Browsing by Subject "Woolf"
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Item Bodily subjectivity as alternative selfhood : The Voyage Out beyond the bildungsroman(2015-05) Kreider, Aleina Anne Nicholas; Carter, Mia; Wojciehowski, HannahVirginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, by initiating and yet resisting the traditional bildungsroman form, illustrates the inadequacy of this genre's brand of self-development and seeks an alternative mode of selfhood. The novel’s protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, though apparently "formless" and unable to "develop," nevertheless exhibits a sense of self and seems to be more than mere blankness. In exploring what selfhood might be when the bildungsroman-self is untenable, The Voyage Out ultimately reaches toward a kind of subjectivity not rooted primarily in intellectual and linguistic experiences—which typically come to shape the subject in the bildungs—but in bodily experience. This bodily subjectivity offers rewards beyond those the telos of the bildungsroman enables, and in affirming the value of the bodily, The Voyage Out also simultaneously facilitates a feminist move towards reclaiming this characteristic of "femininity" that has so often been used to render women lesser-than. Subjectivity and self having long been associated with mind rather than body, they have also long been in the masculine domain, while the feminine is aligned with the bodily, the other, and the object. As The Voyage Out reclaims the value of the body and its involvement in subjectivity, then, it also challenges the notion that to be a subject one must be the mental, masculine hero of the traditional bildungsroman.Item The Crisis of Masculine Space: the End of the Gentlemen's Club in British Modern Fiction(2011-02-22) Edwards, Leslie GautreauxAt the beginning of the twentieth century, men occupied a contested and transitional space in British society. The effects of the women's movement, the Great War, and industrialization changed their life at home, at work, and at their places of recreation. This dissertation examines how the British male writers E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and George Orwell depict this "crisis of masculinity" and its effect on the male population. I argue that one of the ways the writers convey their understanding of the changing gender codes and the ways in which men were attempting to manage the adjustments to their daily lives is through the description and purpose that they attach to masculine spaces. These three threshold writers occupy an important place in the canon of British modern literature. They all are a part of a masculine literary tradition that privileges male bonding and additionally rituals that seek to reinforce and carry on the patriarchal narrative of men to distinguish between homosocial male bonding and patriarchal privilege (which is heterosexually based). While Forster demonstrates the gender tension between men and women in the exclusive masculine spaces of the text, Lawrence characterizes masculine private space as a site for healing and revitalization for men after the war, and Orwell describes underground male spaces as sites where men can prove their masculinity by enduring intense suffering from pain that is inflicted by the work that they perform. In each chapter, I demonstrate that understanding masculine spaces provides a more complete understanding of each writer's masculine paradigm in literature and to some extent gives us a new way of thinking about the author and his own gender insecurities. Whether it is the swimming hole or the automobile, the smoking room or the dining room, the battlefield war trench or the coal mine, the domestic and public spaces of male life are under siege in the modern era, according to Forster, Lawrence, and Orwell. In order to preserve and sustain the rites and traditions that are upheld in those settings, the writers remind readers about the genealogy of men that reinforces the necessity of male space in hopes of preserving it for future generations.Item The Rhetoric Of Writing: A Rhetorical Analysis of Modern Writing Memoirs(2010-01-14) Illich, Lindsay P.This dissertation analyzes concepts of the writing self in works about writing by professional creative writers (writers, poets, and essayists). Through a rhetorical analysis of these texts, I observe that writers view the writing self as a complex structure that is fully conscious as a rhetorical agent, an embodied self that interacts with the world and actively chooses linguistic representations of that experience, and maintains a concept of self that is subject to influences which the writers do not fully understand (such as inspiration and insight). The discourse used by writers to describe their writing processes challenges recent critiques of expressionism and the model of social construction that pervades contemporary composition scholarship. Chapter II examines Virginia Woolf's use of the central metaphor for invention in A Room of One's Own, a river, which sharply calls into question a unified view of the self which is central to critiques of expressivism by composition scholars. Woolf's concept of invention requires a negation of the self and harmony with nature (widely conceived as the entire world, including texts). Chapter III, an analysis of two writing memoirs by contemporary professional creative writers, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Donald Hall's Life Work, finds that Dillard and Hall use metaphors that establish freedom (rhetorical agency) and bodily presence as primary characteristics of their writing processes. Chapter IV, an analysis of two collections of essays about writing by professional creative writers, argues that the writers' use of metaphors of inspiration and instrumental metaphors creates a concept of the writing self that maintains a sense of writerly control (rhetorical agency) alternating with a sense of a diminished control; ultimately, the two concepts coexist in the minds of the writers. Chapter V proposes that the rhetorical situation of the contemporary composition classroom affects students' creativity adversely. The chapter also suggests further analyses of writing memoirs can provide new ways of understanding writing processes (as opposed to one writing process model) and therefore contribute substantially to composition scholarship and pedagogy.