Diapositiva 1

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VIRGINIA WOOLF and the Modern Metropolis
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• Words Live in the Mind they hate being
  useful, they hate making money The truth they
  try to catch is many-sided
• http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7684225.stm

3
Modern Fiction (1919)

• Modernist Manifesto
• Three interrelated issues
• Victorian conventions are inadequate
• Aesthetics of fragmentation
• Complex plot vs analysis of interior life
• Omniscient narrator vs fragmented point of
  view perspective vs. simultaneous impressions
• - Assault on the coherence of and stability of
  unitary consciousness and perception
• Freudian influence (Layered I, Multiple and
  unknowable self, Importance of memory in shaping
  the self, studies on shell shock neurosis and
  the unconscious)

4
Mr Joyce
Complex plot vs analysis of interior life

• Mr Joyce is spiritual he is concerned at all
  costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost
  flame which flashes its messages through the
  brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards
  with complete courage whatever seems to him
  adventious, whether it be probability, or
  coherence
• p. 9

Ulysses 1914-1921 in the Little Review
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The
Egoist (1914-1915)
5

• Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an
  ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad
  impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
  engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all
  sides they come, an incessant shower of
  innumerable atoms and as they fall, as they
  shape themselves into the life of Monday or
  Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of
  old
• so that, if a writer were a free man and not
  a slave, if he could write what he chose, not
  what he must, if he could base his work upon his
  own feelings and not upon convention, there would
  be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy
• p. 8

perspective vs. simultaneous impressions
6

• Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically
  arranged life is a luminous halo, a
  semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
  beginning of consciousness to the end.
• MEMORY

7
Assault on the coherence of and stability of
unitary consciousness and perception

• Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the
  mind in the order in which they fall, let us
  trace the pattern, however disconnected and
  incoherent in appearance, which each sight or
  incident scores upon the consciousness
• MEMORY IS THE ONLY COHESIVE ELEMENT OF
  CONSCIOUSNESS

8

• What does one mean by 'the unity of the mind', I
  pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a
  power of concentrating at any point at any moment
  that it seems to have no single state of being.
  It can separate itself from the people in the
  street, for example and think of itself as apart
  from them, at an upper window looking down on
  them. Or it can think with other people
  spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd
  waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It
  can think back through its fathers or through its
  mothers, as I have said that woman writing thinks
  back through her mothers.Again if one is a woman
  one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off
  of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall,
  when from being the natural inheritor of that
  civilization, she becomes, on the contrary,
  outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the
  mind is always altering its focus, and bringing
  the world into different perspectives.
• From A ROOM OF ONES OWN 1929

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• 1910-11 Post-impressionists exhibition in London
  (organized by Roger Fry)
• (Cubism, 1907 Abstractism, 1910).
• Cinema

Pablo Picasso - Demoiselles d'Avignons - 1907
Vassilij Kandinskij - Acquerello astratto - 1910
10
Story Essays

• A first-person unnamed narrator, interior
  monologue
• Breaking with conventional narrative
  expectations, from the "straight lines" of
  narrative conventions
• Focusing on marginal, unexpected viewpoints, such
  as the outsider within bourgeois society
• A creative hand that brings together the poetic
  lyric, the prosaic narrative, and an audience
  open to the shocks and flights of a new angle of
  vision.

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• the rhythms of the body and the unconscious
  have managed to break through the strict rational
  defences of conventional social meaning. One
  might argue in this light that Woolfs refusal to
  commit herself in her essays to a so-called
  rational or logical form of writing, free from
  fictional techniques, indicates a similar break
  with symbolic language, as of course do many of
  the techniques she deploys in her novels.
• Toril Moi Sexual/Textual Politics 1985

12
Street Haunting

• Antecedents Flâneur
• The narrator represents a twentieth-century
  adapted version of the nineteenth-century French
  flaneur.

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Flâneur

• 1806 an anonymous pamphlet describes a day in
  the life of M. Bonhomme, a typical flaneur of the
  Bonaparte era

14

• 19 century France in the writings of Charles
  Baudelaire, members of a class of writers and
  journalists who, in the serial sections of the
  Paris newspapers, wrote sketches of urban life
  from the perspective of a strolling situated
  observer (Brand, 1991, p.6).

