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1

Let Rhoda Speak Again: Identity, Uncertainty, and Authority in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

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Myk M.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

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2011

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vol. 1

106-122

EN

Performing a rereading of Virginia Woolf's 1931 experimental modernist masterpiece of The Waves, in this article I focus on the elusive and conflicted character of Rhoda, whose significance has been either overlooked or marginalized in the available criticism of the narrative. By pointing out a number of problems in the existing scholarship devoted to Rhoda, I propose to define her as a transgressive figure of uncertainty through which Woolf develops a critique of the unitary self. My point of departure for the following essay is Toril Moi's perspective on Woolf's oeuvre as openly feminist and deconstructive. Consequently, I begin with Moi's emphasis on Woolf's commitment to the problematization of the Western male humanism's underlying concept of the unitary self. Drawing from a number of critical and philosophical perspectives, I turn to Kim L. Worthington's idea of subjectivity as a sustained process of interpersonal narrativization in order to offer a more nuanced account of Rhoda's identity as compound and implicated in the dynamics of inter-subjective processes. I also consider Rhoda's much criticized rejection of identity vis-à-vis Woolf's strategy of impersonality, and, contrasting it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concepts of the flesh and anonymous existence, I contend that Rhoda renounces the unitary selfhood, which corroborates Moi's critique of Woolf. Through a close analysis of Rhoda's position versus the other characters, as well as by examining how Rhoda's ego boundaries are delineated in the narrative, I demonstrate that Woolf's conflicted heroine emerges as an astute critic of gendered reality, since she is the one who most acutely feels the dualistic nature of selfhood and it is chiefly through her that Woolf points to the need to overcome this dualism. Shannon Sullivan's feminist revision of the Merleau-Pontian perspective on the anonymity and the body as well as the Deweyan notion of transactionality further helps to elucidate the ways in which Rhoda's experimental and subversive discourse engages in a polemic with the Cartesian conceptualization of identity presupposed on the dualism of mind and body simultaneously inquiring about a possibility of a non-dualistic and non-unitary conception of subjectivity. As a consequence, Rhoda gains authority and agency through uncertainty which prompts her to adopt an uncompromisingly and insistently questioning stance. Finally, I suggest reconsidering Rhoda's suicide as a metaphorical act of ‘distancing,’ as discussed by Zygmunt Bauman, via Adorno, in his 2006 Liquid Fear, another context for approaching Rhoda's uncertainty.

2

„Nie ma nic lepszego niż teoria.” Kilka uwag o praktyce teoretycznej współczesnych awangardowych pisarek amerykańskich (Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman)

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Myk M.

Praktyka Teoretyczna

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2013

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vol. 10

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issue 4

161-182

EN

The essay discusses theoretical practices of three major Americanexperimental women writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets LynHejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Carla Harryman, who played a crucial role in shapingthe present-day critical and theoretical literary debate regarding the status of formallyradical literature engaged in questions of feminist epistemology and written bywomen. Devoted to language and its ideological dimension, their work is based ona wager that poetic practice is a socially engaged strategy of intervention (Harryman),and as such functions as a language-oriented feminist epistemology. Hejinian,Scalapino, and Harryman created a significant literary and theoretical body of workthat includes complex genre-bending hybrid texts deeply rooted in contemporaryfeminist discourses and preoccupied with such issues as production of knowledge,meaning, identity, gender, and sexuality, hidden ideological mechanismsof the conventional narrative, and the imperative of its constant refiguration.The article is also an attempt to see their work in a broader context of feministthought, ranging from écriture féminine, through Judith Butler’s and Denise Riley’scritiques of identity politics, to the posthumanist horizon of Donna Haraway’scyborg writing.

PL

Artykuł poświęcony jest praktykom teoretycznym trzechczołowych autorek nurtu amerykańskiej twórczości eksperymentalnejkojarzonych z kręgiem poetówL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapinoi Carla Harryman. Odegrały one fundamentalną rolęw ukształtowaniu ciągle otwartej i toczącej się debatykrytyczno-teoretyczno-literackiej dotyczącej statusu formalnieradykalnej literatury tworzonej przez kobiety zaangażowanejw kwestie epistemologii feministycznej. Praktyka ta, skupiającasię na procesach i mechanizmach dyskursu, nie ograniczasię do wymiaru poetyckiego i artystycznego, lecz zakłada,że twórczość poetycka jest społecznie zaangażowaną „strategiąinterwencji” (Harryman), a jako taka funkcjonuje jakoskoncentrowana na języku epistemologia feministyczna. Hejinian, Scalapino i Harryman stworzyły imponujący dorobek literacko-teoretyczny, na który składają się gatunkowozłożone teksty hybrydyczne mocno osadzone we współczesnych dyskursach feministycznych, kupiające się na problematyce produkcji wiedzy, znaczenia, tożsamości, płci i seksualności, ukrytych mechanizmów ideologicznych tradycyjnie pojmowanego utworu narracyjnego, a także imperatywu przekraczenia tych mechanizmów. Artykuł jest próbą umiejscowienia ich twórczości w szerszym kontekście współczesnej myśli feministycznej począwszy od écriture féminine, poprzez krytykę polityki tożsamościowej Judith Butler oraz Denise Riley, po horyzont posthumanistyczny cyborgicznego pisarstwa Donny Haraway.

3

TRAVERSING GENDERED SPACES with Nicole Brossard’s Lesbians: Figurations of Nomadic Subjectivity in Picture Theory

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Myk M.

Review of International American Studies

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2011

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vol. 5

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issue 1–2

EN

TO BE ADDED

4

Life Fictions: Radicalization of Life-Writing in Leslie Scalapino’s Zither & Autobiography and Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography & Fiction

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Myk M.

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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2015

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vol. 50

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issue 2-3

127-140

EN

The paper discusses radicalized aesthetics and politics of structure and form in the experimental autobiographical writing of American avant-garde author Leslie Scalapino. Associated with the innovative protocols of the “Language School” poetry movement, Scalapino’s oeuvre emerges as simultaneously a poststructuralist and phenomenologically oriented poetics in which writing performs a thoroughgoing scrutiny of how one’s implication in linguistic and cultural matrices determines one’s being in the world. Scalapino’s Autobiography, framed by Paul de Man’s remarks on autobiographical writing as always controlled by the external expectations of self-fashioning, sets out to examine and deconstruct the autobiographical project as in itself constructive of one’s life. In Zither the poet complicates her take on life-writing by interrogating and reconceptualizing hidden mechanisms of the genre and confronting it with its own fictional status, while in Dahlia’s iris Scalapino juxtaposes detective fiction with a Tibetan form of written “secret autobiography”, based on a radical departure from the chronology of one’s biography toward a phenomenological horizon of what she refers to as “one’s life seeing”, a practice of attempting to see one’s mind’s constructions as they are formed by the outside as well as by one’s internalization of the outside.

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1 Praktyka Teoretyczna

1 Review of International American Studies

1 Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

1 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

4 Myk M.

1 2015

1 2013

2 2011

Let Rhoda Speak Again: Identity, Uncertainty, and Authority in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

„Nie ma nic lepszego niż teoria.” Kilka uwag o praktyce teoretycznej współczesnych awangardowych pisarek amerykańskich (Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman)

TRAVERSING GENDERED SPACES with Nicole Brossard’s Lesbians: Figurations of Nomadic Subjectivity in Picture Theory

Life Fictions: Radicalization of Life-Writing in Leslie Scalapino’s Zither & Autobiography and Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography & Fiction