Lindy van Rooyen's Books

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

By: Lindy van Rooyen

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Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

By: Lindy van Rooyen

In this study the author conducts a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s first ‘experimental’ novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). Her reading is based on the fundamental premise that the novel is an exploration of fictional form, rather than an exposition of any preconceived idea. Jacob’s Room is an essentially modernist text, and is characterised by extensive genre-mixing typical of the art of fiction in the early 20th century. Throughout her study the author analyses the extent to which the novel transgress the ‘boundaries’ of the novelistic genre. She explores the generic interface between the novel and those genres which are deemed to be innate to Virginia Woolf’s sensibility, i.e. the journalistic essay, biography and impressionist painting. The premise of this study leads the author to read the novel on two levels of significance: On the narrative, ‘surface’ level of the novel, Woolf constructs the tragic life of a promising young Englishman, Jacob Flanders, who dies in the First World War. Simultaneously, on the metafictional level of significance, Woolf, through her garrulous narrator, mocks and evaluates the actions of her characters, experimenting with various points of view in an attempt to define the character of her protagonist. Jacob’s ‘room’ is thus conceived as a ‘mental space’ in which a modern writer’s mind is ‘mapped’. The central aesthetic question which is debated in this room or forum relates to the essential art of modern fiction in general and the efficiency of characterisation in fiction in particular. It is argued that Virginia Woolf probes into the epistemic question of the essence of modern man and, in an attempt to capture the essence of her protagonist, speculates on the corresponding literary question how, and to what extent, the ‘soul’ of man can to be represented in fiction. The author uses this generic approach to the novel as a broad structuring principle for her study of Jacob’s Room. After discussing the socio-political context of modernism in the early 20th century, including the impact of the First World War on modernist writing, she focuses her study on those aspects of Woolf’s fiction which are deemed fundamental to the narrative strategy in Jacob’s Room, i.e. the role and nature of Woolf’s humour within the context of modernism; the ‘nodes’ or clusters of metaphors and symbols recurring in the text; the role of the narrator as ‘toastmaster’ of the debate on character and fiction in Jacob’s Forum; the extent to which the novel parodies the ‘new biography’ of the early twentieth century; and the extent to which Woolf transvaluates the tools of impressionist painting into modernist fiction.

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129

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Diplomica Verlag

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ISBN 10

3842878559

ISBN 13

9783842878556

Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction: Humour, Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922)

By: Lindy van Rooyen

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Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction: Humour, Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922)

By: Lindy van Rooyen

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Virginia Woolf is not a popular writer. Despite a fierce pride in her work it was never her ambition to be one. Most people have heard of her work, vaguely associating it with the second wave of the women s liberation movement in the 1970s and the type of fiction that is commonly called difficult , and few people unfamiliar with her work would associate her reputation with humour. These are some of the first impressions of a writer who is now hailed by scholars of English literature as one of the icons of modernism. To speak of first impressions of Virginia Woolf s work is not as fatuous as it may seem. After all Woolf s fiction was initially founded on impressions, and I hope to show that one of the distinctive characteristics of her oeuvre compared to other modernists like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats or James Joyce, is the intensely visual nature of her art. Furthermore, she is often associated with a movement of modern painting in the early twentieth century known as Post-Impressionism , including painters like Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque. Finally, laughter in all its registers - whether merry, cruel or parodic - runs like a golden thread throughout the texture of her essays, short stories and novels; as satire does more generally throughout modernism. I have chosen Virginia Woolf s third novel, Jacob s Room (1922), as the focus of my study of Woolf s modernism. It is not her best known novel, as most critical acclaim is reserved for Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927). She started writing fiction in 1915 just as the First World War started and, for four reasons, I believe that Jacob s Room is the perfect starting point from which to survey Woolf s particular contribution to the Modernist Movement. Firstly, the social catastrophe associated with the First World War is widely considered to be the decisive historic event in the collective consciousness of early twentieth century Europe, its effects reverberating throughout the literary- and visual arts in the 1920s. Secondly, Jacob s Room was published in a year which falls nicely within the boundaries of the period of High Modernism, which culminated in the decades between 1910 and 1930. Indeed the year of 1922 marks the publication of two other seminal modernist works, T.S. Eliot s Wasteland and James Joyce s Ulysses. Thirdly, Jacob s Room is commonly regarded as Virginia Woolf s first experimental novel in which she, in her own phrase, [...]

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126

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diplom.de

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ISBN 10

3842828888

ISBN 13

9783842828889

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

By: Lindy van Rooyen

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Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

By: Lindy van Rooyen

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

129

Publisher

Diplomica Verlag

Published Date

ISBN 10

3842878559

ISBN 13

9783842878556

Book's by Lindy van Rooyen

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction: Humour, Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922)

Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction: Humour, Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922)

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf?s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in "Jacob?s Room"

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