The Loose-Leaf Diary

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own

In 1927, Woolf embarks on a two-and-a-half-year experiment with a loose-leaf diary, meant to catch more stray or “loose” thoughts. Her 1927 loose-leaf diary seems to plunge her into her creative unconscious. An off-handed air emerges from this diary, which seems a holding pond spontaneously spouting scenes. Orlando comes to her in this diary and the play-poem The Waves. The loose-leaf diary both invites unfettered fancy and serves as a site to preserve, and even restrain, Woolf’s “gushing mind” as she enjoys the “ardour and lust of creation.” Touchingly, at this time when Woolf is awash in spontaneous invention, she reads in August 1927 the first published version of Katherine Mansfield’s Journal. She could hardly fail to note there Mansfield’s greater struggle and self-doubt. Yet Woolf finds Mansfield's Journal most suggestive. Mansfield endorses androgyny there; she describes an imaginary child who changes gender. Journal passages also resonate uncannily with Woolf’s own growing ideas for The Waves, and Mansfield offers the concept of “derision” which Woolf will take for Three Guineas. More than anything, however, Mansfield’s 1927 Journal presents Woolf with ideas and a cautionary life story for A Room of One’s Own.

Renewed Diary Experiment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
General Strike

Woolf expands her 1926 diary. In February, she begins “a new convention”: starting each entry on a new page, her “habit in writing serious literature.” In May, she reaches outward toward public history with a diary of the General Strike. She then turns inward for eleven titled “State of Mind” probes: probes of the boundaries between sense, thought, and art. In October, she imagines “an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.” The diaries she reads propel her toward this place. Across the year Woolf returns often to Beatrice Webb’s memoir My Apprenticeship, woven around diary extracts. These extracts supply notions for To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Flush, and Three Guineas—and especially for A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women.” In September, Woolf reviews the Journals of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. His questing journals encourage Woolf’s search for “the mystical side of this solitude,” she writes, or what Webb calls the great Unknown. Soon after, Woolf reviews the Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals. Haydon’s Journals offer her a memorable moment for To the Lighthouse and matter for A Room of One’s Own—and more.

Katherine’s Secrets

2018 ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Christine Froula
Keyword(s):  
War Journalism ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
The City ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own

When Mansfield offered Woolf ‘scrupulously truthful’ friendship – ‘the freedom of the city without any reserves at all’ – Woolf had already playfully described her as ‘utterly unscrupulous’. Attacking ‘the same job’ of creating a new postwar aesthetics, they shared ‘priceless talk’ about their ‘precious art’ even as their friendship foundered in distance, absence, ‘quicksands’ of insincerity, misunderstandings, secrets, silences – reserves of all sorts. This essay considers this competitive, irreplaceable literary friendship through the veil of Katherine’s secrets, things we see that Virginia evidently couldn’t, or could see only after Mansfield’s death: Mansfield’s 1919 letters about Night and Day; her ‘doubtful’ unsigned 1920 review of it, ‘A Tragic Comedienne’; her 1915 war story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, unpublished until after her death, and its resonances with Colette’s war journalism; the open secrets of her posthumously published Doves’ Nest and Journal, which flow into Woolf’s creation of The Waves. Whether Mansfield’s mercurial ‘we’ voices their ‘public of two’, her exclusive alliance with Murry against Bloomsbury, or their postwar generation’s ‘change of heart’, her work, talk, and thought participate in – and even inspire – that ‘thinking in common’ Woolf theorises in A Room of One’s Own and abstracts as ‘the life of anybody’ in The Waves.

Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Church ◽  
Critical Interest ◽  
English Heritage

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

Artist at a Crossroads

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
The Will ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own

Woolf’s 1928 diary offers the reflections of an artist at a juncture: “some uneasy sense, of change,” she writes in her first entry. Orlando’s completion and surprise success dominates this diary. However, the problem is what to write next. The artistic crossroads Woolf faces in November involves nonfiction and fiction, the external and the internal, and the will to explore. Woolf both probes and resolves the tension in two November diary entries. One answer is to refine her turn-and-turn-about tack. She will allow works of “talent” to relieve her works of “genius.” More importantly, she will try “to saturate every atom” to reach a deeper mix. Her loose-leaf diary experiment ends with the first 1929 diary, the final diary in her second, lean modernist stage. If Orlando unfurled across the 1928 diary, the first 1929 diary resounds with A Room of One’s Own. However, Woolf also readies herself for her coming battle with The Waves. She will need her courage as she begins “a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful.” But her diary continues to help her; in fact, she moves at the end to give it even firmer life in a bound diary book.

