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1

Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

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Otto P. D., University W. K., Peggy Otto is assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green K.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

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2015

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vol. 3

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issue 2

EN

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.

2

Układ relacyjny bohaterów w powieści Pani Dalloway Virginii Woolf

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Szeremeta-Kołodzińska K.

Acta Neophilologica

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2013

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issue XV/2

203-212

EN

In Virginia Woolf’s ample literary oeuvre the 1925 Mrs Dalloway continues to invite most interest among literary scholars. This article closely examines Woolfian narrative strategies and schemata that pertain to the image of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel’s eponymous character. The subject of analysis is the relation between Clarissa and Peter Walsh (former suitor and confidant) which shapes this portrait. Although he belongs to Clarissa’s “entourage” (Woolf called upon a group of other characters in protagonists’ support), his role as the main observer is most pronounced in the novel. Peter Walsh, who acts as a “reflector” − narrator’s agency − helps to reconstruct for the reader otherwise fragmented and elusive image of Clarissa. His contribution is realised by means of narrative functions he fulfils: legitimising her accounts, accompanying her (as a construct of protagonist’s imagination though) in London strolls and mediating between the realm of imagery and empirical world.

3

The (Self)portrait of a Writer: A Hermeneutic Reading of Virginia Woolf’s (Auto)biographical Writings

88%

Hołda M.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

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2020

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vol. 6

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issue 1

52-66

EN

Woolf’s maturing as a writer was deeply influenced by her traumatic experiences in childhood, the (in)capacitating states of mental instability, as well as her proto-feminist convictions. Long before Barthes, she toppled the traditional position of the author, and her literary enshrinement of “the other reality” reached unity with the world rather than individuality. This article ponders Woolf’s creative impulse and investigates her autobiographical writings to show the import of their impact on her fiction, which, as Woolfian scholarship suggests, can be viewed as autobiographical, too. I argue that philosophical hermeneutics sheds light on the self-portrait that emerges from Woolf’s autobiographical writings and offers a rewarding insight into her path of becoming an author. I assert that Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of subjectivity, and, in particular, his notion of narrative identity provide a route to examine how Woolf discovers her writing voice. In light of his hermeneutics of the self, the dispersed elements of the narrative of life can be seen as a possibility of self-encounter. Woolf’s writings bespeak her gradually evolving self-knowledge and self-understanding, which come from the configuration of those separate “stories” into a meaningful whole. The article also interprets Woolf’s autobiographical writings through the prism of Michel Foucault’s reflection on discourse and subjectivity, indicating that her texts instantiate his assertion of the subject’s constant disappearance.

4

Translating and Transcending Censors: Modernist Appropriation and Thematisation of Censorship in the Works of Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg, Czesław Miłosz and Bohumil Hrabal

76%

Sriratana V., Polišenská M.

Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne

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2018

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issue 14

PL

Censorship has often been regarded as the archenemy of artists, thinkers and writers. But has this always been the case? This research paper proposes that censorship is not a total evil or adversarial force which thwarts and hinders twentieth-century writers, particularly those who were part of the artistic, aesthetic, philosophical and intellectual movement known as Modernism. Though the word “censor” originally means a Roman official who, in the past, had a duty to monitor access to writing, the agents of censorship – particularly those in the modern times – are not in every case overt and easy to identify. Though Modernist writers openly condemn censorship, many of them nevertheless take on the role of censors who not only condone but also undergo self--censorship or censorship of others. In many cases in Modernist literature, readership and literary production, the binary opposition of victim and victimiser, as well as of censored and censor, is questioned and challenged. This research paper offers an analysis of the ways in which Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) lived and wrote by negotiating with many forms of censorship ranging from state censorship, social censorship, political censorship, moral censorship to self-censorship. It is a study of the ways in which these writers problematise and render ambiguity to the seemingly clear-cut and mutually exclusive division between the oppressive censor and the oppressed writer. The selected writers not only criticise and compromise with censorship, but also thematise and translate it into their works.

5

Pamięć w dobie psychologii dynamicznej: XIX-wieczne konteksty. (Z angielskiego przełożyła Olga Mastela)

75%

Nalbantian S., Mastela O.

Pamiętnik Literacki

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2013

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vol. 104

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issue 4

17-34

EN

The author of the text sketches the major findings made in the field of memory research in the late nineteenth century, called by some “a golden age of memory,” and shows how these discoveries paved three different pathways for the exploration of memory by fiction writers in the twentieth century. She focuses, in particular, on the legacy of the three leading French and American psychologists: Henri Bergson, who placed memory processes and their duration in the metaphysical domain, Pierre Janet, who examined the functioning of automatic memory at the famous Salpêtrière clinic and actually founded the school of Dynamic Psychiatry, and William James, who in fact invented the notion of “the stream of consciousness,” adopted later by such eminent writers as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

6

The Mind Is the World: Virginia Woolf on the Embodied Self

75%

Serrano L. M. M.

