Thèse de doctorat : Anglais : Rennes 2 : 2008. / Bibliogr. f. 421-455. Index des noms.

This dissertation demonstrates that irrationality in representative modernist novels is a significant and valuable feature of subjectivity. Building on contemporary theories of the novel, the thesis develops two closely related issues: the novel as an aesthetic vehicle of subjectivity and the novel as a reflection of its socio-historical moment. In major novels by William Faulkner, Hermann Broch, and Virginia Woolf a surrender to irrationality is paradoxically portrayed as a positive act which can contribute to a more complete fulfilment of the self. Furthermore, twentieth century notions of the self are often expanded, complicated, or revised at least in part through the genre of the novel which is used to represent them. / In three main chapters, the thesis draws an original link between studies of the novel as genre on the one hand, and explorations of the meaning of irrationality in early twentieth century fiction on the other. The first on Faulkner includes a section outlining my research into the theoretical domain of subjectivity, irrationality, modernism, and the novel which serves as a background for Faulkner, but remains pertinent also to the chapters on Broch and Woolf which follow. With reference to recent social theorists, philosophers of the novel, medical researchers, and literary critics, the dissertation establishes that Faulkner Broch, and Woolf construct works which advance the notion that irrationality can be conducive to the development of an autonomous, private self which is actively engaged in the outside world. Moreover, in each of the novels at the centre of this study, irrational characters personify an aspect of the novel which is essential to the structural development of the genre. / Key works by Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf insist that irrationality is at the core of a dynamic and modernist representation of identity. In novels by Faulkner, irrationality contributes to a flexible sense of time and to the elaboration of a valuable intersubjective communication. In Broch's trilogy, an irrational approach to reality encourages the development of a temporal, ethical, and subjective freedom. For Woolf, the validation of irrational impulses restrains a compulsive and debilitating drive towards introspection and facilitates social interaction.

This thesis traces the self-creation and autonomy of the woman artist figure in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. The first chapter conveys the progression of autonomy and self-creation in Western-European philosophy through contemporary thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Alexander Nehamas, and Richard Rorty. This narrative culminates in a rift between public and private, resulting from the push--especially by Nietzsche--toward a radical, unmediated independence. Taylor and Rorty envision different ways to resolve the public/private rift, yet neither philosopher distinguishes how this rift has affected women by enclosing them in the private, barring them from the public, and delimiting their autonomy. The second chapter focusses on each woman artist's resistance to socially scripted roles, accompanied by theories about resistance: Woolf with Rachel Blau DuPlessis on narrative resistance, Lessing with Julia Kristeva on dissidence, and Atwood with Stephen Hawking and Kristeva on space-time. The third chapter contrasts the narratives of chapters 1 and 2 and reveals how the woman artist avoids the problematic public/private rift by incorporating the ethics developed within the private into her art; she balances her creative goals with responsibility to others. Drawing on the work of women moral theorists, this thesis suggests that women's self-creation and autonomy result in an undervalued but nevertheless workable solution to the public/private rift.

This dissertation examines everyday life in selected works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield. It builds on recent scholarship by Bryony Randall (2007) and Liesl Olson (2009), who have argued that modernism marks a turn to the mundane or the ordinary, a view that runs contrary to the long-established understanding of modernism as characterized by its stylistic difficulty, high culture aesthetics, and extraordinary moments. This study makes a departure from these seminal critical works, taking on a feminist perspective to look specifically at how modernist authors use style to enable inquiry into women’s everyday lives during the modernist period. This work draws on everyday life studies, particularly the theories of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Rita Felski, to analyze what attention to the everyday can tell us about the feminist aims and arguments of the literary texts. The literary works studied here include: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (predominantly the fourth volume, The Tunnel), Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and The Waves, and Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” and “Marriage à la Mode.” This dissertation argues that these works reveal the ideological production of everyday life and how patriarchal power relations persist through mundane practices, while at the same time identifying or troubling sites of resistance to that ideology. This sustained attention to the everyday reveals that the transition from Victorian to modern gender roles was not all that straightforward, challenging potentially simplistic discourses of feminist progress. Literary technique and style are central to this study, which claims that Richardson, Woolf, and Mansfield use modernist stylistic techniques to articulate women’s particular experiences of everyday life and to critique the ideological production of everyday life itself. Through careful analysis of their various uses of modernist technique, this dissertation also challenges the vague or uncritical uses of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ that have long dominated modernist studies. This dissertation makes several original contributions to modernist scholarship. Its sets these three authors alongside one another under the rubric of everyday life to see what reading them together reveals about feminist modernism. The conclusions herein challenge the notion of an essentializing ‘feminine’ modernism that has largely characterized discussion of these authors’ common goals. This dissertation also contributes a new reading of bourgeois everydayness in Mansfield’s stories, and is the first to discuss cycling as a mode of resistance to domesticity in The Tunnel. It argues for the ‘mobile space’ of cycling as a supplement to the common symbol of feminist modernism, the ‘room of one’s own.’ The reading herein of Woolf’s contradictory approach to the everyday challenges the accepted view among Woolf scholars that her theory of ‘moments of being’ has transformative power in everyday life. This dissertation also makes a feminist intervention into everyday studies, which has been criticized for its failure to take account of women’s lives. / Graduate / 2015-04-16 / 0593 / tarastar@gmail.com

