A rhetoric of inauthenticity: critical object images in Woolf’s Victorian scenes

Semiotica 2022 (247):167-200 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper extends the fields of visual and object semiosis, style, and rhetoric by introducing the concept of critical object images. It identifies five of their rhetorical functions in literature and demonstrates the semiotic and rhetorical specificity and force of literary object images. Inter-disciplinary concepts and theories used in the study are introduced before the concept is tested and developed through analyses of object images with critical roles in the Victorian scenes of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The inductive analyses trace the semiosis and stylistic affordances of the selected critical object images, with reference to three categories of kitsch inauthenticity, and their formal and cultural contexts, noting the rhetorical function they serve. Multimodal stylistics and the semiotics of visual images and of objects are used in these analyses, and the unique contribution of critical object images as rhetorical elements in literature is uncovered and explained. The analysis of Woolf’s representation of selected objects shows how the critical object images function rhetorically, through their stylistic connotations, to present unambiguous meanings that are not openly stated in the texts’ verbal discourse.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Discussion on the Scenes and Images of the Ci-poetry of Wen Tingyun.Hong Zhang - 2004 - Nankai University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 6:17-23.
Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life.C. Ruth Miller - 1988 - New York: St. Martin's Press.
The Mania of Existence: Klein, Winnicott, and Heidegger's Concept of Inauthenticity.Beau Shaw - 2015 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46 (1):48-60.
Woolf, Eliot and Bradley.Jane Mallinson - 1997 - Bradley Studies 3 (2):176-185.
Virginia Woolf and our knowledge of the external world.Jaakko Hintikka - 1979 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1):5-14.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-08-16

Downloads
11 (#975,863)

6 months
5 (#246,492)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Art.Clive Bell - 1920 - Franklin Classics.
Vision and Design..ROGER FRY - 2013 - Hardpress Publishing.
Mental imagery.Nigel J. T. Thomas - 2001 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Five faces of modernity: modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism.Matei Călinescu - 1987 - Durham: Duke University Press. Edited by Matei Călinescu.
Image, music, text.Roland Barthes & Stephen Heath - 1978 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (2):235-236.

View all 13 references / Add more references