(Drawing by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet)
15

• Compare with VWs Feminist rewriting of the
  flaneur/flaneuse
• The narrator is more at home in the public space
  of the streets than the privacy of interior
  bourgeois space
• The image of misplaced, petit-bourgeois
• The lost ideal of internal social space the shop
  
• Desire
• First paragraph p. 70

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An enlightened vision of the city

• Charles Baudelaire's flâneur figure, typically a
  male dandy who recounts his perceptions and
  experience in strolling without purpose through
  city streets, appealed to proponents of the
  avant-garde in the 1920s as a model for
  revolutionary perception.
• Also in SH it is the flâneur's disinterested eye
  that looks "With no thought of buying, the eye
  is sportive and generous.

17
Cinema

• Walter Benjamin links the change in perception of
  Baudelaire's art with the new art of film.
• In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
  Reproduction," Benjamin writes that cinema opens
  up a new world for the flâneur by bursting open
  the "prison-world" of our habitual life, "our
  taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices
  and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and
  our factories

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• Benjamin observes how the camera's intervention
  prompts the eye to re-see its world "Evidently a
  different nature opens itself to the camera than
  opens to the naked eye--if only because an
  unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for
  a space consciously explored by man."
• It is into the depths of the perceiving subject
  (rather than the streets) that the audience goes
  exploring, as the film "reveals entirely new
  structural formations of the subject."

19
"Street Haunting (1927)

• Woolf's "Street Haunting" takes up the tradition
  of the flâneur in its narrator's stroll through
  London, and as a catalyst for her estranged
  perception of her own interior experience.

20

• In "Street Haunting A London Adventure" (1927),
  Virginia Woolf's narrator describes the
  experience of stepping from one's familiar,
  habitual room into the street.
• Woolf's image of the shell breaking to unhouse "a
  central oyster of perceptiveness"
• "The shell-like covering which our souls have
  excreted to house themselves, to make for
  themselves a shape distinct from others, is
  broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles
  and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness,
  an enormous eye
• p.71 (2)

21

• Traditional flaneur voyeuristic man who takes
  visual possession of the city
• Androgynous narrator a fluid universe of
  shifting meanings (Wilson, 1991, p. 102).
• P. 71 (3)

22

• Deviating from "the straight lines of
  personality" into "those footpaths" that lead to
  the hearts of "those wild beasts, our fellow men"
  is an escape that is "the greatest of pleasures
  street haunting in winter the greatest of
  adventures.
• P. 81

23

• Different sights that provoke profound ethical
  questions about identity, prejudice, and the
  possibility of empathy and action. The reader is
  surprised by the question, "What, then, is it
  like to be a dwarf?
• P. 72

24

• the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin
  the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of
  his stick the old man squatted on a doorstep as
  if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the
  human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it p.
  74
• Awareness of those whom habit and class privilege
  contrive to make invisible-
• Suspension of authorial judgment. In refusing to
  resolve such questions, to provide the catharsis
  of mimetic action, Woolf places the onus to see,
  consider, and act on her audiences.

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Limits of one's vision yet aspiring to see from
these other standpoints

• Walking home through the desolation one could
  tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind
  men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the
  quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of
  these lives one could penetrate a little way, far
  enough to give oneself the illusion that one is
  not tethered to a single mind but can put on
  briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of
  others
• P. 81 (1)

26
The Metropolis and Freedom

• Narrative of female entrapment in the eclipsed
  bourgeouis ideal of the private interior
• The narrator is more at home in the public space
  of the streets than the privacy of interior
  bourgeois space
• P. 81

27
City and Feminism

• To show the inadequacy of given gendered
  categories and narratives--our "houses,"
  "shells," and "rooms"--to contain or express
  their subjects.
• Woolf saw aesthetic innovation as vitally
  connected to a feminist vision it must have the
  explosiveness to, as Benjamin wrote, "burst this
  prison-world" of our habitual perceptions
  "asunder."

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Feminine Desire becomes central

• "The alternative is the thrill that comes from
  leaving the past behind without simply rejecting
  it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and
  daring to break with normal pleasurable
  expectations in order to conceive a new language
  of desire.
• Laura Mulvey
• DESIRE OPENS AND CLOSES ESSAY p. 70 and p. 81

29
Desire

• Woolf's narrator may necessarily return to the
  room of habit and recognize the comfort of "the
  old possessions, the old prejudices that fold
  us round, and shelter and enclose the self," but
  the narrator also returns to the room with a
  conspicuous object, which she asks us to examine
  "tenderly," to touch "with reverence" "the only
  spoil we have retrieved from the treasures of the
  city, a lead pencil.

