Virginia Woolf’s Queer Time and Place: Wartime London and a World Aslant

Author(s):  
Kimberly Engdahl Coates

Coates employs queer phenomenology proposed by Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed to explore the ways Virginia Woolf’s modernist aesthetic queers events, characters, affects, and the phenomenological experience of time and space. Examining queer angles of vision in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and The Years, Woolf depicts a London irrevocably queered by war or its anticipation. Rendering familiar temporal and spatial frames suddenly askew, Woolf’s queer analysis of wartime London calls us to heed the destructive consequences of a militancy facilitated by patriarchy and heteronormativity, while simultaneously inviting us to inhabit a city capable of offering radically alternative modes of social gathering.

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-293
Author(s):  
Paul Giles

Paul Giles, “‘By Degrees’: Jane Austen’s Chronometric Style of World Literature” (pp. 265–293) This essay considers how Jane Austen’s work relates to “World Literature” by internalizing a chronometric style. Examining the emergence of the chronometer in the eighteenth century, it suggests how Austen drew on nautical frames of reference to combine disparate trajectories of local realism, geographical distance, and historical time. The essay thus argues that Austen’s fiction is interwoven with a reflexive mode of cartographic mapping, one that draws aesthetically on nautical instruments to remap time and space. This style involves charting various fluctuations of perspective that reorder history, memory, and genealogy, while also recalibrating Britain’s position in relation to the wider world. Moving on from an initial analysis of Austen’s juvenilia and early novels, the essay proceeds in its second part to discuss Mansfield Park (1814) in relation to Pacific exploration and trade. In its third part, it considers Emma (1815) in the context of comic distortions and the misreadings that arise from temporal and spatial compressions in the narrative, a form heightened by the novel’s reflexive wordplay. Hence the essay argues that Austen’s particular style of World Literature integrates chronometric cartography with domestic circumstances, an elusive idiom that also manifests itself in relation to the gender dynamics of Persuasion (1817) and the unfinished “Sanditon,” as discussed in the essay’s concluding pages. This is correlated finally with the way Austen’s novels are calibrated, either directly or indirectly, in relation to a global orbit.


Author(s):  
Laura Marcus

This chapter explores the centrality of biography and autobiography to Woolf’s reading and writing life, and to her cultural milieu, in which experiments in life-writing were a crucial aspect of the modernist reaction against the Victorian era. It examines Woolf’s deep engagement in her fiction with life-writing forms, from the bildungsroman of The Voyage Out to the play with conventional biographical forms of Jacob’s Room, Orlando, The Waves, and Flush and the autobiographical foundations of To the Lighthouse. It also examines her biography of Roger Fry, and her own experiment in memoir-writing, the posthumously published ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in the context of concerns with the nature of memory, identity, and sexuality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vigdis Stokker Jensen

This piece dialogically makes methodological, theoretical, and substantive contributions to existing literature on autoethnography, Foucault and queer temporality studies, and autism. The text is based on ethnographic observations from a psych education class for adults diagnosed with autism and an interview with a psychologist who teaches the class. A layered account approach is used to explore the emergent lived experience of time and space for people diagnosed with autism. The concept of chrononormativity serves as a starting point for understanding the autism experience and a springboard for the introduction of an analytical concept that I term toponormativity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Jeanne Tiehen

The crisis of climate change is a difficult phenomenon to conceptualize, particularly in light of how we experience time and how our consciousness works. It is an event that spans tense in ways that are difficult to pinpoint, and it provides no past precedent to shape our future anticipations. Furthermore, climate change encounters us at a moment when time also feels compressed. This paper explores climate change and its relationship to time by assessing how theatre, with its own phenomenologically unique qualities of time and experience, has portrayed these tensions. Utilizing phenomenological theories of time from Husserl and Heidegger, and drawing on philosophical and cultural theories of presentism, this paper examines how these ideas manifest in two climate change plays: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne’s Greenland (2011) and Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion (2012). In conclusion, it is argued that theatre’s own conventions of time and space allows an inescapable present to exist, in which audiences are given a phenomenological experience of climate change that is otherwise unparalleled.


