Abstract

This article aims to discuss Virginia Woolf’s critical appraisal of the contemporariness of her contemporaries’ production while also probing the very idea of what constitutes “the contemporary”. “The Modern Essay serves as the frame for what Woolf dubbed “the contemporary dilemma”, which this article then traces in “How it Strikes a Contemporary”. Resorting to other major essays, this article contextualizes Woolf’s publication of The Common Reader – First Series so as to explore its conversational quality as a philosophical principle inherent to Woolf’s oeuvre. The philosophically inclined methodology of Woolf’s essays finds fertile ground in Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?”. Ultimately, by reading Woolf alongside Agamben, this article sheds light on the intersections between contemporary philosophy and the philosophical questions we continue to find in Woolf’s writing.