context Flashcards
Henri Bergson different ideas of time
- dealt with the differences between historical time, which is external, linear and measured in terms of spatial distance travelled by a pendulum/ hands of a clock
- psychological time: internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment
How can you measure pyschological time (bergson)
-thought or feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions memeories and associations attached to it`
woolf and cubism
- woolf shared the concern with modernist thinkers and artists about the importance of perspective
- even concrete objevts could only be partially represented from a single fixed perspective in the vocabulary of realists
- woolf breaks the narrative plan as cubists broke up the visual plane
proust on the pyschological plane
-there could not only be a two dimensional ‘plane psychology’ but a depth psychology in space and time’- people are the product of their past as well as their present, the sum of multiple perspectives , the ways in which OTHERS perceive them
Woolf and cinema
1) Woolf’s narrative technique is very cinematic- she makes use of montage, close ups flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts in constructing a three dimensional story
2) Cinematic devices would have been very familiar to 1920s reader- flocked to new cinema houses to see the lastest American silent films
- Cinema: a post war development that altered the relationship between art and the classes- opened upo culture and art to all classes
woolf on urban life
We get imitations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assemblee of colour, sound movement suggest that here is a scene waiting for new art to be transfixed
Where do the characters of clarissa and richard first appear
in woolfs first novel the voyage out: clarissa is a ‘tall slight woman wrapped in furs’ with artistic tastes and inclination but no brain whatsoever. Richard is a conservative MP with the most conventional views on womens rights, literature and politics- says that he will be in his grave before a woman os ever allowed to vite in england
what did mrs dalloway the novel orginate from
in august 1922 Woolf wrote a short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ with the idea that it would be the first chapter of a novel
intial intentions for the book that would come out of Mrs Dalloway and bond street
-play with the public and the private, the feminine and the masculine, in broad almost allegorical terms
woolf on the organisation of the novel (chapters) at first and the how it changed
- 6 chapters each completely separate vignettes
then: -8 chapters (dalloway in boind strett/ the prime ministyer/ ancestors/ a dialouge/ the old ladies/ country house/ cut flowers/ the party) Yet she wanted these seperate stories to be connected by a
woolf on chapterisation in Mrs D
the novel became too interwoven for a chapter broken off to be intelligible
woolf on Septimus
-he is only real in so far as [rezia] sees him
what was Woolf reading at the time of writing and how this impacted the connectivity of the text
- reading works of the greek dramatists
- considered replacing chapeters with ‘observers in the street’ acting as a connecting chorus
Importance of Time in Mrs D
- striking of Big Ben acts as a temporal grid to organize the narrative
- initially callled the hours- insistent chiming of clocks keeps us aware of the passage of time and measuring out of human lives and seasons
time and different clocks as a motif
a major motif of the book is the analogy between the hours and the female life cycle (body clock)
