“A porous vessel afloat on sensation”: Temporal Poetics and the Waves of Subjectivity in the Work of Virginia Woolf Restricted; Files & ToC

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. 

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About this Honors Thesis

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

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