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“Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
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- By Patricia Waugh, Durham University
- Edited by Derek Ryan, Stella Bolaki
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- Book:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2012, pp 23-42
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Summary
If I weren't so sleepy, I would write about the soul. I think it is time to cancel that vow against soul description. What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. (Virginia Woolf, Diary Saturday 21st June, 1924)
One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one's soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from every other soul. (William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890, 1:349).
THINKING SOULS IN FICTIONAL WORLDS
The aim of this essay is to develop an argument that Virginia Woolf banished the soul as what James calls the “closed individuality” of personal consciousness, in order to retrieve it, through her fiction, as something more closely resembling an enactivist, extended or distributed idea of mind. Part of her strategy for re-fashioning mind involved the laying bare of the assumptions and limitations of metaphysical dualism and the development of narrative techniques and a language for its deconstruction. This is not to claim that Woolf succeeded in overcoming dualism, nor that, in the end, a more “distributed” idea of mind would, necessarily, provide a foundation for a new conception of the soul. But at the very least, she hoped to prevent the disappearance of the soul or its shrinkage into the biological reductionisms of her own time. “The thoughts of one's soul must unite into one self”: fiction, as a medium for thinking selves into existence, and thinking about selves thinking, is where this argument begins.
Working on To the Lighthouse, Woolf fantasised about writing a novel that might transfer thinking directly onto the page, a novel “made solely & with integrity of one's thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they become a work of art” (D3 102). She immediately dismissed the fantasy: words would intrude, exert their own pressures, deforming thoughts. But the niggling question of how you might catch and tell a thought remained.
41 - The novel amid other discourses
- Edited by Robert L. Caserio, Pennsylvania State University, Clement Hawes, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of the English Novel
- Published online:
- 28 January 2012
- Print publication:
- 12 January 2012, pp 661-676
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Philosophy, religion, science, they are all of them busy nailing things down, to get a stable equilibrium. Religion, with its nailed-down God . . . philosophy with its fixed ideas; science with its laws . . . But the novel no. The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered . . . If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
The novel and other disciplines
Lawrence 's description of the novel genre as “the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered” encapsulates the dialogisms, hybridities, intertextualities, double voicings, and focalization that are celebrated by recent academic criticism. Scholarship thereby constructs the novel as a capacious house, not only full of many windows, but also built ergonomically, with a range of recycled materials. Of course, the novel has never respected disciplinary boundaries, national frontiers, or well-tilled fields and plots; but in the twentieth century its tendencies have seemed ever more promiscuous, democratic, and miscegenated. Novelists, like public intellectuals, have roamed free of academic practices (even when those practices appear not to be restrictive), borrowing and stealing at will, mixing and meshing, parodying and inverting official discourses of knowledge.
Popular science and philosophy, earlier in the century and again from the late 1970s on, after the publication of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976), have been similarly free ranging, making new ideas easily available to readers. In the earlier part of the century, new scientific ideas were liberated from academically circumscribed contexts, and made accessible in Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1928) and James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe (1930). Popular series like the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (from 1911) conveyed Einstein, Russell, Jeans, Eddington, Freud, Bergson, and Nietzsche to a new and educationally aspirational middle class.
Chapter 4 - Thinking in literature: modernism and contemporary neuroscience
- from Part II - Modernist aesthetics in transition: character, perception, innovation
- Edited by David James, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- The Legacies of Modernism
- Published online:
- 05 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 20 October 2011, pp 75-95
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Representing mind: the anti-Cartesianism of the novel
In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Stephen Pinker argues that only a recognition of the truths of the new molecular biological sciences, and specifically evolutionary psychology, might provide any hope of future social progress. Forty years on from the original Rede lecture, ‘The two cultures and the scientific revolution’ of 1959, Pinker's argument essentially reiterates that of his predecessor, the spectroscopist and novelist C. P. Snow, and even extends Snow's fanatical earnestness in scapegoating literary modernism (and its heir, the postmodern), in a broad indictment of modern literary culture for its backward-looking indifference to science and its pernicious cultural pessimism. Pinker's vitriol against the modernist indifference to scientific truth is, however, focused, unlike Snow's, on the alleged ignorance of its practitioners about how the mind really works. His favoured target is Virginia Woolf. The attack on her begins with a misquotation – of her famous ‘on or around December 1910, human character changed’. Assuming that an author so insistent on truth would have checked his facts, the slippage from ‘human character’ to ‘human nature’ can only be viewed as a convenient means to recapitulate his subtitle and to treat with special opprobrium a writer who dares so ostentatiously to assert that ‘human nature’ changes. Woolf is arraigned, along with the ‘elite arts’ in general, as a major perpetrator of a myth of the social construction of self that is still wilfully being promulgated in defiance or denial of the scientifically objectivist understanding of human behaviour gleaned through knowledge of the now fixed and purely biological elements in hominid evolution. Woolf's psychology is deemed to rest on an outmoded and erroneous science that has produced the myth of the mind as a ‘blank slate’, responsible for the disastrous utopian social engineering that underpins the history of modernity: ‘a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colours and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construct’. This ‘militant denial of human nature’ reaches its apogee in the postmodern. Pinker ends more upbeat about the future, looking to a new era of biological truth in which ‘the application of the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology to the arts will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship’.
