scholarly journals Beastly Modernisms: The Question of Animal Speech and Psychology in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Annalisa Federici
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Comparative Psychology ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Western Humanism

This essay analyses the ways in which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf addressed from a very early stage key issues related to contemporary posthumanist theories such as the question of animal speech and psychology. Both Joyce’s description of human-animal encounters in Ulysses and Woolf’s depiction of a sentient animal subject in Flush: A Biography at first present, and then subvert, the idea of the use of language as evidence of a human surpassing of the animal. By challenging preconceived notions of species distinctions, these authors ultimately decenter the human to focus instead on the centrality of animal subjectivity and sensory experience. While the question of a sharp divide between human and nonhuman animals along the axis of speech can be traceable to the anthropocentric tradition of western humanism and not least to such a possible source as Cervantes (whose novella “The Dialogue of the Dogs” is listed as part of both Joyce’s Trieste library and the library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf), the idea of expanding the typically modernist focus on inner life by also including other forms of subjectivity may have derived from the coeval, burgeoning fields of zoology, ethology and comparative psychology. Drawing from these sources and popular areas of knowledge which formed part of the cultural climate of the time, both Joyce and Woolf explore cross-species intersubjectivity in ways that shift the terms of representation away from anthropocentric views in order to affirm, blur and deny the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
John Middleton Murry

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

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.

Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 277-295
Author(s):  
Suzette Henke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Psychiatric History ◽  
Traumatic Loss ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
History Of

Culturally constructed pathologies exhibited by three authors of the modernist period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, reveal an emotional trajectory from paralyzing depressive or obsessive behavior to explosions of creative genius channeled into experimental fiction. Each of these authors struggled with a personal history of psychological distress evinced by genetic, experiential, or cultural factors and exacerbated by traumatic events in childhood or adolescence. All three sought to handle posttraumatic stress through complex gestures of aesthetic reenactment in a process that might be described as scriptotherapy. Woolf epitomizes the tortured artist grappling with so-called madness. Throughout her canon, she self-consciously struggles with irreconcilable issues of gender, abjection, and mourning. What appears to have been bipolar disorder in Woolf’s own psychiatric history might well have engendered a lifetime of creativity punctuated by severe bouts of debilitating depression. Joyce struggled with a pathological fear of erotic betrayal that spurred an obsessional fascination with adultery and with the enigma of spousal complicity, a drama whose erotic perversities were later played out in his twentieth-century epic novel, Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence proved somewhat notorious for his pathological obsessions with sexual desire, homosocial bonding, erotic loss, and conjugal betrayal. These authors worked through pathological symptoms to convert the seeds of incipient madness into burgeoning works of literary genius. They incorporated the pain of traumatic loss into the triumph of aesthetic integration via the creation of radically innovative and experimental art.

Virginia Woolf: an inner life

2006 ◽  
Vol 43 (08) ◽  
pp. 43-4506-43-4506
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Inner Life
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