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
Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- 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
Virginia Woolf's celebrated opening rejoinder, “But, you may say,”, anticipates an as yet unspoken objection, forestalls opposition, and summons an unseen reader or audience, whose thoughts and words she is confident she can know almost before they do. In fiction, the writer projects herself into the minds of her characters and thinks with them, ventriloquising beyond her own boundaries; likewise, in such polemical and confessional writings as A Room of One's Own (1929), someone is lurking at the edge of Woolf's consciousness, as she bends over her paper, composing: the implied recipient of the letter, the imagined reader, hostile or otherwise whom she is engaging, interrupting, cutting short.
The famous essay began as talks, and although her real-life interlocutors were her hosts, the fellows and students of Cambridge women's colleges, she is addressing over their shoulders other unnamed and unseen presences: imagined fathers and brothers, rulers and taste-makers and power-brokers, who assume there is no connection of her subject, “women and fiction” with property, power, independence and laws.
That many words exist for types and degrees of contradiction—rebuttal, refutation, rejoinder, retort, even refusal—and that so many are explicitly forms of speech rather than action (even Bartleby's silence must be broken by utterance, by his mild but steady contradictoriness), reveals how the critic and writer's task of ten takes place within existing circuits of value, the logos which they (we) struggle to reshape through a counter-utterance, a counter-script. Contradictoriness also holds “contrariness” within its compass, on either side of the central syllable, “dicto,” I say. It is Woolf's contrariness, rather than her contradictoriness that I want to look at, though the two concepts intersect, as noted.
And I want to look at her contrariness from two points of affinity that I have felt from the first moment I encountered her voice. Both affinities arise from the questions she puts about authority and class and English history and the ways the personal and public interconnect—through fathers, especially. How values are passed on from a standpoint of unexamined and effortless authority, how those values grow in a deposit of layer upon layer of English historical self-importance, these are the disturbing areas of inquiry, still.
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- Contradictory Woolf , pp. 57 - 65Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012