Woolf Studies Annual 

About: Woolf Studies Annual is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Memoir & Literary criticism. It has an ISSN identifier of 1080-9317. Over the lifetime, 75 publications have been published receiving 260 citations.

The Essays of Virginia Woolf

Abstract: The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 5: 1929 to 1932 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010) xxix + 705pp. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 6: 1933 to 1941 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2011) xxxi + 736pp. In 1904 Virginia Woolf inaugurated her life as a professional writer with a review of W. D. Howells' The Sons of Royal Langbrith (written, she claimed, in half an hour) and a personal account of her visit to the Bronte parsonage at Haworth (this took longer--somewhat under two hours--to write). The enviable facility of these first ventures was not to last, of course, nor did these fledgling efforts seem especially precocious. Still, they are worth revisiting for intimations of preoccupations that would last a lifetime. The Howells review opens by making a workmanlike distinction between the novel of thought and the novel of action; her "pilgrimage" to Haworth, which she found "dingy and commonplace," causes her to wonder "how far surroundings radically affect people's minds" (E1 5). Thus are introduced two of the major themes that will dominate the great essays to come: one I might call, in my own workmanlike way, the aesthetic theme, in which Woolf explores and ultimately champions the inventive forms, the psychological emphasis, the uncensored subject matter that give modern fiction its power and distinction; the other the socio-political theme, which examines and often laments how baleful environments can affect people's minds, by which she means both their hearts and their imagination. With the recent publication of the final two volumes of Woolf's collected and uncollected essays, reviews and occasional pieces, we at last have an indispensable chronological record of what and when Woolf thought what she did about art, about politics, about human character. Stuart N. Carke has taken over the editorial stewardship of this monumental project from Andrew McNellie, the impeccable, eloquent editor of the first four volumes. Clarke has proved a worthy successor, maintaining the same high standards and practices that made the previous volumes so pleasurable as well as informative to read and consult. Thanks to their exemplary work, we can survey Woolf's essays arrayed majestically from end to end and can appreciate anew and in greater depth how much the modern essay--at once relaxed and exacting--owes to her determination to record as honestly as she could her reactions to books, to social and political issues, to people and to places and to do so, moreover, while acknowledging the importance of mood--of bored or flagging spirits as much as exalted enthusiasms--in accounting for one's opinions, which were, she often reminded us, of the moment. The mood deepens, as does the gravity of her concerns, in the works that make up these last two volumes. Volume 5 includes all the essays written between 1929 and 1932, years following the exhausting labor of The Waves and the impressive polemical achievement of A Room of One's Own. The essays from these years predictably reflect her feminist values and continue her critical assault on the generic boundaries traditionally separating poetry and prose. She is ardent in her appreciation of the vigorous colloquialisms and new coinages of American fiction, which she praises for capturing the freshness and impertinence of contemporary reality. But she continues to be adept at taking the long view, as exemplified in The Common Reader: Second Series, reprinted here in its entirety, which begins with "The Strange Elizabethans" and concludes by attempting to answer the rather timeless question of how one should read a book. The sixth and last volume of the complete essays runs from 1933 to 1941, years that tested but failed to subdue her feminism and pacificism. Three Guineas belongs to this era, as do "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" and "The Leaning Tower." Although these essays were written during wartime and while she was battling the debilitating depression that would finally cause her to take her life, there is very little of an end-of-the-world feeling about them. …

A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and "Time Passes"