The questions posed and examined in Violent Femmes take their genesis from psychoanalytic arguments which contend that identity is not a stable monadic thing but rather a continuing process of engagement and negotiation between the self and others. Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas, amongst others, have noted the temporary, coalitional, and provisional nature of the ways in which identity is apprehended and experienced. This thesis expands upon such a theoretical framework of identity formation to specifically question the ways in which the formation and maturation of an artistic identity may, in part, be predicated upon the psychological capacity to enact violence within the realm of the imaginary. Violent Femmes examines the complex relationship between psychological violence and artistic identity as that relationship is recorded in the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Emily Carr. / This project traces the written vestiges of Woolfs, Hall's, and Carr's individual internalised struggles to formulate an artistic identity in specific relationship with an already established 'model' of artistic creativity and identity. Woolfs, Hall's, and Carr's struggles to claim a personal artistic identity, in some ways from their individual model of the artist, are waged within the minds of the authors themselves. However, the violence enacted within their imaginations---the violence perpetrated against the models of the artist---is thrust into the external world, not only within the writings of these three women, but also by the ways in which each author resolves or fails to resolve her own violent conflict with her imaginary model of the artist.

This thesis argues that the popular characterization of high modernist fiction as esoteric, elitist, uncommunicative, and far too difficult for the common reader obscures the democratic principles at the heart of modernist experimentation and its poetics of difficulty. Recent theories of embodied cognition when applied to representative examples of high modernist novels help dispel the myth of inaccessibility and reveal the many ways in which these works actually accommodate the common reader. Once the stigma of inaccessibility is removed from the study of modernist novels, it becomes possible to see how their formal experiments with language as well as the themes and issues they contain operate for readers and writers alike as a means of exploring everyday cognitive activities and responses. To this end, the concept of cognitive dissonance provides a heuristic device for understanding what lies behind the motivations of writers who aestheticise experiences of dissonance in their texts and the responses of readers who confront these texts. This cognitive approach to modern literature challenges assumptions about high modernism's "uncompromising intellectuality" and replaces them with a view of modernism that is more accessible and inclusive without diminishing its radical difficulty. It also paves the way for new readings of highly canonical modernist fiction. For instance, I examine how James Joyce places "inscribed" readers into Ulysses to guide actual readers through some of the difficulties of the novel. I then read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a novel that both thematises and formally resists the modern threat of behaviouristic human conditioning. Finally, I look at how the theme and form of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reinforce the embodied equation of dissonance with illness and incompletion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 304-315). / Microfiche. / x, 315 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Modhumita Roy. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references. Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

ALVERNE, Larissa Arruda Aguiar. A morte e o real na literatura de Virginia Woolf. 2017. 121f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia, Fortaleza (CE), 2017. / Submitted by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com) on 2017-05-31T15:32:52Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_laaalverne.pdf: 2021216 bytes, checksum: 0b65855e0f50ba8370bbb71c3e8bc307 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-06-01T10:47:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_laaalverne.pdf: 2021216 bytes, checksum: 0b65855e0f50ba8370bbb71c3e8bc307 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-01T10:47:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_laaalverne.pdf: 2021216 bytes, checksum: 0b65855e0f50ba8370bbb71c3e8bc307 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017 / This work analyzes the relation between the death and the Real in psychosis, by using the novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway from the english writer Virgina Woolf. One has studied the psychoanalytical theory from Sigmund Freud to understand the category of death, reaching as far as Jacques Lacan and his theory of Real in psychosis. The life of Virgina Woolf was investigated through her diaries and biographies, leading to realize that the death of several loved ones was extremely significant to her, which seems to remain as trace in her life work. Since death was what emerged from the Real that distressed her the most, to write about death as one of the names of the Real seemed to act as an elaboration intermission in the face of an existence fated to meet that whic is from the category of meaningless. The two novels were studied in order to understand how death emerges in her writing, in the story’s fabric, in the character’s creation, in the story’s making, among other aspects. The research allowed one to understand how the relation between death and the Real appears in psychosis and, in particular, to analyze the possibilities of elaboration to Woolf, through her writing and in the face of the encounter with the Real, that weren’t her complete submission to the deadly elements of the Real. / Trata-se de analisar a relação entre a morte e o real nas psicoses, utilizando os romances Ao Farol e Mrs. Dalloway da escritora inglesa Virginia Woolf. Recorreu-se à teoria psicanalítica desde Sigmund Freud para compreender-se a categoria da morte, chegando até Jacques Lacan e sua teoria sobre o real nas psicoses. Investigou-se sobre a vida de Virginia Woolf a partir de diários e biografias da autora e percebeu-se que as mortes de diversos entes queridos foram-lhe extremamente marcantes, o que pareceu restar como marca em sua obra literária. Dado que a morte era aquilo que do real emergia que mais lhe causava angustia, escrever sobre a morte enquanto um dos nomes do real parecia agir como um intervalo de elaboração frente a uma existência fadada ao encontro com o que é da ordem do sem sentido. Exploraram-se os dois citados romances no intuito de compreender de que forma a morte emerge em sua escrita, na tessitura narrativa, na construção dos personagens, na elaboração do enredo, entre outros aspectos. A pesquisa permitiu relacionar como a morte e o real surgem na categoria das psicoses e, particularmente, analisar as possibilidades de elaboração para Woolf, via escrita, frente ao encontro com o real, que não fossem um total assujeitamento aos elementos mortíferos desse real.

A presente dissertação analisa o conteúdo dos diários e cartas de Virginia Woolf para avaliar se um algoritmo de classificação de texto poderia identificar um padrão escrito relacionado aos dois meses anteriores ao suicídio de Virginia Woolf. Este é um estudo de classificação de texto. Comparamos 46 entradas de textos dos dois meses anteriores ao suicídio de Virginia Woolf com 54 textos selecionados aleatoriamente do trabalho de Virginia Woolf durante outro período de sua vida. O texto de cartas e dos diários foi incluído, enquanto livros, romances, histórias curtas e fragmentos de artigos foram excluídos. Os dados foram analisados usando um algoritmo de aprendizagem mecânica Naïve-Bayes. O modelo mostrou uma acurácia de 80,45%, sensibilidade de 69% e especificidade de 91%. A estatística Kappa foi de 0,6, o que significa um bom acordo, e o valor P do modelo foi de 0,003. A Área Sob a curva ROC foi 0,80. O presente estudo foi o primeiro a analisar a viabilidade de um modelo de machine learning, juntamente com dados de texto, a fim de identificar padrões escritos associados ao comportamento suicida nos diários e cartas de um romancista. Nossa assinatura de texto foi capaz de identificar o período de dois meses antes do suicídio com uma alta precisão / The present study analyzes the content of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters to assess whether a text classification algorithm could identify written pattern related to the two months previous to Virginia Woolf’s suicide. This is a text classification study. We compared 46 texts entries from the two months previous to Virginia Woolf’s suicide with 54 texts randomly selected from Virginia Woolf’s work during other period of her life. Letters and diaries were included, while books, novels, short stories, and article fragments were excluded. The data was analyzed by using a Naïve-Bayes machine-learning algorithm. The model showed a balanced accuracy of 80.45%, sensitivity of 69%, and specificity of 91%. The Kappa statistic was 0.6, which means a good agreement, and the p value of the model was 0.003. The Area Under the ROC curve was 0.80. The present study was the first to analyze the feasibility of a machine learning model coupled with text data in order to identify written patterns associated with suicidal behavior in the diaries and letters of a novelist. Our text signature was able to identify the period of two months preceding suicide with a high accuracy.