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Virginia woolf woman and fiction
Virginia woolf woman and fiction
Virginia woolf woman and fiction
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Imposing Our Own Ideological Frameworks onto Virginia Woolf and Her Writing
Whenever we try to imagine the feelings or motives of a writer, we impose our own thoughts and ideas, our own biases, onto that person and their work. Perhaps in order to justify our choices or legitimate the philosophies that we hold dear, we interpret texts so that they fall into place in our own ideological frameworks. Literature, because it engages with the most important and passionate questions in life, evokes responses in readers that emanate not only from the mind but also from the subconscious and from the deepest places in the heart. Writers like Virginia Woolf ask, and sometimes answer, questions about life's meaning, about the nature and importance of relationships, about spirituality, work, family, identity and so on. It is what makes writing fascinating and the critiquing of writing something more than an intellectual exercise.
When we interpret a text, we bring our own hopes, fears, joys and beliefs to the forefront, despite our claims of intellectual objectivity, and what is at stake is not just an evaluation of the work itself, but often an evaluation of our political, social, psychological and emotional identities. What we see or read into a text can become a kind of experiment, a literary depiction of the way we see, or would like to see, and interpret ourselves and our world. Often, in the course of interpreting, we feel compelled to name and label both writer and text in order to talk about them in ways that make sense to us, and in order to pinpoint them in relation to ourselves. When we label anything, we attempt to control or own it; we assign values or a set of rules to that person or object. What is lost in that process...
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... Voyage Out." Modern Fiction Studies 38.1(1992): 269.
Meese, Elizabeth. "When Virginia Looked at Vita, What Did She See; or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman - What's the differ(e/a)nce?" Feminist Studies 18.1 (1992):105.
Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, eds. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.
Smith, Patricia Juliana. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1979.
--- . "A Sketch of the Past." Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.
--- . Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1925.
--- . Three Guineas. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1938.
--- . To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1927.
There are many times in which a reader will interpret a piece of literature in a way that was completely unintended by the author. In her article, “In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons”, Amy Tan discusses people telling her the meaning behind her own stories, her experiences with criticism, and how this has affected her approach to writing moving forward. While this may seem ironic, considering the topic, I have my own interpretations of this article. Firstly, Amy Tan addresses how people will often tell her what her own work means and the symbolism in her writing.
Fisher, Jerilyn, and Ellen S. Silber. Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991.
*"Virginia Woolf." Gay & Lesbian Biography. St. James Press, 1997. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć
Roald Barthes’s 1967 critical essay “The Death of the Author” addresses the influence of the author in reading and in analyzing his or her writing, the power of the reader, and the option to ignore the work’s background and focus solely on the work. When critically looking at writing, the author is forced to take sole responsibility for the work. Whether the audience loves or hates, whether critics think it is genius or failure. With this idea the creator’s work has a direct correlation to the creator himself or herself, which according to Barthes seems to take away from the text. In other words, the information not stated within the work defines the work. The historical and biographical elements culminate into a limitation of interpreting the text. Barthes goes on to discuss the text itself appearing as derivative, saying that all texts from a certain era will be read the same due to the cultivation of a culture. The direct intent of the author may be muddled due to the translation from author to text to reader, with the text becoming more of a dictionary than anything else. This point ultimately leads to Barthes’s main point: the reader holds more responsibility to the text than does the author. The complexity of different experiences that come from the author into the text is flattened when it is read. The reader comes blindly and has no personal connection to the text. So much information is condensed and made inaccessible to the viewer. Barthes makes the point that a work may begin with the author, but its last stop is with the reader.
3 Woolf, Virginia: A sketch of the past , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2 , sixth edition
Philosophy according to the Encyclopedia Britannica is “the critical examination of the grounds for fundamental beliefs and an analysis of the basic concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs.” (Britannica) With the different values people may have, their beliefs, and their understanding of certain ideas, comes different perspective as well. Some people may not agree with the beliefs of another. Throughout the readings within this summer course I saw different aspects of philosophy present within each text and the arguments and conflicts that arise from such differences. The different forms of philosophical reasoning and beliefs presents within the tales read include theology, ethics, as well as scientific principles. One philosophical theme that I saw present within most of these stories was equality.
Moeck, P. G. “Academic Dishonesty: Cheating Among Community College Students.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice 26 (2002). 479-91.
Work Cited Woolf, Virginia. A. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
3 Haines-Wright, Lisa and Kyle, Tracy L. "Fluid Sexuality in Virginia Woolf" Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts New York, NY: Pace University Press, 1996
"So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind." Aristotle’s quote rings especially true in reference to the Victorian Era. In the late 1800s and early 1900s men were considered the dominant of the two sexes. Because of this, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman” (Woolf 51). Female genius was undistinguished or nonexistent in the century in which Virginia Woolf lived, because it was completely and utterly dominated by males. Her surroundings influenced her to explore the history of women in literature through an unconventional examination of the social and material circumstances necessary for the process of writing. Virginia Woolf asserts that female genius cannot be attained in a society that solely praises the masculine desire for status and seniority because it opposes creativity, which is essential to the education and independence of women, which fosters genius.
In the Broadview Anthropology of Expository Prose, Buzzard et al. describe Virginia Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” as a “lecture to a society of professional women” (100). As a queer writer, Woolf’s voice during the 1930’s received much attention, along with praise and criticism. Woolf’s fight for women’s empowerment and gender equality are evident throughout her essay, and as of now, in the 21st century, it is unequivocal that Woolf saw herself as a feminist. However, as Woolf writes her “Professions for women” she makes use of the blanket terms “the woman” and “herself” to refer to a general professional woman. It leads us to question who the woman really is: which kinds of individuals are included in and excluded from Woolf’s filtered view of women. How does
Woolf, V., & Barrett, M. (1980). Introduction. Virginia Woolf, women and writing (pp. 1-57). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
“I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual.” Virginia Woolf was a popular modernist back in the twentieth century. She wrote various novels, each novel different, but all connecting the same theme. Woolf struggled with a bipolar disorder and a deep depression within her years of living, and showed through her work the struggles she was faced with. Woolf put all her energy into writing what are now the most famous pieces from the twentieth century. Woolf was unlike average writers in her day, Woolf liked to focus on changes in the literature world. Although she was a dark writer, she liked to mix her darkness in with the changes the world was experiencing. Woolf’s famous novels are Mrs. Dalloway, The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and Orlando.
Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing.