Virginia Woolf's Haunted House of Fiction

This work tries to implore certain changes that have taken place in the course of the development of the modern short story. It also contains analysis of one modern short story The Haunted House by Virginia Woolf

Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 43, 2012

Virginia Woolf’s central section in To the Lighthouse hinges upon the oxymoric nature of ruin, and ponders over disappearance. The family house is victim of a time that passes irremediably, yet remains and endures. In Woolf’s ‘elegy’, the Ramsays’ ruined and empty house is pictured as a transitional spectral place (visible/invisible, light/darkness, life/death), articulating waste and decay and the progressive vanishing of an older order and heritage with the promise of reconstruction through metamorphosis. We will see how through the ramshackle house Woolf reflects upon war (destruction, dislocation, fragmentation), mourning (decay, dust, darkness) and Time (memory). The text is born out of a reflexion about duration. Time is here a question put to humanity and literature, a question without definite answer, but rather a perpetual reworking of the question. We will see that Woolf uses the ruined house as a structural motif in To the Lighthouse to try and express the inexpressible in troubled times (traumatic aftermath of WWI). The ruin becomes a lieu de mémoire through striking images (influence of photography and cinema linked to questions of time and remembrance), a place of resistance too, underlining the crucial function of art when a whole civilisation is threatened by destruction.

Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture

Literature Compass, 2007

This paper forms part of a Literature Compass cluster of articles which examines the current state of Virgina Woolf Studies and aims to provide a snapshot of the field. Urmila Seshagiri (University of Tennessee) and Rishona Zimring (Lewis and Clark College) first provide an introduction for this paper along with Sara Gerend's article, “‘Street Haunting’: Phantasmagorias of the Modern Imperial Metropolis.” The full text of Benjamin Harvey's piece then follows.These papers grew out of the 15th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference (College of Lewis and Clark, Portland, OR, June 9–12, 2005).The full cluster is made up of the following articles:“Introduction: Virginia Woolf and The Art of Exploration,” Urmila Seshagiri and Rishona Zimring, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00393.x“Virginia Woolf's Sense of Adventure,” Maria DiBattista, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00394.x“The Twentieth Part: Virginia Woolf in the British Museum Reading Room,” Benjamin Harvey, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00395.x“‘Street Haunting’: Phantasmagorias of the Modern Imperial Metropolis,” Sara Gerend, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00396.x“Hyde Park Gate News,” Gill Lowe, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00397.x“The Art of ‘Scene-Making’ in the Charleston Bulletin Supplements,” Claudia Olk, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00398.x“A Camera of Her Own: Woolf and the Legacy of the Indomitable Mrs. Cameron,” Emily Setina, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00399.x“Woolfian Resonances,” Anne Fernald, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00400.x“Early Twentieth-Century British Women Travellers to Greece: Contextualizing the Example of Virginia Woolf,” Martha Klironomos, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00401.x“‘Others Wanted to Travel’: Woolf and ‘America Herself’,” Thaine Stearns, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00402.x

AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard

Beginning with the theme of the location of haunting in Gothic interiors and the confusion of life and death and the "sub-central" positioning of the feminine as the hidden source of fearfulness, the paper analyzes Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" as an example of a narrative written from the position of the haunting in which the figure of fearful feminine is transformed into a "hauntess" participating in the public world on equal rights with others. Woolf's text, though seemingly positing the protagonist in the position of flâneuse, in fact implicitly criticizes flâneuring as a masculine kind of looking and participating in the public space. Taking place away from home, Woolf's strolling in the streets of London carnivalizes (in the Bakhtinian sense) the activity by way of a joyful blurring of the split between the home and the market. Transgressing what Kathryn Simpson calls "the male privilege of the flâneur" (2010, p. 47) and rendering the transgression as haunting, Woolf evades participation in the masculine world of traffic and exchange by way of bringing the space of the Gothic confinement, and also of entombment, to the public.

452F Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, 2021

Considered her first modernist novel, Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) would be remembered for its experimental techniques to tell the story of Jacob who died in the First World War. Woolf's construction of her ultimately unknowable character offers a distinct response to the changing realities of warfare and serves as a literary mode of mourning that seeks not to console, but rather to preserve and transmit absence provoked by the losses of the Great War. Here I offer an analysis of Woolf's aesthetics of absence, which I contend anticipates later concerns in addressing experiences of mass violence in literature. In particular, I trace parallels in Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and Sebald's Austerlitz (2001).

Literary texts of the 20th century are not about the world " as it is. " They do not " mirror " an assumed " reality. " They are, like the " new art " or " new drama " in the words of Konstantin Treplev, the young playwright in Chekhov's Seagull, embod-iments of " dreams. " This is nowhere better illustrated than in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse is constructed by or as a giant gaze or by/as myriads of gazes which are embedded in each other, in endless perspectival repetition—en abîme. There is no " central " narrative perspective, no narrator to guide the reader through the maze of imagined scenes, emotions, inner monologues and pictures evoked before him or her. The text is like a giant weave, which generates itself, self-propagates, is fecund—like Mrs Ramsay. This self-propagation of the text is contrasted with the labors of the artist, Lily Briscoe. She finds it difficult to extract meaning from her material—color and paint— and labors to fashion her thought into form. She succeeds only at the end of the novel, in Part 3, simultaneously with another story-line which is being accomplished: the oedipal rite of passage of James Ramsay, now 16 years of age. By contrast with Gayatri Spivak's feminist reading of Woolf's novel, this essay presents a view of the novel as a model of meaning and the creative process, in which all the characters—male and female—have a metaphoric dimension, even if they are constructed out of fragmentary and allusive socio-historical material. Jacques Lacan, whose revision of Freud's concept of the Unconscious has taken psychoanalysis into the domain of structuralism and linguistics, operates with the concept of the Other to redefine the Self as a subject of language. The psychoanalytic Other is an abstract locus which overlaps with the Freudian concepts of the " other scene " and the " id. " Both the Other and Freud's ein anderer Schauplatz 1 are atemporal and nonspatial substitutions for the " unrep-1 Lacan, who reappropriated Freud's term, explains: " Freud named the locus of the unconscious by a term that had struck him in Fechner (who, incidentally, is an exper-imentalist, and not the realist that our literary reference books suggest), namely, ein

Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1, 2010