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"To the Lighthouse"
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All the lives we ever lived : seeking solace in Virginia Woolf
Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death--a calamity that claimed her favorite person--she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth's story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf's most demanding and rewarding novel--and crafts an elegant reminder of literature's ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.
Book
Between Parentheses: The Poetics of Irrelevance in Virginia Woolf’s Experimental Fiction
The understanding and appreciation of Virginia Woolf’s modernist fiction demands careful attention, not only for the obvious complexity of its experimental form but also for the apparent simplicity of certain typographical and stylistic devices. Among these is the use of parenthetical expressions, consisting of explanatory or qualifying remarks inserted into a passage and usually marked off by brackets, dashes, or commas. Generally speaking, the main functions fulfilled by parentheticals have been examined and classified by Woolf scholars. What has received less critical attention, however, is the intrinsic nature of parenthetical constructions and the subtle, multifaceted implications of their actual functioning within the overall economy of every single novel. The purpose of this paper is to address a similar question, beginning with a preliminary delimitation of the scope of the analysis. Firstly, among the different types of the so-called ‘parenthetical expressions’ only the explicit use of parentheses (in the form of round or square brackets) will be assumed as a distinctive feature in order to identify a specific category of stylistic and narrative devices. Secondly, and quite obviously, the novel under consideration will be, in particular, To the Lighthouse (1927), inasmuch as it provides the most striking examples of the disruptive potential contained in Woolf’s parenthetical writing. A good point of departure for such an analysis, however, can be found in Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf’s first experimental novel, which shows a long and compound sentence, inserted between brackets, significantly placed in the opening page of the book.
Journal Article
Who Is Mrs. McNab? A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to This Narrative Agent and Narrative Device in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes\", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two outer blocks, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”, in which she aimed to depict an empty house, devoid of human presence, and to highlight the passage of time. This section has often been analysed by literary-stylistic criticism as if written from a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, the presence of a lower-class cleaner and the absence of the upper middle-class characters who predominate in the other two blocks has also raised much debate in the literary arena. Literary critics agree that this character is given a narrative voice, but how this voice functions, and whether this character is granted narrative agency in terms of the class issues and social relations in the period of transition between Victorian England and the early twentieth-century, is an issue which still remains open. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics, I suggest reading this character both as a category-based and person-based character, and as a narrative device. First, I carry out the analysis of the repetitive she-clusters and their semantic prosodies; then, through samples of the section “Time Passes\", I analyse how viewpoint blending between narrator/author and character concur to grant narrative agency to Mrs. McNab and to what extent such agency may be limited by our perception of her through the social schemata of a servant, or whether such a perception may undergo a process of schema refreshment. Last, I suggest that this character may also be viewed as a narrative agent by means of which the reader can activate mental processes of TIME and SPACE blending between the three different blocks of the novel. This blending process allows for the completion of the narrative design of the novel: the journey to the lighthouse.
Journal Article
“In the Midst of Chaos There Was Shape”: Formalist Aesthetics and Ekphrasis in To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical novel
explicitly connects itself with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, with a special acknowledgement of Roger Fry’s formalist influence. This essay focuses on the influence of Fry’s formalist principles on
, but additionally proposes a reorientation of reading that argues for Woolf’s modifications of formalism, which is concretized as the reconciliation of formalism and everyday life, where everyday life is specified as Woolf’s notion of “moments of being.” The essay contends that such a reconciliation is facilitated by representation and thus adopts James Heffernan’s theory of ekphrasis to analyse Lily Briscoe’s painting. Drawing on Heffernan’s definitions of ekphrasis, this essay regards the formalist elements in Lily’s picture as representational but not pictorial, whereas the object represented in Lily’s picture – in the text, Mrs. Ramsay – is of second-degree representationality, which spells out as intimacy and unity in terms of human relations. With intimacy and unity as core values in her mind, Lily eventually manages to represent Mrs. Ramsay’s being until “there she sat.”
