-invent the racial philosophies of Roger Fry's formalist tract Vision and Design (1920), as well as the racially marked modernité of the Omega Workshops' art-objects. The well-known feminist politics and formalist aesthetics that answer this novel's questions depend on the often-overlooked narrative position of racial identity.

Cohen, Scott, 1946- ,  The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley, and Imperial Monuments

Abstract:  This essay attempts to recover the vectors of urban traffic in London as they were charted by way of imperial landmarks, both real and imagined, in Virginia Woolf's writing about the city. Examining her visit to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924-25) alongside Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I argue that Woolf's novel can be seen as an aesthetic and a political response to the representational dilemmas involved with bringing the empire home and the difficult task of translating global space into local space

Johnson, Erica L., 1970- ,  Giving Up the Ghost: National and Literary Haunting in Orlando

Abstract:  In Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf substantiates continuity in Orlando's transhistorical, transgender character through national identity. Through her emphasis on Orlando's elemental relationship to national space and poetic entrenchment in a national literature, though, Woolf reveals Englishness to be composed of exclusions as well as inclusions. She thus illustrates the extent to which national identity is haunted by what she might have called "invisible presences" that inhabit the nation not as subjects and citizens, but as ghosts. Woolf works out her conflicted stance on national identity through hauntings insofar as she builds silences and absences into her narrative of Orlando's Englishness.

Dalgarno, Emily.   A British War and Peace? Virginia Woolf Reads Tolstoy

Abstract:   Woolf's reading of Tolstoy in her roles as critic, translator, and novelist, is set in the context of discourse about the nation. The Modernist structure of Mrs. Dalloway suggests that as a novelist Woolf challenged Arnold's and Lubbock's readings of Tolstoy, which as a reviewer of Russian fiction she had at first shared. The most telling result of her reading may be traced in the composition of The Years. Like War and Peace it was to represent the family in the context of wartime representations of national history. The incomplete sentence, by means of which speakers of different national languages may create a single syntax, tropes translation as potential communication beyond the bounds of family, class, and nation.

Berman, Jessica Schiff, 1961-,  Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf

Abstract:  This article takes up the connection between feminist ethics and aesthetics through the example of Virginia Woolf's work. It argues for a feminist model of ethics posed between radical alterity and its seeming opposite, the ethics of care, by way of the Deleuzean figure of the fold. In Woolf's work we can see public ethical and political responsibility arise from private moments of eros or care. Woolf's writings bring the epistemological and the ethical into conversation with each other, using aesthetics to make an ethical realm­­or a fold­­between the potentially universal and the personal.

Monson, Tamlyn. "A trick of the mind": Alterity, Ontology, and Representation in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Abstract:  Within a theoretical framework linking Julia Kristeva's subject-in-process to the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this paper links the novel's metaphor of subjectivity to language, history and social convention through a reading of the character Bernard. It highlights the symbolic nature of totality as expressed in Bernard's narrative, with language, history and convention grouped together as the home of the singular self, and the decentering of this self achieved through the problematization of representation, teleology and social structures. Associated questions of the violence and ethics of representation, subjectivity and the writer's task are also addressed.

Clewell, Tammy.  Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning

Abstract:  This essay argues that Woolf's engagement with the war's legacy prompted her to represent a new kind of mourning practice, one that spurns consolation and closure. In critiquing the consoling rhetoric of God, king, and country, Jacob's Room articulates a politics and ethics of mourning linked to Woolf'sfeminist aims. To the Lighthouse turns the question of consolation back upon Woolf's own medium, showing how a female painter deconstructs the notion of redemptive art and represents a perpetual mourning of loss.

Review Essay:

Linett, Maren. From Supernova to Manuscript Page: Circling Woolf

 

A Selected Bibliography:

Dymond, Justine.  Virginia Woolf Scholarship from 1991 to 2003: A Selected Bibliography