37 - Legacies: from literary criticism to literary theory
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- By Patricia Waugh, Durham University
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
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- Book:
- T. S. Eliot in Context
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- 05 August 2012
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- 31 March 2011, pp 381-394
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To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion
(W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’)No doubt W. H. Auden did not intend any reference to T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in his famous poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’. But even in 1940, Eliot's distinction between the man who suffers and the mind that creates (the mind that created the mind, in Freud's case) was a linchpin of twentieth-century criticism: its influence had already reoriented criticism towards the poem and away from the poet and would stimulate W. K. Wimsatt's more philosophical exposition of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946). Soon after, Harold Bloom's ‘anxiety of influence’ more pugnaciously continued the textual conversation with the dead, though in a rivalrous and agonistic vein only hinted at in Eliot's understanding of tradition (and disavowing any influence of Eliot himself). Finally, in the post-structuralist intertextualities of the 1980s, the theory that had begun life on the tide of Eliot's early desire to secure a more communitarian ground for the practices of authorship than the disembodied and individualistic Romantic theory of inspiration, was now exposed, in the most paradoxical swerve of all, as the distal cause of the death of all authors. The question of authorship, of who or what produces poems, and of legacies, of who or what continues the conversation with them, would emerge as one of the major chords of modern literary theory, continuing to sound through feminist, New Historicist and cultural materialist discussion for the rest of the century.
7 - Contemporary British fiction
- Edited by Michael Higgins, University of Strathclyde, Clarissa Smith, University of Sunderland, John Storey, University of Sunderland
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture
- Published online:
- 28 September 2010
- Print publication:
- 19 August 2010, pp 115-136
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Introduction
At the end of the twentieth century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings singly and collectively through life, no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where the journey is taking us.
Ours is not the first age to think of the 'contemporary' in terms of a loss of the representative power of existing historical maps, but the metaphor has become almost tiresomely familiar to us. Recognising that the map has now come to function primarily as a placeholder term for all those complex and mysterious cognitive frameworks through which we orient ourselves in space and time, Fredric Jameson suggests that maps 'enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole'. Jameson's idea of 'cognitive mapping' is a useful way of beginning to think about the contemporary 'space' of fiction and evolutions in fictional forms which provide peculiarly appropriate vehicles for the articulation of the complex 'structure of feeling' of our own historical moment.
33 - Feminism and writing: the politics of culture
- from PART FIVE - TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Edited by Laura Marcus, University of Sussex, Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 06 January 2005, pp 600-617
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‘Women are writing, and the air is heavy with expectation: What will they write that is new?’ The expectations to which Kristeva refers in her seminal essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) are the subject of this chapter. The inauguration of ‘women’s time’ had begun a decade before, but Kristeva saw that the time had also come to reflect upon some of the more metaphysical, as well as political, implications of women’s entry into historical temporality. By 1981, the Women’s Liberation Movement had splintered into a bewildering diversity of identity politics around issues of race, sexuality and class, but feminist writing had changed for all time the political and literary landscape. The burning issue thrown up by this maelstrom, however, was the question of what it is to be a woman and what is meant by women’s writing. In the same year, 1981, Elaine Showalter’s essay ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ tempered Kristeva’s utopian sense of expectation in suggesting that women’s writing has always been, and will remain, essentially double-voiced: inevitably an articulation of both the muted and the dominant, the old and the new. Moreover, she implied that feminist re-visioning (to use Adrienne Rich’s term) will require both an impulse towards, and resistance to, the concept of the feminine, to identity as woman. Showalter’s essay performatively demonstrates her own undecidability. Proceeding in sections, each headed by citations from literary mothers, dead and alive, her argument develops in a mode of textual parallax, woven through and striated by a female chorus whose ghostly voices beckon towards unity and solidarity and simultaneously threaten to break into cacophony and difference.
22 - Postmodernism
- from MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM
- Edited by Christa Knellwolf, Australian National University, Canberra, Christopher Norris, University of Wales College of Cardiff
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2001, pp 289-306
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Where are the primary causes on which I can take my stand,
where are my foundations? Where am I to take them from?
I practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary
causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake,
and so on ad infinitum.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (1864)Naming the unnamable: what is postmodernism?
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed that Enlightened modernity was now caught in a ‘legitimation crisis’ from which it could not recover. By the mid-eighties, La condition postmoderne enjoyed hierophantic status as the book which had completed the Nietzschean project of persuading us of the death of the ‘grand narratives’ of God, metaphysics and science. Twenty years on, the discourse which named that crisis seems to have developed its own terminal symptoms. In a rather Beckettian image, Lyotard has recently declared that postmodernism is now an ‘old man's occupation, rummaging in the dustbin of finality to find remains’. Richard Rorty (defender of consensus but hardly secret sharer of Lyotard's postmodern anti-foundationalism) has also come to see the term as so elastic as to be useless even for his own neo-pragmatic purposes. He has, he now tells us, ‘given up on the attempt to find something common to Michael Graves’ buildings, Pynchon's and Rushdie's novels, Ashberry's poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida’. So, has postmodernism become a victim of that very built-in obsolescence which was central to its diagnosis of all intellectual or artistic culture within late capitalism? Is it possible any longer to define postmodernism? Perhaps the task is comparable to an attempt to force a rainbow back through the geometrical contours of Newton's prism.
Still, if we accept Fredric Jameson's belief that the value of postmodern expression lies precisely in its attempt to name the unnameable, to find a form in which to represent the seemingly unrepresentable global networks of technologised late capitalist culture, then there is some historical justification in attempting, yet again, to name the unnameable which is postmodernism.