Virginia Woolf Critics Flashcards
When was Mrs Dalloway first published?
1925
Introduction to the Vintage Classics edition?
Carol Ann Duffy - ‘London itself is almost a character’
Woolf became disenchanted?
Rebecca Walkowitz suggests that Woolf was disenchanted with nationalism after the war and turned to an ethic of cosmopolitanism instead
Walkowitz suggests that Woolf embraces ‘communities of friendship’
Characters are in a complex social mosaic?
Walkowitz - “Woolf directs her readers to notice those aspects of British society that have gone almost unseen”
Richard feels that social problems should be controlled by a patriarchal agency
When was street haunting published?
1927
The speaker of street haunting becomes a participant observer?
Carey Snyder suggests Woolf employs the American anthropologists Clifford Geertz’s ‘self-nativizing’ gaze
Snyder suggests that this gaze turns the speaker into an ‘enormous eye’ which alternates ‘between skimming and imaginatively plunging into another’s experience’
The female dwarf?
In her article on “Feminist Disability Studies,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains ‘women with disabilities are often stereotypically considered undesirable, asexual’
The movement in Woolf’s writings?
French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre proposed that urban culture emerged from overlapping rhythms.
Woolf often described the process of writing as finding the right rhythm (Sutton 2010).
Woolf’s reaction to being away from the city?
Woolf and her husband Leonard moved to the suburb of Richmond between 1914 and 1924 for her mental health, she missed the city’s liveliness acutely. On June 28, 1923, she wrote:
‘I’m tied, imprisoned, inhibited’
How street haunting presents the role of the poor?
Tamar Katz - ‘“Street Haunting” intensifies the gap between London’s glittering commodities and the poor’
What the city represents?
Literary historian Franco Moretti - Cities represent a ‘network of relationships unfolded (or not) over time’
Free indirect discourse?
On free indirect discourse - Her novels typically, therefore, create character at the intersection of exterior (third-person narrator) and interior (individual perception, affective response)
Her wish to write about London?
As early as 1924, she had confided to her diary, ‘One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort’.
What was the book written about the flaneur?
The figure of the flâneur epitomises a distinctive nineteenth-century conception of the writer as walker, a sort of man about town with ample leisure and money to roam the city and look about him
A popular text by Louis Huart entitled Le Flâneur, dating from 1850
How Huart defines a flaneur?
Huart - ‘you always have to exercise reserve and discretion’
‘he must be familiar with all the streets, all the shops of Paris’
Association between street haunting and flaneur?
‘Haunting’ is almost a homonym of one of the possible English words for translating flâner: ‘sauntering’.
In a diary entry from a few years before, Woolf had written: ‘I like this London life in early summer—the street sauntering & square haunting’ (D, 3:11; 20.4.1925), as if bringing the two terms into complete synonymity, neighbours of sense as well as sound.
What was the sociological essay?
Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)
What was Georg Simnel’s essay?
Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) is a foundational sociological essay analyzing the psychological effects of urban life. Simmel argues that the modern city, with its fast-paced environment, large population, and economic structures, profoundly shapes individual consciousness and social interactions
What does Georg Simnel say about the metropolis?
‘the money economy […] dominates the metropolis’
metropolitan life requires ‘punctuality, calculability and exactness’
They develop a ‘blasé attitude’ to sensory overload, economic interaction and impersonal relationships