The March of Headlines

2018 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Diary Entry ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Distant Relative

Virginia Woolf's “curious props”—including her diary and others’ diaries—ably support her across 1931. She shows, in fact, such sure life command that she mocks the outer political scene in September of 1931. Meanwhile, she continues to add newspaper headlines to her 1930–1931 diary, and her inner wars persist. This chapter shows how Woolf used her 1930–1931 diary as a practice field for The Waves. Other diaries also aid her. In December 1930, she makes double use of The Journal of a Somerset Rector, with its tale of a country suicide. First, she summarizes John Skinner's Journal in her diary to test her ability to write and then she revises the diary entry for her Second Common Reader essay “The Rev. John Skinner” (1932). She finds James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson further proof of life deathless in a diary and pairs him with John Skinner in the Second Common Reader. In May 1931, The Private Diaries of Princess Daisy of Pless—Vita Sackville-West's distant relative—offers Woolf rich matter for future works: for Flush, The Years, and Three Guineas.

Braving the Waves with Francis Xavier

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Strasser
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fear Of God ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Waves

This chapter discusses the transoceanic voyage as a rite de passage into missionary manhood. Jesuits defined their brand of masculinity in the social microcosm of the ship, carrying out pastoral work in confinement and danger. If Ignatius was the Society’s inventor and Ur-father, Francis Xavier was its patron of mobility and a model for conduct for generations of missionaries, including many Germans. Hagiographical accounts and paintings of Xavier’s dramatic sea voyages emphasize his exemplary self-governance and ability to convert sinful fears into correct fear of God. The transoceanic ship was a site of embodied conditioning for those who followed in Xavier’s footsteps. When the missionaries reached foreign shores, they felt more ready than ever to convert and regulate indigenous others.

Arbiters of taste: Women, modernism and the making of Paris

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-110
Author(s):  
Ilyana Karthas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Art Worlds ◽  
The Arts ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Waves

The years 1870–1960 were a period of vibrant innovation in France when traditional ideas about art and living were challenged. At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris became the epicentre for creative risk, innovation and originality. The city both represented and became a ‘laboratory of culture’ that attracted individuals eager to ride the waves of modernism. What forces enabled Paris to become a site of such artistic vibrancy? What cultural labour was involved in propelling avant-gardism forwards? In this article, I introduce a few examples of women who played a vital role in the modernisation of the arts in Paris, the internationalisation of French artistic tastes, and the cultivation of Paris’s reputation as the centre of avant-gardism and artistic development. In doing so, I offer a new paradigm for understanding the art worlds of Paris in this period by revealing women as important and effective arbiters of taste.

“Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other”

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Elsa Högberg
Keyword(s):  
Specific Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Unresolved Question ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Primary Responsibility ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Jacob's Room

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.

Synaptic plasticity in the thalamo-cortical pathway as one of the neurobiological correlates of forelimb flexion conditioning: electrophysiological investigation in the cat

1994 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 2631-2647 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Meftah ◽  
L. Rispal-Padel
Keyword(s):  
Synaptic Plasticity ◽  
Motor Cortex ◽  
Distal Part ◽  
Motor Responses ◽  
Associative Conditioning ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Cerebellar Interpositus Nucleus ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Animal Preparation

1. In a previous study, using a chronic cat preparation subjected to an associative conditioning procedure, we described the plasticity of the thalamo-cortical pathway by qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the motor responses induced by stimulating each of the relays on the cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway. In the present study, it was proposed to analyze the effects on the synapses located between thalamic endings and cortical neurones, using a twofold behavioral and electrophysiological approach, with a view to correlating the patterns of synaptic plasticity with the changes in the motor responses recorded. 2. For this purpose, a reduced, functionally organized sensorimotor circuit, which can be taken to be a neuronal analog of associative conditioning, was studied in an awake chronic animal preparation. This circuit was defined on the basis of the sites at which conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (UCS) were applied: the CS was applied at a site on the cerebellar interpositus nucleus which activated the forepaw musculature so as to induce flexion movements and the UCS was applied to the skin of the distal part of that paw so as to induce reflex flexion movements. By repetitively activating the central nervous pathways by the associated CS and UCS according to a predefined temporal pattern, the efficiency of the thalamo-cortical pathway's contribution to the movement production was enhanced, and its capacity to convey the cerebellar inputs to neurons in the motor cortex increased. 3. The associative nature of the conditioning was tested using previously established criteria. The setting up of motor and central changes in response to the repetitive presentation of paired CS and UCS, the fact that these changes were reversible because they could be abolished by applying extinction procedures, and the consistency of their occurrence whenever the CS was applied repeatedly alone for several days to naive animals, all showed that the stimuli of both kinds (CS and UCS) had to be applied together for the plasticity of the thalamo-cortical pathway to be expressed. 4. By determining whether the waves constituting the cerebello-cortical responses were excitatory or inhibitory, the nature of the changes in the transmission of the cerebellar impulses to neurons in the motor cortex was established.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

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