Browsing by Subject "Virginia Woolf"

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Affective geographies : Virginia Woolf and Arab women writers narrate memory
(2016-06-14) Logan, Katie Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Grumberg, Karen; Wilkinson, Lynn; Carter, Mia; Cullingford, Elizabeth
Affective Geographies engages a cross-cultural group of writers who long for lost places and pasts but express that longing critically. The writers articulate affective memories to contest linear and politically legible narratives about place. I focus on nostalgia and forgetting to theorize a memory practice in which authors navigate ambiguous, ongoing loss. I construct an associative canon of women writers like the contemporary Arab authors Miral al-Tahawy, Leila Ahmed, Hoda Barakat, Ghada al-Samman, and Jean Said Makdisi and the British Modernist Virginia Woolf. Scholars who read these authors globally often shy away from explorations of affect, particularly nostalgia or sentimentality. I advocate, however, for a comparative reading that emphasizes the authors’ aesthetic and affective resonances despite the differences in their contexts, audiences, and publication histories. Each writer uses personal experience, ambivalent feelings, and complex memory structures to claim and re-narrate their own histories, pushing back against dominant political narratives and becoming sources for critical reflection. Female writers in particular use affective memory to contest gender-based distinctions in the political and domestic spheres. In Chapter One, I describe how autobiography and memoir projects from Leila Ahmed, Virginia Woolf, and Leonard Woolf introduce ambivalent feelings about the past to leave their narration of complex histories open. I develop a theorization of ambivalent nostalgia in order to compare three disparate authors with diverse relationships to colonial and domestic histories. In Chapter Two, I argue that Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights reconfigure the negative connotations of female memory, most notably sentimentality, as a practice of empathy and community formation rather than an exercise in backwards-gazing. I demonstrate that in both novels, the act of walking through city space provokes a dynamic and embodied form of memory. In Chapter Three, I explore how Woolf and Hoda Barakat resist medical discourses that seek to pathologize experiences of desire, longing, and female narration. Finally, Chapter Four details how forgetting can become an essential tool for narration, allowing the writer to shape and renegotiate her past.
Neither poppy not Mandragora : the memorialization of grief and grievance in the British literature of the Great War
(2012-05) Cannon, Jean M.; Friedman, Alan Warren; Sherry, Vincent; Graham, Don; Cullingford, Liz; Kornhaber, David
This dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death.
"Other than human forces" : Virginia Woolf’s moments of posthumanist being
(2016-05-25) Senzaki, Sierra Miyone; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Carter, Mia
How are we affected by “other than human forces”? Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and New Materialism, I ask what new understandings of Virginia Woolf become visible when we allow ourselves to blend together humanist knowledge categories such as “nature” and “culture” and attend to sensation and emotion. This project grounds itself in Woolf’s descriptions of interactions between the human and nonhuman in “A Sketch of the Past,” tracing the two types of interactions that emerge: posthumanist moments of being, which are vivid encounters between the fleshy self and its material surroundings, and humanist moments of non-being, in which the human utilizes the nonhuman as a tool to subdue emotion. Woolf’s theorization of these moments – read with an emphasis on embodied experience, the natural, and the presence or absence of division between the human and nonhuman – largely guides my own thinking. I then turn to an earlier novel, To the Lighthouse, in order to demonstrate that these interactions are not limited to “Sketch” or to Woolf’s own life. Rather, they reveal a dual sensibility towards the natural that pervades Woolf’s life and work. Ultimately, a posthumanist reading of Woolf illuminates how Woolf thinks carefully about human interactions with the natural and also allows us to refine our own thinking about the world in which we are enmeshed
Perceptions of an erotic maker
(2016-05) Miller, Ann Benjamin; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Hubbard, Teresa, 1965-
This report is a summary of my work and research during my three years at University of Texas at Austin. The first section of the report begins with the presentation of a mode of perception that comes from Parker Tyler’s essay “The Erotic Spectator: an Essay on the Eye of the Libido”. The second part of the report is a narrative that puts into practice the tools presented by Tyler- a set of tools that I use to allow boundaries of life and studio to fluidly shift and coalesce into paintings and back into life experiences.
