Browsing by Subject "Woolf"
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Item Bodily subjectivity as alternative selfhood : The Voyage Out beyond the bildungsroman(2015-05) Kreider, Aleina Anne Nicholas; Carter, Mia; Wojciehowski, HannahVirginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, by initiating and yet resisting the traditional bildungsroman form, illustrates the inadequacy of this genre's brand of self-development and seeks an alternative mode of selfhood. The novel’s protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, though apparently "formless" and unable to "develop," nevertheless exhibits a sense of self and seems to be more than mere blankness. In exploring what selfhood might be when the bildungsroman-self is untenable, The Voyage Out ultimately reaches toward a kind of subjectivity not rooted primarily in intellectual and linguistic experiences—which typically come to shape the subject in the bildungs—but in bodily experience. This bodily subjectivity offers rewards beyond those the telos of the bildungsroman enables, and in affirming the value of the bodily, The Voyage Out also simultaneously facilitates a feminist move towards reclaiming this characteristic of "femininity" that has so often been used to render women lesser-than. Subjectivity and self having long been associated with mind rather than body, they have also long been in the masculine domain, while the feminine is aligned with the bodily, the other, and the object. As The Voyage Out reclaims the value of the body and its involvement in subjectivity, then, it also challenges the notion that to be a subject one must be the mental, masculine hero of the traditional bildungsroman.Item Towards a Language of Yearning: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Sublime(2018-05) Davis, Delia Maria; Carter, MiaThis 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.