Abstract: I Temporalization as lapse, the loss of time, is neither an initiative of an ego, nor a movement toward some telos of action. The loss of time is not the work of a subject.... Time passes. --Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (51-52) For a long time it was thought that language had mastery over time, that it acted both as the future bond of the promise and as memory and narrative; it was thought to be prophecy and history.... In fact, it is only a formless rumbling, a streaming; its power resides in its dissimulation. That is why it is one with the erosion of time; it is depthless forgetting and the transparent emptiness of waiting. --Michel Foucault, "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From the Outside" (55) In diary entries, Woolf describes "Time Passes," the short middle chapter of To the Lighthouse in which the Ramsays' uninhabited summer house ages ten years, as "this impersonal thing, which I'm dared to do by my friends, the flight of time" and "the most difficult abstract piece of writing ... all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to" (D3 36, 76). These suggestive phrases for the chapter's dislocations from normal life help us appreciate its strange narrative qualities, its intimation of a not-quite-human voice that seems to cling to nothing in order to cling to the passing of time. Yet, as many critics have noticed in recent years, this section is not simply an exercise in abstraction or formalism; the perspective of "Time Passes" is distinct from the rest of the novel--and new to modernism--but not because it moves from particularity to generality, from contingent events to their essential forms. (1) The haunting narrative unlocatability of its language carries a palpable stillness and silence, an almost reverential care not to wake the sleeping and dead, rather than narrative omniscience or objectivity. In this essay, I discuss the fragile stillness and delicate lyricism around the absences of "Time Passes," not as abstraction, but as the narrative poetics of alterity, the poetics of the subject's intuition of its responsibility towards others, and especially of its involvement in the deaths of others. I argue that Woolf anticipates concepts in ethical criticism and philosophy regarding the subject's response to the death of the other as the origin of time. "Time Passes" is an especially vivid example of an important strain in Woolf's writing--I also refer briefly to Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One's Own--in which the death of the other inaugurates the subject's temporality, and in which this temporality exceeds the subject's knowledge by virtue of its impossible ethical demand. In other words, I argue that the narrator of "Time Passes" speaks with the ethically-inflected voice of selfhood bound to the other more than to its own being, a self for whom the fullness of autonomous identity is not a sufficient meaning of the human. For these few pages, Woolf leaves the familiar horizons of traditional Western subjectivity to narrate in the voice of its unnarratable, voiceless exteriority, rendering intelligible a void in consciousness that is hard to describe or imagine. This can be thought as something like an eclipse, (2) a shadow saturated with light that evades or pains our seeing. Locating the exteriority of self, like grasping darkness as a substantial thing, confuses familiar notions of identity and difference, giving what is other and alien a value that is not compatible with the internal economy of self. To describe "Time Passes" in terms of alterity and exteriority instead of abstraction is to suggest that its narrative technique animates difference as a meaningful discrepancy in being, rather than subsuming difference in identity or rendering it an object for the subject's grasp. Alterity, in this sense, differs from Wilhelm Worringer's emphasis on modernist abstraction in that it does not provide solace to a self vulnerable to death and decay by creating a new (aesthetic) order; rather, alterity is the experience of selfhood that achieves an ethical value in its relation to others. …

Tilting at Universities: Virginia Woolf at King's College London

Abstract: Women's education was a constant concern for Virginia Woolf. She read widely about the historic exclusion of women from higher education, the social reformers who fought for women's higher education, and the prejudices that persisted even after colleges opened their doors to women. Her novels are full of female characters--Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, Eleanor Pargiter--lamenting the insecurity and constraint bred by their lack of education. It was not enough that women's colleges such as Newnham at Cambridge, Somerville at Oxford, or Bedford in London simply existed; Woolf's writing continually questions the nature, aims and methods of education itself. Particularly during the 1930s as she was writing The Years and Three Guineas she considered the psychological effects of the inequities between male and female education. Her 1937 novel is full of evidence of the untold emotional divisions between siblings caused by the amount of money and time spent on educating boys as opposed to girls. (1) As research for The Years she read and collected quotations from scores of memoirs and biographies about Victorian education and attempts to reform the provision for girls and women. In this period, too, she was forever "tilting at Universities," arguing in particular that the roots of imperial and patriarchal violence lay in the training boys received at public school and Oxbridge (D4 79). In the notes to Three Guineas she argues that psychologically eminence upon a platform encourages vanity and the desire to impose authority. Further, the reduction of English literature to an examination subject must be viewed with suspicion by all who [...] wish to keep one art at least out of the hands of middlemen and free, as long as may be, from all association with competition and money making. (TG 379) Given the prevalence of questions of gender and pedagogy in Woolf's own writing it is curious that her own formal education has received relatively little attention. Recently examined archival records at King's College London reveal that Woolf had much more first hand experience of women's higher education than either she or her biographers have acknowledged. Her extended studies at King's College Ladies' Department brought her into direct contact with some of the early reformers of women's higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull. (2) This article will not only reproduce, for the first time, the enrolment lists, syllabi (course reading lists) and examination pass lists relating to Virginia and her sister Vanessa's studies at King's College between 1897 and 1901, but will also place those studies in their institutional context. We will link aspects of the ethos and environment of King's Ladies' Department to Woolf's later writings. The absence of references to her early education in her subsequent writing career has meant that this important archival material has gone unnoticed, and also that the impact of her studies on her later theories of education has not been explored. Biographical material from Woolf's teenage years is sparse--only intermittent letters and journals remain--therefore this discovery provides valuable information about a relatively undocumented portion of her life. The impression given by Woolf's biographers, and indeed by Woolf herself, is that she was almost entirely self-educated. The appended chronology in Quentin Bell's biography of Woolf does list attendance at King's College in November 1897 (Greek and History), January 1898 (Greek with Dr. Warre [sic]), October 1898 (Latin with Miss Pater and Greek with Dr. Warre [sic] and October 1900 (Bell 191-2). In the biography itself, however, her attendance at King's is not mentioned, just her private tuition with Clara Pater. When Bell outlines a typical day in the Stephen household he depicts Vanessa cycling off to her art classes at Mr. Cope's School, and Virginia left alone in the nursery at the top of the house reading Greek (Bell 68 and 73). …