Ars inter Culturas

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2020

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issue 9

295-315

EN

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights into bodies as the place of existence, David Abram’s thinking on the more-than-human world, Jane Bennett’s conceptualisation of vibrant matter and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality,” this article explores how Virginia Woolf transforms fiction into a powerful epistemological tool in her examination of the self amidst a vibrant world. In novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves(1931), Woolf found not only that human beings are finite, singular and exposed, but also porous, embodied selves that are sensuously immersed in the vitality intrinsic to matter. Fasci-nated by the flow of consciousness and the workings of the human mind when confronted with reality, the novelist seeks to capture the evanescent moment in time as refracted through the consciousness of her own characters. Her compulsion to write down impressions, thoughts, and half-ideas is expressive of her concern with imposing order upon the phenomena of a world populated by agentive entities through the medium of language. If the flux of life was simply unstoppable, language gave her at least the opportunity to freeze moments of being and look at them as if from simultaneous perspectives, as well as to shed light on how humans are in and of the earth – i.e., part of, not apart from, a more-than-human world.

7

Housed Memories: Spatial and Temporal Portrayals in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out

75%

Pająk P.

Anglica Wratislaviensia

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2018

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issue 56

109 - 118

EN

Neurocognitive research has confirmed that people perceive and remember the “rooms of their own” similarly to their own bodies. These psychological discoveries yield important new insights into the oeuvre of Virginia Woolf, an avid diarist, flâneuse and experimenter, preoccupied with gendered memory and space available to women in the early 20th century. While there exists an important and growing body of work on Woolf’s interest into women’s emancipation and politics of space, the gendered connection between spatial and temporal aspects of her works remains a little researched area, particularly in the context of neurocognitive theory of memory. This paper argues that in The Voyage Out the representations of the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, are structured around the processes of autobiographical remembering and spatial perception, as her private rooms serve as loci of her memory and identity. It is then possible to interpret Rachel’s rooms as her spatial portraits, which perceived by other characters tell their inhabitant’s life story. A similar role could be attributed to the (auto)biographical memory, which preserves their owner’s temporal portrayals in particular moments of her life.

8

Jane Austen (dla) Josepha Conrada

63%

Samsel K.

Przegląd Humanistyczny

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2019

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vol. 63(2 (465))

77-90

PL

The understanding of Jane Austen was for Joseph Conrad (probably) the condition of the understanding of the English soul as such. And, even if we roam around fascinating hypotheses, it is worth formulating them – mainly because they are a new key to the reading of the works of the author of Lord Jim. His problems with the literary heritage of Austen could be affected by different, numerous factors: 1) the growing popularity of Janeites; 2) the authority of, appreciating the author of Mansfield Park, Henry James; 3) the feeling of being lost of the Polish writer in the situation of the late novelist debut; 4) the literary tradition of the Ukrainian School in the Polish Romanticism, in which he was raised and he formed his personality. Conrad could make an attempt of dealing with, incomprehensible for himself, Austen in the 1910s, in the period of jubilees of the editions of her novels. In this spirit, it is worthy to read again such prose texts of Conrad, as: Zwycięstwo (1915) and Ocalenie (1920), but above all – the earliest from this group – Gra losu (1913).

9

Moments of liberty. (Self-)censorship Games in the Essays of Virginia Woolf

63%

Pająk P.

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica

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2017

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vol. 45

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issue 7

283-301

EN

What is surprising in Virginia Woolf’s essays is the scale and the audacity of her intellectual searches – in the time of increased repressive censorship and growing totalitarianisms, she approached the themes of freedom which have remained controversial ever since. The article presents the essayistic nature as a strategy applied by Woolf in her personal essays to avoid censorship, and intentionally expand the limits of freedoms important to her. The author offers an outline of the mechanism of repressive censorship and the chilling effect it worked in the interwar United Kingdom based on the examples of suspensions of outstanding modernist works and show-trials of writers. She presents three areas of study of freedom in Woolf’s essays: women’s emancipation, tolerance towards non-heteronormative persons, and pacifism, as well as the areas of private and public (self-)censorship which existed therein.

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2 Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

1 Acta Neophilologica

1 Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica

1 Anglica Wratislaviensia

1 Ars inter Culturas

1 Pamiętnik Literacki

1 Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne

1 Przegląd Humanistyczny

2 Pająk P.

1 Hołda M.

1 Mastela O.

1 Nalbantian S.

1 Otto P. D.

1 Peggy Otto is assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green K.

1 Polišenská M.

1 Samsel K.

1 Serrano L. M. M.

1 Sriratana V.

1 Szeremeta-Kołodzińska K.

1 University W. K.

2 2020

1 2019

2 2018

1 2017

1 2015

2 2013