“A porous vessel afloat on sensation”: Temporal Poetics and the Waves of Subjectivity in the Work of Virginia Woolf Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

This thesis addresses the relationship between memory and the body in the works of Virginia Woolf. I extract a distinctly Woolfian poetics of time and subjectivity through a formal and theoretical analysis of her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” (1939) alongside her novel, The Waves (1935). I find that Woolf’s personal writings on memory reconfigure the shock experience as a rapturous realization of life as art. Such a notion of the shock experience leads Woolf to a new theory of ‘extra-voluntary memory’: a memory dynamic in which recurring memories are brought into the body from somewhere outside of or beyond the body. Woolf poeticizes this relationship between the body and extra-voluntary memory through the rhythm of the waves. This rhythm textually takes form in The Waves through the formal motif of ‘unity-dispersion,’ a pattern of movement which perpetually structures experience for the novel’s narrative consciousness. The Woolfian subject in this sense is figured as a blank vessel, a container for sensations, which cyclically takes on sensations and thus a stable sense of identity, only to disperse and reconfigure itself in accordance with the materialist wave-like rhythms upon which the subject floats. This Woolfian temporal poetics offers itself as a pedagogical tool for teaching an embodied experience of time. 

Table of Contents

Abbreviations 3

Introduction 4

Chapter 1: Writing Rapture and Sketching Time in “A Sketch of the Past” 17

Chapter 2: Rhythmic Time in The Waves: Unity-Dispersion, Materialism, and History 33

Chapter 3: The Waves as a Rhythmic Text: Material Language and Non-Dualistic Subjectivity 59

Conclusion 84

Bibliography 89

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	English
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Aesthetics Literature, English Philosophy
Stichwort	The Waves Psychoanalysis Epistemology A Sketch of the Past Memory Trauma Literary Criticism Shock Virginia Woolf Walter Benjamin Between the Acts
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Kelleher, Paul, Emory University
Committee Members	Marder, Elissa, Emory University Rosinberg, Erwin, Emory University

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