Journal Article
A Recipe for Parody: Mark Crick’s “Clafoutis Grandmère à la Virginia Woolf” as a Pastiche and Parody of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
This paper explores a parody of Virginia Woolf’s writing style featured in Kafka’s Soup by Mark Crick. The volume by Crick comprises a wide range of parodies, including “Clafoutis Grand-mère à la Virginia Woolf”, which, this paper strives to show, represents both a general parody of Woolf’s writing style and a specific parody of her novel To the Lighthouse. This paper also highlights the similarities between certain features of Woolf’s writing style and of the chiselled style of the late-Victorian, decadent-aestheticist writer Walter Pater – particularly the use of lengthy sentences divided by semicolons, stream-like writing with frequent subject changes, and the intertwiningof the external events with the characters’ impressions. This connection between Woolf and Pater is underexplored in scholarly research. Crick’s Kafka’s Soup is also rarely discussed academically, save for occasional reviews.This paper explores the inspirations behind the book and demonstrates how Crick’s “recipe” functions as a literary pastiche. The recipe form is what makes Crick’s parody unique; hence, an overview of the inclusion of recipes in twentieth-century literature is here provided. Crick’s parodic rewrite of the British Modernist’s literary manner is discussed here not only with regard to the stylistic features but also with reference to the motifs typical to Woolf’s writing. Thus, while analysing “Clafoutis” as a specific parody of To the Lighthouse, this paper indicates specific themes from the novel – including the themes of the passage of time, of genteel sentiments, and of gender differences – which, too, find their comical reflection in Crick’s text.
Journal Article
Faith and Fabrication in To the Lighthouse
Critics often identify the Ramsays’ kitchen table from To the Lighthouse (1927) as the principal object of philosophical inquiry in Virginia Woolf’s work, but their accounts have never taken the Ramsays’table-cloth into careful consideration. Like the table, the table-cloth had profound significance for Woolf, who used it to engage in early twentieth-century debates regarding the nature of reality, perception, and representation. In To the Lighthouse and beyond, the table-cloth elucidates Woolf’s philosophical position—her awareness of dramatic shifts in the epistemology of science, her references to the philosophy of mathematics, and her faithful commitment to a fabricated reality. Ultimately, the Ramsays’table-cloth is an essential part of Woolf’s project to “reach what [she] might call a philosophy” that was built primarily on her own terms and no one else’s.
Journal Article
The Cambridge Companion to To The Lighthouse
To The Lighthouse is one of the most important of Virginia Woolf's modernist achievements. Written by leading international scholars of Woolf and modernism, this Companion to To The Lighthouse will be of interest to students and scholars alike. Individual chapters explore the biographical and textual genesis of the novel; its narrative perspectives and use of form; its thematic and formal attention to time and space; and its representations of feminism and gender as well as generational change, race, and class. Complete with a chapter on the novel's critical history, a chronology, and a guide to further reading, this volume synthesizes To The Lighthouse's major ideas and formal innovations while also summarizing and advancing critical debate.
eBook
How does it feel? : point of view in translation : the case of Virginia Woolf into French
Narratology is concerned with the study of narratives; but surprisingly it does not usually distinguish between original and translated texts. This lack of distinction is regrettable. In recent years the visibility of translations and translators has become a widely discussed topic in Translation Studies; yet the issue of translating a novel's point of view has remained relatively unexplored. It seems crucial to ask how far a translator's choices affect the novel's point of view, and whether characters or narrators come across similarly in originals and translations. This book addresses exactly these questions. It proposes a method by which it becomes possible to investigate how the point of view of a work of fiction is created in an original and adapted in translation. It shows that there are potential problems involved in the translation of linguistic features that constitute point of view (deixis, modality, transitivity and free indirect discourse) and that this has an impact on the way works are translated. Traditionally, comparative analysis of originals and their translations have relied on manual examinations; this book demonstrates that corpus-based tools can greatly facilitate and sharpen the process of comparison. The method is demonstrated using Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), and their French translations.
eBook
Implementing Authentic and Literary Texts to Improve Saudi EFL Reading Skills: A Study of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
This paper explores the impact of using Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse as a literary text in enhancing reading skills among second and foreign language learners through adopting Constructivist Learning Theory (CLT) as underpinning framework. CLT emphasizes the active role of learners in constructing their own understanding and knowledge through experiences, interactions, and engagement with the learning materials. Through an analysis of literary techniques, thematic depth, and engagement strategies, this study aims to demonstrate how Woolf's text can serve as an effective pedagogical tool in language education. The findings of this study showed integrating literature into language learning not only improves reading comprehension but also enhances critical thinking, cultural awareness, and emotional engagement. This study highlights effective pedagogical strategies for implementing literary texts such as To the Lighthouse in the classroom, focusing on fostering critical thinking, enhancing reading comprehension, and encouraging personal connections to the text. These strategies would help students navigate the novel’s complexities while engaging deeply with its themes and literary techniques. Before delving into To the Lighthouse , it is essential to prepare students for the novel's thematic and stylistic challenges. Pre-reading activities can help activate prior knowledge and stimulate interest.
Journal Article