30

• Empowers her, she can write
• Fetishistic consumer attraction for the pencil, a
  symbol of desire

31
The potential of the lyric moment

• Woolf attempts the alternation of two frames of
  reference
• 1) a human perspective of the prosaic (such as
  the sights the London street offers, "the glossy
  brilliance of the motor omnibuses, the
  butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and
  their purple steaks the blue and red bunches of
  flowers burning so bravely through the plate
  glass")
• 2) a timeless perspective of the poetic (the
  composition "of these trophies in such a way as
  to bring out their more obscure angles and
  relationships").

32

• The eye and brain collaborate to discover
  "beauty" in and create imaginary houses for the
  self from "the tide of trade so punctually and
  prosaically" deposits on Oxford Street, precisely
  because it is the flâneur's disinterested eye
  that looks "With no thought of buying, the eye
  is sportive and generous."

33

• The narrator's mind uses the objects and images
  of London's streets that the eye seizes upon
  during its ramble for lyrical, imaginative
  departures but must finally also return to
  "habit," the socially constructed and contained
  "I" within the familiar confines of one's room.

34

• However, Woolf's androgynous narrator, as a
  writer-flâneur, has the ability to depart from
  habit at will and thus has more freedom to alter
  the habitual.

35

• Joyce, Epiphany Woolf, Moments of being an
  intense experience or insight, heightened intense
  feeling
• It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a
  blush when one tried to check and then, as it
  spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed
  to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt
  the world come closer, swollen with some
  astonishing significance, some pressure of
  rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and
  poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the
  cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had
  seen an illumination a match burning in a
  crocus an inner meaning almost expressed. But
  the close withdrew the hard softened. It was
  over the moment.
• From Mrs Dalloway

36
Flying over London

• The artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935)
  identified the aerial landscape (especially the
  "bird's-eye view", looking straight down, as
  opposed to an oblique angle) radicalizing
  paradigm in the art of the twentieth century.
• Aerial landscape painting and abstract painting
  not only because familiar objects are sometimes
  difficult to recognize when viewed aerially, but
  because there is no natural "up" or "down"
  orientation in the painting.

Jackson Pollock, Painting (Silver over Black,
White, Yellow and Red), 1948, Georges Pompidou
Center, Paris.
37

• Aviation afforded an unprecedented freedom
• The prose documents of pilots quickly became the
  raw material for poets who translated the
  aviator's actual accounts into flights of fancy.
  i.e. ending p. 210

38
THE METROPOLIS and the Fragmentation of the I/Eye

• The city escapes synthesis and can only be
  represented in fragments
• New perspective unsettles habit p. 203
• Again the prosaic and poetic

Metropolis, F. Lang, 1927.
39

• a critique of anthopocentrism/human perspective
  of the prosaic
• (one becomes conscious of being a little
  mammal the world of brussel sprouts and sheep)
• p. 203
• 2) a timeless perspective of the poetic (One
  could see through the bank of England) p. 204

40
The metropolis and memory

• London is portrayed as a multilayered text that
  can be read and interpreted. The city as a
  palimpsest, that is to say, as a text that is
  built up layer after layer where the past is
  preserved underneath the present p. 132 (1)
  Palimpsest

41

• Because of the impending break of the bourgeois
  stage of history and its private interiors, the
  city is mixed, partial and layered, as districts
  and houses overlap with one another in space and
  in time (the masses turning private into public
  space)

42

• She describes the sensation of ascending in an
  airplane, as the Moth rose "like a spirit shaking
  contamination from its wings, shaking gasometers
  and factories and football fields from its feet."
• The mystical experience of flight provided a
  perfect metaphor for freedom from life on earth
• It was a moment of renunciation. We prefer the
  other, we seemed
• to say. Wraiths and sand dunes and mist
  imagination this we
• prefer to the mutton and entrails. It was the
  idea of death that now suggested itself . . . not
  immortality, but extinction. p. 205
• The pilot becomes a Charon