This book does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever place one opens it, one will find matter for reflection. The most useful books are those of which readers themselves compose half; they extend the thoughts of which the germ is presented to them; they correct what seems defective to them, and they fortify by their reflections what seems to them weak. It is only really by enlightened people that this book can be read; the ordinary man is not made (...) for such knowledge; philosophy will never be his lot. Those who say that there are truths which must be hidden from the people, need not be alarmed; the people do not read; they work six days of the week, and on the seventh go to the inn. In a word, philosophical works are made only for philosophers, and every honest man must try to be a philosopher, without pluming himself on being one. This alphabet is extracted from the most estimable works which are not commonly within the reach of the many; and if the author does not always mention the sources of his information, as being well enough known to the learned, he must not be suspected of wishing to take the credit for other people's work, because he himself preserves anonymity。. (shrink)

This thesis is a sceptical investigation into the notion that the metaphorical wave-particle binary of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is related to quantum physics. Indeed, the field of literature and science has employed conceptual similarities as the main means of connecting quantum concepts to novels, however, this has led to a host of scholarly difficulties, prompting the need for a re-examination of analogical linkages. Woolf is the model candidate for such a re-examination, given her historical and philosophical (...) proximity with the developments of quantum mechanics. To the Lighthouse, in particular, was written between 1925 and 1927: precisely when quantum physicists were attempting to resolve the wave-particle duality, leading to Niels Bohr's complementarity. This parallel has been noted by researchers as relevant to the novel, as it too displays a general binary that can be read as wave-particle-like, which the author also attempts to resolve along similar philosophical lines. Nevertheless, other than proximity and similarity, there are no reasons to affirm that the science is related to the novel; hence, it is an ideal case study to examine in order to ascertain the value of conceptual similarities in literature and science. To do so, To the Lighthouse's binary and its resolution are interpreted in a thesis-long close reading, in order to compare aspects of it firstly to Woolf's personal thought, and secondly to various non-quantum intellectual contexts that preceded and surrounded her. In doing so, it becomes clear not only that invoking quantum physics serves no clear purpose in better understanding the novel, but also that the notion of resolving wave- particle-like binaries was a widespread philosophical procedure at the turn of the century, decades before Bohr's concept. This negative conclusion interrogates what the scholarly value of interpreting similarities is, though a hypothetical solution can be found in conceptual metaphor theory. (shrink)

Virginia Woolf mentions the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer by name only once in her writings, in a book review published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1917.1 Viscount Harberton, author of the book she is reviewing, argues initially that knowledge gained from books is inferior to that derived from practical experience, but later makes a special case for two writers—Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer. "No praise is too high for them," comments Woolf sarcastically. In "their books, we are told, we (...) shall find the secret of the universe. After all, then, Lord Harberton is merely one of those cultivated people who play the innocent for a holiday. Still, one reader will give him the benefit of the doubt and take his... (shrink)

Examines how Virginia Woolf used frames in her fiction, including windows, thresholds, and mirrors.

Le Carnet de Virginia Woolf se termine par ces mots, qui font suite à la lecture d’Ajax de Sophocle : « Probablement, si je pouvais lire comme un Grec, je ne trouverais pas la fin si dispersée » (p. 213). « Lire comme un Grec » : c’est bien à cela que s’est essayée V. Woolf dans son carnet, composé des notes prises au cours de ses lectures grecques et latines réalisées entre 1907 et 1909. Virginia Stephen a (...) tout juste vingt-cinq ans lorsqu’elle débute son carnet, quelques mois après le retour... (shrink)

When Ann Banfield argued in The Phantom Table1 that the debate about modernism should take into account its revolutionary conception of the objects of sensation, and turned to Bertrand Russell’s 1914 theory of knowledge to do so, she challenged on the one hand the critics’ near ignorance of the Cambridge Apostles’ influence on Bloomsbury, and on the other, the “assumption of contemporary understanding of modernism—that the only philosophy of relevance to twentieth-century art and literature is continental.”2 Following her example, daunting (...) as it may be, I will challenge this last assumption and argue that the philosophy of relevance to the understanding of Woolf’s work is not necessarily continental but British.My .. (shrink)

As a critic, Virginia Woolf has been called a number of disparaging names: "impressionist," "belletrist," "raconteur," "amateur." Here is one academic talking on the subject: "She will survive, not as a critic, but as a literary essayist recording the adventures of a soul among congenial masterpieces. . . . The writers who are most downright, and masculine, and central in their approach to life - Fielding or Balzac - she for the most part left untouched....Her own approach was at (...) once more subterranean and aerial, and invincibly, almost defiantly, feminine." In other words, Virginia Woolf is not a critic; how could she be? She is a woman. From its beginning, criticism has been a man's world. This is to say not only that males have earned their living as critics but, more importantly, that the conventionally accepted ideals of critical method are linked with qualities stereotypically allotted to males: analysis, judgment, objectivity. Virginia Woolf has had a poor reputation as a critic not merely because her sex is female but because her method is "feminine." She writes in a way that is said to be creative, appreciative, and subjective. We will accept this descriptive for the moment but will later enlarge on it, and even our provisional acceptance we mean to turn to a compliment. Barbara Currier Bell has written articles on critical theory and modern poetry and has served as a consultant on women's education at both Vassar and Hampshire Colleges. She is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. Carol Ohmann is the author of Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman and several articles on English and American fiction. She coedited Female Studies IV: Teaching about Women with Elaine Showalter and is chairman of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. She has contributed, with Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye , and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" .See also: "The Masculine Mode" by Peter Schwenger in Vol. 5, No. 4; "The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief of Love: A Woolfian Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs" by Mark Spilka in Vol. 5, No. 4. (shrink)

The longstanding critical refrain that Virginia Woolf's fiction represents a turn "inward" to the vagaries of the inner life has more recently been countered with an "outward" approach emphasizing Woolf's interest in the material world, its everyday objects and their social and political significance. Yet one of the most curious and pervasive features of Woolf's oeuvre is that characters are so frequently wrong in their perceptions. This essay consolidates the inward and outward approaches by tracing the trope (...) of misperception in Woolf's fiction as well as in her conceptions of the work of author and reader. For Woolf, the modern literary experience derives from the nature of the faculties of perception, the tenuous points of connectionand disjunctionbetween the inner and the outer worlds. (shrink)

This book introduces Virginia Woolf as a nondualist and process-oriented thinker whose ideas are strikingly similar to those of her contemporary, Alfred North Whitehead. The author argues that in their respective fields, the two thinkers criticized the materialist turn of their time and attempted to undermine long-rooted dualisms.

The novels of Virginia Woolf and the poetry of T.S. Eliot are an integral part of the modernist literary canon. The life and work of both writers continue to attract critical attention because, as Woolf said of Shelley.

In Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves, one of Bernard's many becomings – his ‘becoming-savage’ – reveals a point of intersection between Woolfian aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Moreover, a triangulation of Woolf's ‘moments of being’, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘worlding’, and coloniality provides a new and productive node for examining the debates surrounding imperialism in these thinkers’ works, and an insistence that Woolf, read alongside Deleuze and Guattari, offers an alternate and precisely ethical way of being (...) in the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virginia Woolf, Time, and the RealJane DuranCritical appraisal of the work of Virginia Woolf has tended to focus on feminist concerns, or on issues revolving around the actual facts of her upbringing and the extent to which she might have been thought to be a victim of abuse. Although some commentators have noted that Woolf's high modernist style lends itself to a number of readings with (...) respect to sense of self, the passage of time, and a sort of phenomenological reflection, philosophical concerns have, in general, not played a large role in Woolf scholarship to date.In this article I shall argue that some of Woolf's best known work—especially To the Lighthouse—exemplifies a concern for time, reality and a sense of interior life-as-lived that is overtly philosophical in its construction, and even somewhat didactic. Furthermore, I will claim, it is part and parcel of modernism as it is ordinarily conceived to address these issues in some fashion, even if, in many cases, they are not addressed as thoroughly as they are in Woolf's work. Even if we can be certain that a great deal of Woolf's mental disturbance, or mental illness, was the result of childhood abuse, or even inherited tendencies, it still does not detract from the power with which she was able to use depictions of inner turmoil to give us a sense of the fleeting and transitory nature of the real. Indeed, such a sense is one of the hallmarks of Woolf's work and is acknowledged by most of her critics, even if it is not termed a philosophical concern. I will analyze constructs of time and the chronological through a view of To the Lighthouse.IA number of philosophers have offered conceptions of time; these efforts range from those of antiquity to the more technical articulations [End Page 300] of the twentieth century. One of the most haunting evocations of the power of time is in the work of one whose thought is seldom cited in this regard, Simone de Beauvoir. In Old Age, she offers a phenomenological account of the passage of time that reflects an emphasis on the internally-felt disparity between the past and the present that is a frequently-remarked upon aspect of old age.1 There is a paucity of experience-of-the-present among the very elderly, and a reliance upon the past. Concomitantly, there is a foreshortening of the future. As Beauvoir writes: "How far does memory allow us to retrieve our lives? The images... are far from possessing the richness of their original object. An image is the seeing of an absent object by means of an organic and affective analogue" (p. 147). Despite the fact that these images may lack the richness of the original, the somewhat paradoxical effect of being older is that these images predominate.In To the Lighthouse, Woolf plays with time in a way that allows for a development of the internally-sensed structure of time on the parts of the various characters. Although many have remarked upon the well-known middle section, "Time Passes," this aspect of the felt sensation of time as an internal phenomenon, and one on which her characters seem to draw at regular intervals, is a somewhat little remarked feature of the rest of the book. It is present from the outset: James's first thoughts about the trip to the lighthouse highlight time in a sort of reversal of the way that Beauvoir has indicated for the elderly; James's conception of the passing of time is altered in another sense, since he is only six. He has projected himself forward so intently to the trip to the lighthouse that everything else has seemed somewhat unreal. As Woolf writes, "he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed...."2Although the differences between the felt constructions of time between, for example, childhood and old age might seem to partake of the commonplace, Beauvoir is among those philosophers who have used the notion of the truncation of time and the foreshortening of the future among the elderly to make philosophical commentary. By the same token... (shrink)

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might have for (...) our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Deviated Transcendency? Woolf's The Waves as a Textbook CaseSimon De Keukelaere (bio)The Waves, more than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, conveys the complexities of human experience.—Kate FlintHumankind—according to mimetic theory—is not (as Marx thought) homo economicus but rather homo religiosus. Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Girard's first essay (1961), evocatively opens with a saying by Max Scheler: "L'homme possède ou un Dieu ou une (...) idole" (Man has either a God or an idol). If we may believe Girard, the Enlightenment profoundly misunderstood human beings because it naively assumed that doing away with "ancient superstitions" would fully liberate them: "denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delà to the endeçà " (Girard 1965, 59).What has all this to do with Virginia Woolf's secular art? René Girard's "transcendance déviée," the diverted or deviated transcendency––which we may also want to term idolatry––is beautifully and transparently depicted in one of Woolf's most enigmatic and experimental novels. In The Waves, the portrayal of human desire as mimetic, imitated, is so crystal clear that––once noticed—it can hardly be overlooked any longer. Perhaps even more interesting for mimetic theory is the fact that Woolf (just as Proust did before her) brings into play the language of the sacred when rendering the mimetic nature of human longing. Neither of these two aspects of The Waves (the obsessively mimetic nature of desire and the use of the religious metaphor) have been fully unraveled by Woolf's critics.The purpose of this article is to make obvious the value of Virginia Woolf's (poetic) language for mimetic scholars and to show how deviated transcendency can be made visible and (above all) intelligible through great secular literature. The study of literature is vital to the humanities, not for some frivolous, outdated reasons, but because great literature can, sometimes [End Page 195] more effectively than many erudite studies, convey the complexities of human experience.It would no doubt be unjustifiable to foist Girard's mimetic thesis on Woolf's novel without clear support from the text, but I believe The Waves provides such backing. The outline of the present article is as follows. I first argue that the characters in Woolf's novel really are interdividuals rather than individuals, since mimetic desire plays an important role in them. I subsequently focus on a typically metaphysical illusion that goes along with mimetic desire, that is, the apparent self-sufficiency or divine autonomy of the Other. Then I show how the religious metaphor is consistently linked with the first-mentioned issue and that a form of distorted mysticism is to be recognized throughout the novel. Finally I examine how in The Waves deviated transcendency is depicted as a road toward Death in exactly the same way as Girard does in his Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961).The Interdividual and Her Mimetic DesireMimetic theory is deeply involved with the problem of selfhood, the paradoxical nature of subjectivity. According to René Girard we are not individuals but interdividuals. The ambiguous nature of the Self is a recurrent theme in Woolf's novels too, and especially in The Waves, it seems. As Lisa Marie Lucenti remarks: "Many critics seem to agree that subjectivity, for Woolf, is no simple matter, but they disagree on the significance, expression and forms of its intricacies. The most productive theories for reading Woolf are those which allow for a large measure of variation and ambiguity both between and within individual subjects" (1998, 34). The problematic nature of the Self challenges the critic, since the very concept of character is turned into a conundrum, rather than a useful instrument with which to analyze the novel. To speak of separated characters, of individuals (in-divisus) with regard to The Waves is particularly difficult. So, for example, at the end of the novel Bernard (one of the six "voices" or "characters" whose lives are recounted) states: "I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs... (shrink)

This study is a major reappraisal of Virginia Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time. Through extensive archival research, Ann Banfield offers the first full analysis of Woolf's engagement with the theories of a remarkable trinity of thinkers: G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Roger Fry.

This essay raises the question of gender in relation to the question of intellectuals in Britain, commenting on the gender blindness that made their exclusion so automatic in Collini's study. It looks at some women who might have been included, focussing particularly on Virginia Woolf as one who was not only a very significant public intellectual, but who in her essays entitled 'The Common Reader' also provided a definition and analysis of the role of an intellectual which is very (...) different from that suggested by Collini. Rather than offering expert advice, Woolf sought to help readers to develop their own critical insights. (shrink)

Deleuze's references to Woolf's work, and his work on Bergson, allow for a more far-reaching as well as more nuanced and diverse account of her correspondences with Bergson than have been noted. Her early collection of stories, Monday or Tuesday, reveals a powerful, many-sided metaphysical and aesthetic inspiration that bears out in detailed, various and fundamental ways what can be called the Deleuzian or Bergsonian aspects of Woolf's creativity and style at this crucial phase of her development as (...) a writer. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - particularly the work of (...) Luce Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (shrink)

In the growing body of academic literature on biography that has developed in the last few decades, Virginia Woolf's essay, "The New Biography,"1 has come to occupy a central place—mentioned, discussed and quoted from, I would estimate, more often than any other piece of writing on the subject. Virginia Woolf's distinctive view of the nature and limitations of biography has thus had, and continues to have, a deep and wide-ranging influence on the way the genre is discussed by (...) critics and theorists. My aim in this essay is to present a detailed analysis of Virginia Woolf's thinking about biography in order to make clear why I believe its influence on contemporary theorising about biography is, on the whole, a misfortune. As is often pointed out, Virginia Woolf's views on biography are closely connected with—indeed, to an extent that I hope to make clear, they are simply an application of—her views on fiction. In the light of this, I have tried to trace some of the most striking features of her thinking about biography back to her earlier thoughts on fiction, as presented in both her novels and her essays. The result, I hope, will be that, while the attractions of her way of looking at fiction and biography are recognised and revealed, the manifest flaws in her thinking on these subjects are clearly exposed. (shrink)

Hans‐Georg Gadamer has been criticized by a wide range of feminist scholars who argue that his work neglects feminine aspects of understanding, many of which are essential to sound theorizing about educational contexts. In this essay, Linda O’Neill employs Virginia Woolf’s classic gender analysis both as a foil for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and as an exemplar of feminist reasoning. Through her striking descriptions of embodied tradition, language, and transcendence, Woolf challenges and enriches Gadamer’s work. Bringing Gadamer into conversation (...) with Woolf offers expanded horizons for philosophers of education who choose to ground their studies of teachers and learners in a feminist epistemology resonant with the rich ambiguity of educational experience. This comparison, O’Neill concludes, suggests that the pluralistic reasoning of feminist inquiry offers engendered, embodied insights absent from Gadamer’s hermeneutics and crucial to what Patti Lather calls “fieldwork in philosophy,” an investigative alternative capable of informing sustainable educational policy, practice, and reform. (shrink)

This essay raises the question of gender in relation to the question of intellectuals in Britain, commenting on the gender blindness that made their exclusion so automatic in Collini's study. It looks at some women who might have been included, focussing particularly on Virginia Woolf as one who was not only a very significant public intellectual, but who in her essays entitled 'The Common Reader' also provided a definition and analysis of the role of an intellectual which is very (...) different from that suggested by Collini. Rather than offering expert advice, Woolf sought to help readers to develop their own critical insights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 462-464 [Access article in PDF] The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism,by Ann Banfield; 452 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $55.00. We have grown accustomed to reading Woolf philosophically. Lucio Ruotolo, Mark Hussey, Gillian Beer, and Pamela Caughie are just a few notable scholars who have used philosophical texts and themes to shed light on Woolf's (...) novels and life, but Ann Banfield's The Phantom Table marks the beginning of a new approach. Contrary to the poststructuralist readings of the last two decades, Banfield treats Woolf as a "philosophical realist" (p. 294), an interpretation that presupposes that "Truth, although logically constructed, remains nonetheless objective, a discovery, as opposed to a creation, of the mind" (p. 94). To justify this approach, Banfield makes a case for privileging Bertrand Russell's "symbolic logic" (p. 42) as "a key if limited influence on Woolf's thinking about language" (pp. 42-43). Simply appropriating elements of Russell's rigorous epistemology, however, is not enough to determine Woolf's thinking, for as Banfield claims: "Woolf's philosophically inflected aesthetic is not one Russell would have foreseen" (p. 54). Roger Fry's astute reflections on Post-Impressionism aesthetics complement Russell's philosophical approach and thereby provide Woolf with a framework for the "novel's realism [which] must relate two competing realities, the private world and the public persona" (p. 324). Through an extraordinarily insightful analysis of the work of Russell and Fry, Banfield offers an intelligent interdisciplinary interpretation of the rigorous epistemological presuppositions at the base of Woolf's aesthetic.Central to Banfield's project is the conviction that reality is mind-independent (p. 101). On this view, "modern fiction ultimately aims to describe a reality beyond privacy" (p. 298), but to understand how we can access that reality we must carefully distinguish sensations, sense-data, and sensibilia. According to Russell, sensations are the private experiences or awareness of a subject, whereas a sense-datum is "that external object of which in sensation the subject is aware" (p. 70). Sensibilia, the lynchpin of Russell's and Banfield's theory, have the same ontological status as sense-data, though they are not necessarily data to a specific mind. Banfield cleverly articulates the ontological priority of sensibilia by reversing Berkeley's famous dictum: "What brings about" sensibilia's "actualization is the perspective's occupation by a subject and the corresponding interception of sensibilia by sense-organs located in time and space" (pp. 74-75). Sensibilia need not be perceived to exist, which places the perceiving subject at the mercy of sensibilia, rather than making sensibilia ontologically dependent upon the perceiving mind.Given the primacy of sensibilia, the epistemological "goal is now to leave one's perspective and imaginatively project oneself into other perspectives, even the possible ones inhumanly occupied, to experience the world as it would be without the thinker" (p. 213). According to this system, the perceiving [End Page 462] subject and the modernist artist become irrelevant because they can inhibit our experience and/or understanding of sensibilia. Eliminating the subject and effacing the author, therefore, become necessary so that "artistic creativity" (p. 173) is given free flow, which means that for art to achieve its goal of seeing "the world 'as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desire'" (p. 382), the death of the subject is mandatory—though this death of the subject differs considerably from Roland Barthes's, Michel Foucault's, and Paul de Man's. Once the subject is eliminated, which occurs in Woolf's novels according to Banfield, the novelist will be able to create a "method of multiple perspectives" which functions as a "route to wider knowledge" (p. 312) of sensibilia.In the last part of the book, Banfield examines how "Fry's aesthetic derives from analytic philosophy" (p. 248) and then argues that Woolf incorporates much of this aesthetic into her work. Fry makes a clear distinction between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Impressionism represents the "totality... (shrink)

What is it that we human beings are? What is it that we do? The reduction of these questions to biology doesn't do justice to how we think and act, nor do traditional philosophical approaches satisfy our intuitions. Fortunately, it's not in our nature to give up. While minds and bodies, subjects and objects, do play a role, to focus here is to miss the mark. Underlying each of these is something more fundamentally human. Martin Heidegger thinks of this as (...) being, Virginia Woolf thinks of this as a purple triangle. Together, Heidegger and Woolf may succeed in unveiling the disguises which we, perhaps unwittingly, have imposed on our own being-in-the-world. (shrink)