Geometries of Space and Time: The Cubist London of Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's affectionate portrait, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), refers again and again to Fry's sense of the connections and formal likenesses among painting, music, and literature, particularly in the contemporary art world. In their intellectual discussions, Woolf recounts, "The arts of painting and writing lay close together, and Roger Fry was always making raids across the boundaries.... many of his theories held good for both arts. Design, rhythm, texture--there they were again--in Flaubert as in Cezanne" (RF 240). Because Fry brought a unique mixture of critic's eye and painter's sense to bear on his evaluations of her fiction, Woolf sought and valued his opinion. In one instance of "making raids across the boundaries," Fry was spurred to an act of interartistic comparison that is especially relevant to a reading of Woolf's fiction. In a 1919 review of French art at London's Mansard Gallery, Fry addresses the Cubist project of "introduc[ing] at some point a complete break of connection between ordinary vision and the constructed pictorial vision"; describing in particular a painting by Cubist Leopold Survage, Fry exclaims, "how much of modern literature is approximating to the same kind of relationship of ideas as Survage's pictures give us!" (1) ("Modern French Art" 341). The "modern literature" Fry had in mind was none other than the work of Virginia Woolf. To test his theories of Cubism's possibilities for literature, Fry performed an exercise of ekphrasis on Survage's 1911 painting Ville (Fig. 1). His "narrative" emphasized in particular the spatial relations of the pictorial elements: Houses, always houses, yellow fronts and pink fronts jostle one another this way and that way, crowd into every corner and climb into the sky; but however close they get together the leaves of trees push into their interstices.... Between house and leaves there move the shapes of men; more transient than either, they scarcely leave a mark.... ("Modern French Art" 341-342) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Fry pinpoints the dynamism of the visual field and the interplay of textures and planes. Even the human elements are evaluated by spatial and dimensional characteristics. Following his description Fry reflects, "I see, now that I have done it, that it was meant for Mrs. Virginia Woolf--that Survage is almost precisely the same thing in paint that Mrs. Woolf is in prose. Only I like intensely such sequences of ideas presented to me in Mrs. Virginia Woolf's prose, and as yet I have a rather strong distaste for Survage's visual statements" ("Modern French Art" 342; my emphasis). Upon reading the review, Woolf appears to have been neither insulted nor spurred to reflection, merely amused. (2) In Fry's view, Woolf's cubistic style--still gestating but detectable in such elements as the snail's eye view of color, space, and time in "Kew Gardens" (1919)--trumps a mediocre painting making use of a similar technique. (3) Fry's early connection of Woolf's prose to Cubism is prescient, anticipating as it does the wealth of studies analyzing Woolf's fiction in relation to visual art. (4) His analogy not only broaches the complex subject of translating the dynamics and effects of one expressive medium into another, it raises the equally crucial concern of humanity's relation to the modern city. How might that unstable relationship be translated into the material of art? How can the subject of humans negotiating the metropolis influence the shape of a narrative or the structure of a painting? In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf depicts urban reality as it is perceived and experienced: an ephemeral and piecemeal admixture of sense and memory. In order to surmount the formal challenges presented by the novel's themes--the experience of lived time, the phenomenon of memory, and the complex dynamics of the modern city--Woolf formulated her aesthetic response in part by borrowing from Cubist principles and by materializing the formal possibilities suggested by Fry in his Mansard Gallery review. …

Ce chien est a moi: Virginia Woolf and the signifying dog

Abstract: Woolf's signifying dog belongs to the "companion species" that marks the boundaries between the human and non-human. My concern, however, is not primarily with the modality, or dogginess, of the dog but with its status as signifier. It marks the boundary between literal and figurative. In exploring the dog's metaphorical or figurative status, I risk its "erasure," confirming it as "absent referent," (1) according to animal ethicist-feminist, Carol Adams. "Could metaphor itself be the undergarment ... of oppression?" she asks, since through the reifying action of metaphor "the object is severed from its ontological meaning," something that also occurs in the discourse of racism and misogyny (Adams 209, 213). But what interests me, in risking the bracketing of Adams's referent, is the behavior of such metaphors in Woolf's modernist free indirect discourse, in texts that also are themselves highly allusive to and citational of other texts. Adams is concerned with the restoration of the "absent referent" of oppressive metaphor, so that the witnessing of its presence would prevent its becoming the object of oppression, whether of racial violence or sexual violence or violence against animals, and, drawing on Marjorie Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1988), she demonstrates how closely these three oppressive discourses are interrelated in their choice and deployment of metaphor (Adams 211-212). But such a restoration, as the literary history of black and feminist experimental writing makes evident, is no easy matter; nor can we understand the relationship between figurative and literal (language and referent) quite so straightforwardly as Adams has it. Furthermore, we cannot simply abolish or censor metaphor; but it may perhaps be turned to advantage. The sense of turning metaphor to advantage informs the canine-feminist ethics of writing and reading that Woolf's signifying dog enables, as this essay will explore. Woolf's dog is a sliding signifier representing not least the historic, unequal struggles between men and women over artistic subjectivity and voice. (2) Marking and marked by race, gender and class, Woolf's signifying dog is a constructed, monstrous, multivalent figure whose "referent" is certainly not just a dog, but nor, contra Adams, does this metaphor cleanly evacuate the dog from its vehicle merely to accommodate "woman" or "slave" (Woolf gestures to both). A few critics have previously noted the metaphoricity of Woolf's dogs, but only as simple allegories of sexuality, particularly of lesbianism, and, in one argument, of incest (Dunn, Eberly, Vanita). But Woolf's dogs are already more complicated than this; already metaphors of metaphor, they have complicated textual pasts, burdened by canine cultural baggage. Woolf's most obvious signifying dog is the protagonist of her best-selling novel Flush: A Biography (1933), but Flush is preceded (and followed) in Woolf's oeuvre by numerous important instances, and "turns," in a fascinating chain of canine troping. My focus in this essay will be on Woolf's signifying dogs prior to Flush, particularly their appearance in A Room of One's Own. I am interested, most specifically, in the notorious "fine negress" passage (AROO 76), and the performance there of Woolf's slippery canine metaphors in her free indirect discourse. (3) These elude Jane Marcus's attention in her illuminating and fine scrutiny of the passage in her book Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (2004). But, hunting with canine and animal ethicists, I will chase Woolf's dog in one crucial sentence back through some of the sentences it has previously frequented in Woolf's and others' writing. My aim is to explore and uncover the rich semantic layering at play in this densely allusive and highly citational, multivoiced passage; to build on Marcus's detailed, and nuanced reading, supplying further detail and nuance; but also to depart from it. I am not interested in indicting Woolf or A Room of One's Own as racist, or indeed in rescuing either from such indictments; but I am interested in the ways Woolf's writing, which she herself characterized as a "tunnelling process" (D2 272), encourages her readers to engage actively in the quite canine business of chasing, unearthing, and turning its densely wrought metaphors and tropes. …