Ebc hors série
résumés /
abstracts
Patricia
Laurence,
"'Holding her pen like a broom': Virginia Woolf's Anxieties about working-Class
Women."
|
Pas de résumé / No abstract
Apprehending the World: Surface, Substance,
and the True Experience of Things in Virginia Woolf's
Novels
This article
examines the different ways of apprehending the world of things in Virginia
Woolf's novels. When subordinated to philosophical analysis, things become
abstract, withdraw into an irreducible alterity. The movement to apprehend
the substance of things requires the permeability of mind that characterizes
both artists and children. The substance of things reveals itself through
colours, in an epiphany of visibility. Woolf's obsession with the
very
texture of things
testifies to the need to give materiality to a world often perceived as
insubstantial. The true experience of things requires silence
and
desertion, that
is a phenomenological reduction of the world. It leads to an awareness of
the "reserve of invisibility" expanding behind things.
This experience corresponds to what Bachelard calls, "retentissement
phénoménologique," and which consists in re-capturing a freshness
of vision, the capacity to be
"ek-stase."
Love
with a Fruit-Dish / Nature morte avec l'amour en plâtre / An
Instance of Pictorial
Eroticism
Liliane LOUVEL
This article
offers to reread a passage of To The Lighthouse applying the criteria
of what I call a "pictorial description and "an aesthetic arrangement. Then
the text turns out to be emblematic of the whole section as it contains and
reveals some hidden meaning which in fact comes to the fore thanks to a pictorial
description in which "things" and objects play a fundamental role. An aesthetic
experience coupled with a subtle erotic fusion will reveal Mrs Ramsay as
the other artist who composes and recomposes shapes and colours wandering
in the meanders of the fruit-dish turned still life and macrocosm.
So doing, she embodies the figure of the reader of the painting and its critic.
The pictorial description illustrates the process of sublimation metonymically
shifting desire from one object onto
another
To the
Lighthouse:
the Jarring Rebus of
Subjectivity
In the diegesis
of To the Lighthouse, the insistence of things constitutes a phenomenal
surface that outlines the void of the Thing, figured by Mrs Ramsay, the trope
that signifies both presence and absence and that determines object relations
through the mediation of the look and the voice. The novel's narrative economy
will consist in transforming the lighthouse, the object of scopic desire
and the fantasmatic locus of the Thing, into an empty signifier, so that
the journey of human desire can begin. If Lily Briscoe does not go to the
lighthouse, this is because artistic sublimation requires something else:
abandoning the fusional desire to be "like waters poured into one jar", writing
the spectral thing off at the very core of the art object, and translating
the remains of the jar, "that jar on the nerves", into the picture, its living
trace.
Epistolarity and Object
Relations
Pas de résumé / No abstract
Virginia Woolf and the Shop
Window
Pas de résumé / No abstract
Abject Objects in Jacob's
Room
Pas de résumé / No abstract
The Nature of Things in
Orlando
The purpose
of this article is to study how Virginia Woolf manages to endow the most
trivial thing with a poetry and a significance which can transform it into
the magnificent symbol of some fundamental idea she means to
develop.
One of the most
striking characteristics of Orlando is the fact that it is teeming
with lists and inventories of objects which are either meant to anchor the
text in reality or to allow Virginia Woolf to develop theories about such
varied subjects as the creative power of the writer or woman’s role
in society.
It would be
possible to classify the numerous objects which fill the biography according
to their historical value, their ability to trigger powerful emotions (in
which case their status of objects is transcended into something more abstract),
their role as metonymic extensions of the self, (the social import of clothes
is of particular interest in this respect) or their metaphorical value (some
objects are definitely chosen by Woolf because they are tokens of a
period).
But we shall
also see that the relationship between things and the words which are meant
to represent them is a constant mystery to the narrator and to the character
of Orlando who are both spokesmen of Virginia Woolf’s concerns as a
writer. The gradual shift from a metonymic to a metaphorical apprehension
of things in the course of the novel attests to the modernist enterprise
of a writer who is at a loss to transcribe the mutifariousness of life and
who shifts from a realistic mode of description to a more modern one, emphasising
the elusiveness and the fragmentary aspect of things and
characters.
"Let
us then keep the form unsigned": Things and the Inscription of the Feminine
in Three
Guineas
Frédéric
REGARD
The paper starts
from an imaginary confrontation between Woolf and Heidegger to suggest that
the former would have laughed at the latter's disquisitions concerning the
thingness of things. Three Guineas sees things as gender-producted signs,
which leads Woolf to devise a new way of reading things, in a gesture that
is meant both to wrench things from male-determined patterns of meaning and
to prevent war through the production of a new culture. Particular attention
is thus paid to the narrator's use of photographs and to the rhetorical devices
that implement Woolf's aesthetic policy. But the paper primarily concerns
itself with the writing "I"'s position in the text. Using Derrida's philosophy
of restance in La Carte postale, the author comes to define the inscription
of the feminine as "an operation in the distance." A new light is thus shed
on Woolf's polemical stance in Three
Guineas.
"Capricious
Friendships with the Unknown and the Vanished" (a Reading of some of Virginia
Woolf's
Essays)
Catherine BERNARD
Although recent
criticism has foregrounded the socio-historical import of Woolf's works,
the formalist legacy still contributes to a reading of her literary production
emphasizing the paradigm shift from a referential to a poetic economy of
fictional representation canonized by Lodge's post-Jakobsonian exploration
of Woolf. This article intends to displace the focus and move to the margins
of the Woolfian canon by evoking some of her essays ("Street-Haunting", "The
Moment"…) in which this paradigm shift does not seem to obtain so
successfully. The representation of experience and of the effect of the world
of objects on consciousness seems here centrifugal rather than to be redeemed
by an aesthetic sense of purpose. Things retain an obtuse form of stubborness
invalidating any form of poetic patterning just as writing seems doomed to
the mere tentative rendering of an irrovocably alien and fragmentary reality.
These essays tell thus the story of their own disintegration, of the disruption
of the narrative and of the aesthetic vision under the pressure of a metonymical
reality.
From "the real thing" to "character":
Virginia Woolf’s poetics of
"life"
Because the
question of "things" in the literary text summons up the whole theoretical
culture of Platonic metaphysics, and its entrenched binarism, which plants
the thing at an unbridgeable conceptual distance from the sign,
it is also an excellent critical point, as touchstone for the major issues
in literary theory that are at stake in the Woolfian critical heritage: it
enables us to identify the dualistic and dichotomous aesthetics of
(post-)structuralist readings of Woolf, and invites us to re-read Woolf in
order to recover the "flow of language" (Saussure) that her poetics works
at, both in the novels and in her theorizing. One central trope of this decidedly
un-Platonic poetics is the complex figure and concept of "character", which
it is the paper’s ambition to
explore.
Taking our Time with Things: Virginia
Woolf's Object
Lessons
Since the treatment
of things is essential to Woolf's text, and since, in many cases, the lesson
taught by the object is at the very center of the organic whole, the translation
of these things is crucial to the understanding of the story, the tone, and
the point. There must be enough space left around the object for the imagination
to roam: all too frequently, the reader is deprived of the desirable margin
around the thing, particularly in the translations into French. Taking the
texts of Woolf as an example, this paper examines various translations of
certain crucial things into French, along with the presentation of the text,
and draws its conclusions from them: its object
lessons.
Bibliographie sélective de 1990 à 1998 / Select bibliography 1990-1998