scholarly journals A Literary Voyage into the Unconscious: A Philosophical Approach to the Psychological Novel in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nariman LARBI

The present paper attempts to reawaken the avant-gardism of the literary Stream of Consciousness; a twentieth-century psychological concept that has been accommodated into fictional exertion through the Interior Monologue. The first practitioners of this technique and mode of narrative reportedness are Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce, all of whom are modernist fictional writers who engaged with what previous novelists of the nineteenth century failed to engage with. Woolf observed - in a lecture given to the Cambridge Heretics Society in May 1924 - that: “no generation since the world began has known quite so much about character as our generation”. Woolf’s fiction tends to be psychological, for she experiments with the working of the psyche of her characters and the permanence of the past in the present beyond the reach of realism. Her fiction treats the complex networks of emotions and memories of which the character is the center of the narrative. This paper accordingly, addresses the philosophical background of the Stream of Consciousness and its use within fictional exertion and how the latter is deployed in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to show and uncover the anxieties vis-à-vis her thanatophobia, not only this, but also to express the anxieties of the Great War and the disillusionment towards the modern enterprise.

Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley

‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alexandra Berger

This project explores the way in which Virginia Woolf uses and subverts the classic nineteenthcentury genre, the Bildungsroman in her first novel (The Voyage Out) and her third novel (Jacob's Room) in order to posit questions about understanding subjectivity. Virginia Woolf's later novels are written in a prose style commonly called "stream-of-consciousness" or "mindstyle" that her first novel is not, and her third novel, although attempts this style of prose, is quite novice in its execution. Essentially, this project argues that it was through Woolf's use and complication of the Bildungsroman genre that she was able to pose philosophical questions about subjectivity and human understanding-- never answered in a concrete manner--that develop into her later, most famous style of prose in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway. This paper builds on Gregory Castle's scholarly book, The Modernist Bildungsroman, which was written in response to Franco Moretti's seminal book, The Way of the World.


Author(s):  
Suzanne Raitt

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.


Author(s):  
Bryony Randall

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature. Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.


Author(s):  
Peter Fifield

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’, it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to and appearance of the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions, and models of behaviour. As a topic illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.


Author(s):  
Emily Ridge

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Maswood Akhter

 My aim in this paper is to offer a critical discussion on certain linguistic and stylistic aspects in the fictional pieces by Sunetra Gupta, an important Bengali diaspora author based in Oxford. In her debut novel, ‘Memories of Rain’ as well as in her others, Gupta effortlessly intersperses prose with poetry; her writing is complex, fusing stream of sensuous poetic imagery with stream of consciousness. A powerful delivery of interior monologue, figurative language, and continuous time-shifts invites the novelist’s comparison with Virginia Woolf. Memory becomes a vital player in many of her novels, be it Memories of Rain, Moonlight into Marzipan or So Good in Black. Giving it the centre stage automatically leads her towards an experimental narrative technique, since memory – a highly subjective and elastic category blending fantasy with the past – keeps intervening in the linear flow of the plot. Interestingly, her stream-of-consciousness technique transforms language and punctuation marks from normative linguistic symbols into poignant emotional tools. By exploring the limits of ambiguity in language, as I argue here, Gupta has evolved a personal literary idiom in which prose is pushed into a territory formerly accessible only to poetry. The issue of intertextuality is also discussed, with special reference to Memories of Rain where the influence and interplay of diverse texts provide the novelists context and meaning, and shape its narrative and characters.


Author(s):  
John Mansfield

Advances in camera technology and digital instrument control have meant that in modern microscopy, the image that was, in the past, typically recorded on a piece of film is now recorded directly into a computer. The transfer of the analog image seen in the microscope to the digitized picture in the computer does not mean, however, that the problems associated with recording images, analyzing them, and preparing them for publication, have all miraculously been solved. The steps involved in the recording an image to film remain largely intact in the digital world. The image is recorded, prepared for measurement in some way, analyzed, and then prepared for presentation.Digital image acquisition schemes are largely the realm of the microscope manufacturers, however, there are also a multitude of “homemade” acquisition systems in microscope laboratories around the world. It is not the mission of this tutorial to deal with the various acquisition systems, but rather to introduce the novice user to rudimentary image processing and measurement.


This paper critically analyzes the symbolic use of rain in A Farewell to Arms (1929). The researcher has applied the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as a research tool for the analysis of the text. This hypothesis argues that the languages spoken by a person determine how one observes this world and that the peculiarities encoded in each language are all different from one another. It affirms that speakers of different languages reflect the world in pretty different ways. Hemingway’s symbolic use of rain in A Farewell to Arms (1929) is denotative, connotative, and ironical. The narrator and protagonist, Frederick Henry symbolically embodies his own perceptions about the world around him. He time and again talks about rain when something embarrassing is about to ensue like disease, injury, arrest, retreat, defeat, escape, and even death. Secondly, Hemingway has connotatively used rain as a cleansing agent for washing the past memories out of his mind. Finally, the author has ironically used rain as a symbol when Henry insists on his love with Catherine Barkley while the latter being afraid of the rain finds herself dead in it.


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