Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction to Contradictory Woolf
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- “But… I had said ‘but’ too of ten.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
- “The Play's The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf's Work in the Late 1930's and Her Vision of Prehistory
- Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- “But somebody you wouldn't forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art
- Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf's Writings on Art
- “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography
- “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas
- Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque
- Woolf's Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf
- “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One's Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an Calculated Cross-Dressing
- Lacanian Orlando
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush
- From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf's Flush
- Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of : Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf's Economic Writing
- “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf's Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the Fourth Dimension
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition
- “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating
- Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “Patron au Dedans”
- Who's Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge's Translation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films “projected into the shape of Orlando”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf's Rhetoric of Genres
- Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf : “A Chapter on the Future”
- DUNCAN GRANT
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
“Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction to Contradictory Woolf
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- “But… I had said ‘but’ too of ten.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
- “The Play's The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf's Work in the Late 1930's and Her Vision of Prehistory
- Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- “But somebody you wouldn't forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art
- Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf's Writings on Art
- “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography
- “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas
- Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque
- Woolf's Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf
- “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One's Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an Calculated Cross-Dressing
- Lacanian Orlando
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush
- From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf's Flush
- Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of : Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf's Economic Writing
- “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf's Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the Fourth Dimension
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition
- “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating
- Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “Patron au Dedans”
- Who's Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge's Translation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films “projected into the shape of Orlando”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf's Rhetoric of Genres
- Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf : “A Chapter on the Future”
- DUNCAN GRANT
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
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.
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- Contradictory Woolf , pp. 23 - 42Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012