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In the first segment of the critical part of my thesis, my thought lays on "L'art du roman" of Virginia Woolf. In the second part, while recognizing certain qualities in the critical work of the English writer, I take side in favor of the literary theories of Celine and Sartre. In the last part of this text, I am exposing my views according to which the Quebec's literature would have greater advantage of being more "engage". The creating part of my thesis takes shape as a "roman engage". The story is about a disillusioned nationalist Quebecer, graduate and unemployed, who decides to change his personality to be like an English Canadian to better start his career in Toronto. Though all the sustained efforts he made to become Canadian, he realizes that he is first and above Quebecer. In ... Dent pour dent, the political message plays a fundamental role, but the esthetical aspects like humor, repetition and rythm are in the first place.

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What follows is an attempt to circumscribe Virginia Woolf's ideas on life and death, the relation between self and all that which is not self, and the nature of reality, in short, Woolf's vision. I hope that whatever unity and structure may exist in the vision will not be overlooked, and moreover, I intend to avoid imposing a unity where none exists, whether the absence of unity is intentional or accidental

The short stories of Virginia Woolf have never received serious scrutiny, critics determinedly maintaining that the novels contain the heart of the matter and that the stories are merely preparatory exercises. Mrs. Woolf, however, provides sufficient evidence that she was "on the track of real discoveries" in the stories, an opinion supported by her Bloomsbury mentors Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. A careful analysis of her twenty-one known stories suggests that they are indeed important (not merely peripheral to the novels and criticism) and are successful in developing specific techniques and themes germane to her total canon. One of the reasons why the stories have never been taken seriously, of course, is that they simply are not stories by any conventional definition— but are nonetheless "short fiction" of interest and significance. The stories derive from three distinctly separate chronological periods. The earliest group (1917-1921) was published in Monday or Tuesday and included two stories available only in that volume, now out of print. (To enable a complete assessment, I have made these stories available as appendices II and III of this thesis, and included Virginia Woolf's lone children's story as appendix IV since it too is of the early period). This phase of creation utilized one primary technique—that of evolving an apparently random stream of impressions from a usually inanimate and tiny focussing object, and was generally optimistic about the "adorable world." The second phase of her short fiction (those stories appearing in magazines between 1927 and 1938) illustrates a progression in both technical virtuosity and in personal discipline: the fictional universe is now peopled, and the randomness of the early sketches has given way to a more selective exploitation of the thoughts inspired by motivating situations. But vacillation is here evident in the author's mood, and while optimism at times burns as brightly as before, these stories as often presage Mrs. Woolfs abnegation of life. The third group, posthumously published by Leonard Woolf in 1944 without his wife's imprimatur (and recognizably "only in the stage beyond that of her first sketch"), still reveals a desire in the author to pursue her original objective suggested in "A Haunted House"--the unlayering of facts to bare the "buried treasure" truth, using imagination as her only tool. In one respect, and one/Only, the critics who have neglected these stories are correct: the pieces are often too loosely knit, too undisciplined, and too often leave the Impression of a magpie's nest rather than one "with twigs and straws placed neatly together." In this the stories are obviously inferior to the novels. But by neglecting the stories the critics have missed a mine of information: herein lies an "artist's sketchbook,” which, like A Writer's Diary, provides a major avenue into the mind of one of the most remarkable writers of our age. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Beginning with the premise that Virginia Woolf's novels exhibit a dual perspective of psychological mimesis and apocalyptic allegory, this dissertation formulates a critical theory of vision which operates on literary principles extracted, with a number of modifications, from two studies of Romantic transcendence: Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, and the Second Essay of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. The narrative role of the Woolfian "moment of being" is explored in her nine novels as a fictional analogue of Weiskel's "sublime moment," a metaphorical subplot in which the harmonious relation between the self and nature breaks down. When the moment of being does not merely collapse into a cycle of nature worship, it follows an Oepidal path of reactive identification in which the character identifies with the prevailing cultural pattern, or "father." Thus the fictional character experiences the moment of being as a failed psychological transcendence. From the perspective of apocalyptic allegory, these novels engage the imagination of the reader by means of the "logical imagination": that is, the poetic Logos becomes-, the anagogic Word. This revolutionary concept of apocalypse is adapted from the theory of symbols that Frye discusses in Anatomy of Criticism, where the "anagogic symbol" is identified with the divine Word. In Woolf's allegory, "there is no God; we are the words" (Moments of Being, 72). The view of Woolf's vision as a dual perspective implies that Woolf advocated, and developed, fictional forms that juxtapose realistic and mythopoeic constructs. Her characters, plots, and settings represent life in this world as a failed transcendence, while her mythical and metaphorical structures define for the reader an imaginative apocalyptic quest having five identifiable stages: 1) the presentation of an inner psychological realm where the imaginary and the real seem inextricable, 2) the discovery of the "out there" as a solid basis for imaginative identity, 3) the exploration of a crisis of vacancy out of which the imaginative self becomes reborn, 4) the establishment of an imaginative pattern as a prelude to the rejection of the "fatherhood" influence of history and society, and 5) the apocalyptic awakening of "ourselves" from the dream of history and of selfhood. From the investigation of these developments in Woolf's vision emerges a distinct novelistic canon. This study, as a whole, documents Virginia Woolf's "own particular search--not after morality or beauty or reality--no ; but after literature itself" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, I, 214). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

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