"But she loved her roses (didn't that help the armenians?)"
resisting facts, inventing forms, negotiating history in virginia woolf's to the lighthouse and mrs. dalloway
pp. 191-213
in: Ana Falcato, Antonio Cardiello (eds), Philosophy in the condition of modernism, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
This essay aims to explore modernism's relationship with philosophy by focusing on two novels by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). It will argue that despite modernism's anti-philosophical stance, Woolf's texts engage with seminal philosophical debates in their own search for truth and invent new ways of re-inscribing literature, the artist, and the arts in the realm of politics. Her novels propose challenging positions to basic philosophical questions associated with the subject/object relationship, the connection between the personal and the political, our shared condition of precarity, or the open-endedness of history. Woolf's modernist/cubist aesthetics and narrative techniques invite new readings of the self and history and anticipate poststructuralist views like those of Judith Butler or Fredrik Jameson.
