Virginia Woolf’s Figures of Loss
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Virginia Woolf’s poetics of loss has long been recognized for its contradictory qualities, which make her elegiac works so singular, vital, and open-ended. Her “fiction-elegies” mourn for losses that are past and those that may come to pass; they register the “blows” of loss, both individual and collective, and aesthetically shape them; they use loss as a creative spur in the effort to overcome it and achieve some sort of wholeness. While this complex “grief work” is self-avowedly inconclusive, the consolations partial and temporary, there are, I contend, important, if equally provisional, triumphs at the level of style, through what I am calling Woolf’s figure-language of loss. Words will never be sufficient to recover what has been lost; however, by marshalling tropes, like metaphor and metonymy, imagery and anthropomorphism, into “companies,” Woolf’s figure-language, in intensified moments, pierces through the “cotton wool” of the “conventions of sorrow” and their prescribed forms and meanings. Throughout her major novels, these singular figure-languages both reopen wounds and feelingly contour our thoughts, such that, figuratively, we share in a more authentic response. Consoling and anti-consolatory, the force of this language lies in its capacity to wound, while provoking us to face loss openly, mindfully, and inventively.
Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s poetics of loss has long been recognized for its contradictory qualities, which make her elegiac works so singular, vital, and open-ended. Her “fiction-elegies” mourn for losses that are past and those that may come to pass; they register the “blows” of loss, both individual and collective, and aesthetically shape them; they use loss as a creative spur in the effort to overcome it and achieve some sort of wholeness. While this complex “grief work” is self-avowedly inconclusive, the consolations partial and temporary, there are, I contend, important, if equally provisional, triumphs at the level of style, through what I am calling Woolf’s figure-language of loss. Words will never be sufficient to recover what has been lost; however, by marshalling tropes, like metaphor and metonymy, imagery and anthropomorphism, into “companies,” Woolf’s figure-language, in intensified moments, pierces through the “cotton wool” of the “conventions of sorrow” and their prescribed forms and meanings. Throughout her major novels, these singular figure-languages both reopen wounds and feelingly contour our thoughts, such that, figuratively, we share in a more authentic response. Consoling and anti-consolatory, the force of this language lies in its capacity to wound, while provoking us to face loss openly, mindfully, and inventively.
참고문헌 (31)
- Bahun, Sanja, "Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning" (2014), Oxford UP
- Clewell, Tammy, "Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning", Modern Fiction Studies, 50(1), pp.197~223 (2004)
- Czarnecki, Kristin, "Melted Flesh and Tangled Threads: War Trauma and Modes of Healing in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony", Woolf Studies Annual, 21, pp.50~77 (2015)
- De Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Romanticism" (1984), Columbia UP
- Ender, Evelyne, "Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Memory" (2005), U of Michigan P
- Freud, Sigmund, "Sigmund Freud: On Murder, Mourning, and Melancholia" (2005), Penguin
- Froula, Christine, "Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning", Modernism, 2002, pp.9(1), 125~163
- Goldman, Jane, "Virginia Woolf: Prophet of ‘Pure Loss’", Modernism, 2015, pp.20(2), 389~395
- Hagen, Benjamin D., "A Car, a Plane, and a Tower: Interrogating Public Images in Mrs. Dalloway", Modernism, 2009, pp.16(3), 537~551
- Harrison, Robert Pogue, "The Dominion of the Dead" (2003), U of Chicago P
- Martin, Linda, "Elegy and the Unknowable Mind in Jacob’s Room", Studies in the Novel, 47(2), pp.176~192 (2015)
- Lyon, Janet, "On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew", Modernism, 2012, pp.18(3), 551~574
- Penner, Erin Kay, "The Order of a Smashed Window-Pane: Novel Elegy in Woolf’s The Waves", Twentieth-Century Literature, 61(1), pp.63~91 (2015)
- Ramazani, Jahan, "Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heany" (1994), U Of Chicago P
- Rosenthal, Lecia, "Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation" (2011), Fordham UP
- Smith, Susan Bennett, "Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Representations of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse", Twentieth Century Literature, 41(4), pp.310~318 (1995)
- Smythe, Karen, "Virginia Woolf’s Elegiac Enterprise", Novel: A Form on Fiction, 26(1), pp.64~79 (1992)
- Utell, Janine, "Meals and Mourning in Woolf’s The Waves", College Literature, 35(2), pp.1~19 (2008)
- Vickery, John B., "The Modern Elegiac Temper" (2006), Louisiana State UP
- Wall, Kathleen, "Significant Form in Jacob’s Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44(3), pp.302~323 (2002)
- Walsh, Kelly S., "The Unbearable Openness of Death: Elegies of Rilke and Woolf", Journal of Modern Literature, 32(4), pp.1~21 (2009)
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Common Reader" (1984), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Death of the Moth and other Essays" (1970), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1924-1928" (1994), Houghton Mifflin
- Woolf, Virginia, "Jacob’s Room" (1960), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1923-1928" (1977), Harcourt
- Woolf, Virginia, "Moments of Being" (1985), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "Mrs. Dalloway" (1981), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "To the Lighthouse" (1981), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Waves" (1959), Harvest
- Zwerdling, Alex, "Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy", ELH, 48(4), pp.894~913 (1981)