Written Communities: Imagining Connection in Virginia Woolf’s Novels
Written Communities: Imagining Connection in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

Summary/Abstract: Starting from recent takes on the concept of community as an impossible form of the mandatory coming together of finite beings (mainly, Blanchot’s unavowable community and Alphonso Lingis’ “community of those who have nothing in common”), the present paper attempts an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s work as the practice of sketching temporary, episodic connections emerging from the confrontation between the singularity of the “modernist” consciousness and the demand placed on the former by the Other. A selection of extracts from two novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando) serves as the basis for the proposition that Woolf’s short-lived communities evolve from shared acts of attention most often represented through a figuration of the act of writing.

• Details
• Contents