Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.

My thesis is about Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. I examine these novels in relation to the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and Sigmund Freud, and the groundwork of Modernism. I relate Woolf's use of water imagery and stream of consciousness technique to Bergson’s theory of “la durée,” or psychological, subjective time, James’ “stream of consciousness” theory in psychology, and Freud’s theory of the “oceanic” feeling of religious experience.

solid objects is a collection of objects and its cultural life, where the roles of the object, artist, collector, museum, writer, publisher and curator are suspended to reemerge in other possible forms. In this work the text becomes an object, the pocket a museum, the collection a persona, the artist its curator, the writer a sign.

The thesis aims to explore how Virginia Woolf indicates the individual beauty in Mrs. Dalloway to free the meaning of a human being from the social construction. The social condition of Clarissa and Septimus as a woman and a mad man shows that an individual could be marginalized in the dominating ideology of the society. The relationship in which people judge and overwhelm one another with their own ideas and beliefs exposes similar violence. Through the aesthetic perspectives expressed in the characterization of Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway, however, Woolf discloses the beauty of existence itself. The aesthetics liberates the value of a human being from the social value systems and manifests the aesthetic relationship between different individuals who transcend the boundaries of time as well as body. In addition to Introduction and Conclusion, the thesis is divided into three chapters. In Chapter One, I investigate Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s and Septimus¡¦s marginalized social positions as a woman and a mad man in Britian in the early 20th century. As a woman, Mrs. Dalloway was confined to her domestic role and Septimus, as a mad man, was secluded from society. In this chapter, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s party and Septimus¡¦s mad writing, as their way to change the status quo of the society, are their offerings to the world. Chapter Two investigates the dark desire to wield power over the others. Septimu¡¦s death and Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s perception of the beauty of the existence are taken as an escape/exit from this violence. Chapter Three explores the beauty of the existence and the aesthetic relationship between individuals beyond the violence of judgments and social construction Woolf reveals in Mrs. Dalloway.

This study attempts to interpret Virginia Woolf¡¦s works by appropriating Jacques Lacan¡¦s theoretical concepts, especially the concept of ¡§psychic structure.¡¨ I argue that Virginia Woolf¡¦s psychic structure belongs to the category of hysteria and her psychic structure is revealed in both the form and content of her writing: her writing exemplifies ¡§the hysteric¡¦s discourse,¡¨ one of the four discourses conceptualized by Lacan. I want to further argue that, in her works, the hysterical Woolf can transform herself into the analyst, transforming the hysteric¡¦s discourse into the analyst¡¦s discourse. The thesis is structured in four parts. In the introduction, I will introduce the author Virginia Woolf, Jacques Lacan, review relevant criticisms, construct the theoretical framework, and present the thesis structure as well as my arguments. In the first chapter I examine Woolf¡¦s essay A Room of One¡¦s Own, arguing that, in this text, Woolf hysterically questions women¡¦s lacks in the phallic symbolic order and experiments with her writing to subvert the hierarchal patriarchal society that oppresses women. Woolf, moreover, turns herself from being a hysteric into an analyst, adopting the analyst¡¦s discourse to guide women to explore their desire repressed by the patriarchal society. In the second chapter I examine Woolf¡¦s novel To the Lighthouse, arguing that when writing the novel, Woolf unconsciously betrays her desire to withdraw from the Symbolic and regress into the maternal Imaginary order. Although, on the one hand, Woolf attempts to re-evoke the lost Imaginary mother-child dyad¡¦s unity, on the other hand she unconsciously acknowledges that she cannot paper over the lack and void of being, and this recognition greatly traumatizes Woolf. To understand the fundamental cause of her trauma, Woolf splits herself into both a hysterical analysand and an analyst, adopting the analyst¡¦s discourse to question and explore her repressed desire for the maternal Imaginary order. In the concluding chapter I restate the thesis statement and summarize the analyses of the two previous chapters.

Literacy theory, a multi-disciplinary, late-twentieth century endeavor, examines the acts of reading and writing as cognitive and social processes, seeking to define the relationship between reading and writing and other social and cognitive - especially linguistic - acts. As such, literacy theory intersects with discussions of public and individual education and reading habits that surface with the rise of the mass reading public. This dissertation analyzes scenes of reading and writing in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley as implicit authorial discourses on the function of literacy, including properties of written language and the social consequences of literate acts. It argues that reading and writing form important thematic concerns in Modernist fiction, defines fiction that theorizes about reading and writing as "literacy fiction," and proposes fictional dramatizations of literate activity as subjects for literacy theory. Chapter I argues that early twentieth-century Britain is an important historical site for intellectual consideration of literacy because near-universal access to education across social classes influences an increase in middle and working class readers. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway provides a test case for the analysis of scenes of reading because her democratic concern with education is well established in the scholarly literature. Chapter II argues that in "The Celestial Omnibus" and "Other Kingdom," Forster critiques use of literacy as cultural capital. Chapter III argues that Forster's A Room with a View and Howards End portray the dangers of naive reading and the difficulties of autodidacticism for the working class, respectively. Chapter IV argues that Lawrence's "Shades of Spring" and Sons and Lovers introduce the theoretically unexplored topic of literacy's influence on intimate relationships. Chapter V argues that Huxley's Brave New World responds to the Modernist discourse on literacy by addressing the restriction of individual literacy by the State and elite intellectuals. The conclusion summarizes Modernist representation of literacy, states the significance of the methodology and its further applications, and refines the definition of literacy fiction. Because Modernist writers scrutinize the relationship between external forces and the individual psyche, their anxiety-tinged portraits treat both cognitive and social functions of literate acts.

This thesis is focused on Virginia Woolf¡¦s mourning in her Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse based on the theory of the work of mourning. Since Freud¡¦s grounding essay, ¡§Mourning and Melancholia¡¨ first appeared in 1918, numerous critics, like John Bowlby and Therese Rando, have followed Freud¡¦s path to study the process of the work of mourning. Julia kristeva also proposes ¡§the sublimatory hold over the lost Thing¡¨ as a way of curbing mourning. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf restarts her work of mourning, which she fails when her mother, Julia Stephen dies. Woolf writes down and expresses her memories and affections of her mother through her fictional surrogate, Lily Briscoe. Through Lily¡¦s completion of her painting in the end of the novel, Woolf also completes her own work, not only the work of art but also her belated work of mourning. The reason that Woolf writes about her work of mourning in a belated time is that she has not find an appropriate voice of her own to speak out her mind. It is until the creation of Mrs. Dalloway, in which she experiments with the technique of stream-of-consciousness, that Woolf finds a voice of her own. As a result, after the composition of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf starts her work of mourning in To the Lighthouse. The first chapter begins with an introduction to the theories of mourning and Robert Humsphrey¡¦s theory of the techniques of stream-of-consciousness in modern novel. The second chapter is the discussion of Mrs. Dalloway. By means of her experiment of the new technique of narration, Woolf is able to reveal her belief of the work of mourning through the doubling of the sane Clarissa Dalloway and the insane Septimus, that any suppression of the work of mourning may cause insanity. The third chapter explains how Woolf restarts her belated work of mourning in To the Lighthouse. Since some of the plots of the novel derive from Woolf¡¦s own experiences, verbalizing her past is Woolf¡¦s first step of her work of mourning. Moreover, Woolf expresses her feelings and sentiments for her mother, represented as Mrs. Ramsay, through Lily Briscoe, the surrogate mourner in the novel. By means of the technique of stream-of-consciousness, Woolf is able to speak out her true thoughts about her mother through Lily¡¦s observation of Mrs. Ramsay. Therefore, in the end of the novel, Woolf and her surrogate, Lily, are finally able to finish their own work of art and of mourning as the story ends. In the last chapter, I suggest that Woolf¡¦s new invention of the technique of stream-of-consciousness as her own voice in Mrs. Dalloway initiates her next novel, To the Lighthouse. This is why Woolf restarts her work of mourning of her mother three decades later¡Xbecause she is finally able to speak of her own.

This dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death. / text

This essay is a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography that focuses on representation of gender in the novel and the possible response it elicits in the reader. The essay argues that the implied reader of Orlando - as manifested in the novel - is a feminist one, as well as it explores the possibility of this implied feminist reader being a female. The reasons as to why this could be are extensively examined by analyzing the main character Orlando as he metamorphoses from an English nobleman into a grown woman. To support the thesis, the essay looks both into reader response criticism and feminist criticism to clarify what an implied reader actually is. The similarities between Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own” are also touched upon as these suggest that the implied reader is a feminist. The essay then takes a closer look at the narrator of the novel and what this narrator suggests about the identity of the implied reader of the novel. In addition to this it is also concluded that s/he controls the reader’s perception of Orlando’s gender in the novel, and that this also echoes the ideals presented in “A Room of One’s Own”. The essay concludes that the implied reader of Orlando indeed is a feminist, but not necessarily a female one.

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