The uneasy relation of language to meaning that is characteristic of much modernism punctuates Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Taking walk with “the atheist” Charles Tansley, Mrs. Ramsay, tired of being talked at, begins to let her mind wander in a way that detaches Tansley’s words from their intended meaning, first with the words taking on
Given the length at which To the Lighthouse dwells on the everyday thoughts of its characters, it comes as a brutal shock to read in the grim second section that: Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms,
In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at
In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at
What is ‘rhythm’? It is neither a ‘thing’ (a material object) nor necessarily related to a human action. We usually think about rhythms in time, but the term need not be temporal. The OED gives one of the definitions as ‘Regularity in the repetition in time or space of an action, process, feature, condition, event,
This is the second in a series of two posts about the ‘subject’ and ‘objects’ of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in relaiton to the literary studies unit on modernism I will be teaching this coming semester. Literary criticism, in step with Cartesian dualism, has tended to operate according to a dichotomy of active subjects and
This is the first substantive post related to the unit in literary modernism I am teaching next semester. These posts are not intended to be proto-essays, nor necessarily particularly deep. I just want to jot down quick thoughts about what struck me in reading through the set texts, with the hope and intention of stimulating
In preparation for the modernism unit next semester I’ll be starting Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse this week. Grab yourself a copy (the OUP edition is the one we’ll be using in the unit) and read along with me.