Publishing short stories : British modernist fiction and the literary marketplace
(2012-08) Zacks, Aaron Shanohn; Winship, Michael, 1950-; Nadel, Ira; Friedman, Alan; Carter, Mia; Lesser, Wayne
The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre.
“Quality is everything” : rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement in interwar women’s literature of England, Ireland and the United States
(2009-12) Craig, Allison Layne; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Cloud, Dana; Carter, Mia; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Wilks, Jennifer M
This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.
Reproducibility in the age of mass feeling : toward a media history of the thirties
(2019-09-24) Canfield, Kristin Louise; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Houser, Heather; Lewis, Randolph
Reproducibility in the Age of Mass Feeling plots a genealogy for media history that centers on the work of British and American writers in the 1930s. The project examines how these writers understood the newly reproducible character of media as essential to modern political belonging. Taking Walter Benjamin as a point of departure, this dissertation tracks how Richard Wright, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston incorporated emergent media in their own work. The project tracks competing theories of reproduction, elaborating how these writers related to the rapidly changing media environments in which they wrote and lived. Even as these writers critiqued the ways in which then-new media participated in and perpetuated a state built on racial exclusion, they were also excited about the possibility of harnessing the power of media to reform the state. As these writers incorporated elements of new media into their own works—for instance, by reproducing newspaper articles and photographs within them—they challenged narrow conceptions of authorial agency and demonstrated how one can be implicated in a system that one claims to oppose. Elevating the work of these writers to a place in media theory alongside Walter Benjamin, the project traces a literary context for connections between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. Staging the historiographical problem of how fascism and Jim Crow relate to one another in terms of theories of reproduction, the project excavates formal resonances between Benjamin’s critique of the Nazi state and Wright and Hurston’s writings on Jim Crow. A chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), an anti-fascist essay in which Woolf connects fascism abroad to British cultural politics, bridges the chapters on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston by demonstrating how Woolf understood media to be complicit in producing fascist subjects, while extending the dissertation’s media history of the 1930s to anglophone Europe.
Towards a Language of Yearning: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Sublime
(2018-05) Davis, Delia Maria; Carter, Mia
This thesis examines the intersection between Virginia Woolf’s contemporary materialist critique of imperial-patriarchal society and the more timeless existential inquiries that permeate her work. Analyzing two novels, The Voyage Out (1920) and Orlando: A Biography (1928), the project looks at the ways in which Woolf’s experimentations with genre develop her materialist critique while her modernist sublime aesthetic connects the political to existential questions. The thesis also argues for a thematic potentiality of Being that shapes Woolf’s unified political-artistic vision. It identifies two different types of yearning that characterize the stories of Woolf’s female protagonists: “identity-based yearning” and “universal existential yearning.” The former is a sort of longing to push beyond and rupture the constraints of hierarchical society, while the latter emphasizes expansion, growth and possibility. This thesis argues that Woolf’s modernist sublime aesthetic articulates the relationship between these two types of yearning. Her sublime can be found in a “symbology of landscapes” and a “semiotics of sensuality,” and these in some ways are borrowed from the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime, which is predicated on nature and the feelings of “astonishment” and existential terror that nature can give rise to. The longing and potentiality that the project traces in Woolf’s fiction also appears in her most radical pacifist-feminist essay, Three Guineas (1938). This project argues that Woolf’s essay makes use of the same formal experimentations in its materialist critique, which articulates how patriarchy works on an institutional level to perpetuate oppression. At the end of Three Guineas, Woolf proposes that women and other marginalized groups band together to form an Outsiders’ Society that will work in their own ways to achieve peace and social unity. The idea of Woolf’s Outsiders’ Society not only carries the same spirit of potentiality that unifies her political-artistic vision, but also offers a glimpse of a new horizon, a different possibility that could form the vocabulary for a new kind of progressivism.