2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-367
Author(s):  
Finn Enke

Watercolor and ink help me dwell with the porousness of all morphologies emerging through birth/death, living/nonliving, dis/ability, interbeing, visible and nonvisible embodiments, and the passages of time. In real life, numerous non-trans people have told me that gender transition gives me control over what happens to my body and what people make of it; gives me more freedom than they have to choose what my body/mind does in the world; makes me get younger instead of older. Like me, watercolor has its own opinion and illumination. Like me, it is mortal. When I use ink, as in these black ink paintings, I often close my eyes as I make the lines. The canvas witnesses my nonlinear, non-Cartesian, queer experience of time and space, grief, and love.


2021 ◽  
pp. 164-194
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley

Since Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s fiction had incorporated three tools borrowed from poetry: the lyric “I,” figurative language, and aural recurrence. These tools find their clearest expression in The Waves (1931), which Woolf described as “prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.” This chapter analyzes The Waves with respect to these three tools, and then considers the book’s genre. Since its publication, many critics have received it—and other work by Woolf—as prose poetry and free verse. But to read Woolf as writing in these genres is to disregard authorial intent and historical context, to impose associations and conventions on work conceived without them. And lineating Woolf’s prose to “reveal” it as free verse betrays a confusion of lineation with poetry. Woolf’s vexation with the word “novel” reflects her effort to expand the meaning of the term. One way to honor this expansion is to use the term to describe the work of hers that seems least novel-like.


1995 ◽  
Vol 41 (9) ◽  
pp. 1398-1402
Author(s):  
J Mazza ◽  
M Huber ◽  
S Frye

Abstract The separation of time and space in processing a sample greatly simplifies the design of automation for clinical testing. The efficient spatial arrangement of analytical units and sample manipulators has become a more complex task because of the degree of automation required on today's state-of-the-art analyzer. Minimization of sample volume and the reduction of overall analyzer size further complicate the design problem. We report the development of a proprietary method of decoupling the temporal and spatial elements required for analysis of samples. This process is based on number theory and can be used to optimize the distance between the physical processing stations while allowing these same stations to operate on samples over a substantial range of times. The technique is versatile and can also be used when it is desirable to sequentially move groups of items from location to location.


Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola

Chapter 3 examines Virginia Woolf’s representation of real-world sound, which develops throughout her career and is crucial to her connection with the “common reader.” Woolf’s onomatopoeia indicates a desire to represent the sounds of the world without mediation—a drive that was helpfully modelled by the phonograph, which some hoped would allow composers to make music from recorded real-world sounds rather than relying on the mediation of musicians. Starting with Jacob’s Room, published in the modernist high point of 1922, this chapter evaluates Woolf’s use of onomatopoeia, which reaches a climax with her later works: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). These novels are overwhelmingly sound-driven, with characters consistently directed and influenced by the sounds they hear. While characters often feel alienated and scrutinized when they are looked at, the act of listening has the power to unite them, even if only temporarily. On the level of form, Woolf’s onomatopoeia stimulates one’s “reading voice,” so that the reader too can be momentarily united with the text through, for example, the “chuffs” and “ticks” that sound out beyond semantic meaning.


Author(s):  
Elsa Högberg

In this chapter, Högberg traces a specific form of non-violent ethics across Woolf’s interwar and WWII writings, considering its political potential and limits. Focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of ‘The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other’(Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’, 1984) alongside Judith Butler’s attempts to politicise his ethics of precariousness, this chapter shows how Woolf foregrounds vulnerability as an ethical injunction against violence. Arguing that Woolf’s work prompts a still unresolved question as to whether a pacifist ethics can be politically productive, Högberg reads Woolf’s pacifism as rooted in a concept of peace as proximity: the proximity of the ethical encounter, which prompts awakeness to the other’s vulnerability. The chapter ranges from Woolf’s Levinasian elevation, in Three Guineas, of a primary responsibility to Antigone’s Law of love, peace and proximity over the laws of the sovereign state to her literary articulations of an alternatively Levinasian and Butlerian ethics of peace and precariousness in Jacob’s Room, The Waves and Between the Acts. Voiced through poetic tropes of naked defencelessness and extra-linguistic, primal cries, Woolf’s pacifist ethics floods the boundaries defining Europe in a relocation of its ‘Greek’ origins, and in defiance against its political constructions of the other’s precarious face as a threat, which continue to justify the scandalous closing of European borders to ‘millions of bodies’ made vulnerable by war.


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