“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
Palavra-chave	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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