“울프 여사는 영화를 발견했다”: 1920년대 영화와 버지니아 울프의 영화적 글쓰기

손현주 ( Heon Joo Sohn ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.1

The purpose of the paper is to explore how the films of the 1920s had an influence on Virginia Woolf`s writing technique. Reviewing “Kew Gardens,” focusing on Woolf`s new experimental techniques, Winifred Holtby declared that “Mrs Woolf had discovered the cinema,” by which she meant that Woolf tried to adopt some techniques from the cinema in the short story, such as close-up, bird`s eye view, and shifting the camera angles. “Kew Gardens” is not the only one to be viewed in terms of the influence of the cinema of the times. Woolf`s writings, particularly following Jacob`s Room, may be read in relation with the cinematic culture of the 1920`s, which may yield more productive results. In 1926, the London Film Society was established by a group of intellectuals, including some members of Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and J. Maynard Keynes. The London Film Society became the site of introducing European avant-garde films as well as Hollywood films. The Woolfs were regular attendants to the Saturday film premieres. In her diaries and letters she put comments on and discussed the recent films she watched. She even published an essay titled “The Cinema” in which she discerned the great potentials of the burgeoning art, foresighting its glorious future as an art form on its own right. Woolf`s interest in the film could be dated back to her youth when she took photos and developed them with her siblings at home. Her creative imagination was almost always related to the visual. In one of her childhood memories recounted in The Moments of Being, she recalls that what made her a writer was her desire and habit to make a scene out of a shock or blow she received. Such visual imagination must have been developed and modified in the cultural environment of the 1920s when the film became an important cultural issue. This paper reads Woolf`s short stories written in 1929, “Three Pictures,” “The Lady in the Looking-glass,” and “The Fascination of the Pool,” along with her novels, Jacob`s Room and To the Lighthouse. In “Three Pictures,” Woolf presents three seemingly unconnected pictures, which eventually converge to form a drama of a tragic kind, adopting a filmic “montage” technique. “The Lady in the Looking-glass” tries to make reader reconstruct the image of a lady through the scene reflected in the mirror hung on the wall, using the frame of a mirror as an equivalent to the cinematic frame. “The Fascination of the Pool” explores Woolf`s long standing interest in water and its narcissistic pull, interrogating the validity of the views on the surface and trying to recover the lost memories accumulated underneath. By doing so, Woolf strongly suggests to see the filmic scenes as symbols, instead of watching them passively. The attempt to read Woolf`s writings in relation with the cinema of the times will provide the reader with yet another productive tool to appreciate Woolf by locating her in the cultural milieu of the early twentieth century.

“Must I Join Your Conspiracy?”: The Politics of Passivity in Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas

김영주 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.2

Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf’s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf’s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf’s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women’s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf’s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately call for the politics of passivity as Woolf’s famous proclaim of the outsiders’ society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf’s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation. Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf’s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf’s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf’s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women’s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf’s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately call for the politics of passivity as Woolf’s famous proclaim of the outsiders’ society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf’s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation.

『호텔 듀 락』에 갇힌 이디스 호프에게, 울프로부터

김정 한국제임스조이스학회 2004 제임스조이스저널 Vol.10 No.1

This paper consists of three fictional letters of Virginia Woolf to Edith Hope, the heroine of Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Choosing an epistolary form as a way of writing a thesis is intentional under the presumption that this kind of new attempt fits to maximize the efficacy of Virginia Woolf's writing technique which has been proved already by her ardent innovation of the form and contents of the novel. Woolf asks in her work A Room of One's Own, "Are you aware that you [women] are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?" Ironically, her heated question, now aims at herself making her "perhaps, the most discussed woman in the universe." The extensive, sometimes distorted, representations of Virginia Woolf give her a contested place to become a 'cultural icon.' This proliferation of her meanings throughout various media -including intellectual spheres and the more popular culture- transformed Woolf into a multifaceted iconic figure. Among others, in Hotel du Lac Woolf acquired the iconic status from Edith Hope who owns the image and status of Virginia Woolf as her own emblem without any explanatory identification. She likes nothing better than to be mistaken for Woolf. Edith, who writes romantic stories, adopts as a literary icon a popular conception of Woolf, to define both her public and private personae. But her choice is ironic. Her public Woolf persona receives little approbation from others. Moreover, Edith is never presented reading or reflecting on a Woolf text. This refusal, this tacit manipulation challenges the reader to confront what constitutes Virginia Woolf in the novel. This paper has grown out of that sense of challenge, and an attempt of vindication has been made. In the first letter, Woolf asks why she has become a role model for Edith and discusses the cause and effect of it. The second letter examines the novel Hotel du Lac as a whole under the critical eye of the eminent writer of The Common Reader and traces the heroine's circumscribed life. Finally in the third letter Woolf gives integral advice to Edith and Brookner that what she has done is an attempt not only to vindicate herself but encourage the author, Brookner, to further the relationships through literary works that we have bred and continue to breed.

Virginia Woolf`s In/Visible Cities: A Reading of Woolf`s London Essays

( Eun Kyung Park ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.2

Virginia Woolf`s vision of the city in her London essays departs from male modernists` perceptions of a modern city. While T. S. Eliot and James Joyce often reduce the metropolis merely to a space for abstract and general psychological dramas, with their main concerns about urban evils and social pathology, Woolf does not focus on urban ugliness but embraces diverse aspects of city life and their abundance. I unfold a reading of Woolf`s London stories in parallel with Italo Calvino`s Invisible Cities. Both writers pay attention to the heterogeneous urban space, uncovering its fascinating and unattractive in/visible cities. Their phantasmagoric vision of the city is that of a modern metropolis that cannot be unitary, standardized, unchangeable, or immortal. However, Woolf does not share Calvino`s sense of urban blues and his apocalyptic vision of the city. As an urban flaneuse, Woolf enjoys the flitting, fragmented moments of street encounters in twisted streets. She celebrates human connectedness and glorifies subversive freedom in city streets. Observed with “an enormous eye,” not the egocentric “I,” Woolf`s London emerges as a dynamic, charming space, in its bustle and chaos, coloured with her own idiosyncratic, but, at the same time, starkly realistic vision. The eye of an urban haunter marks in/visible, heterogeneous mutipli-city, layer upon layer, in London. Woolf opens up the possibility of and necessity for ceaseless narratives about the modern city. To explore the urban blessings and vitality, travelling with Woolf, might be helpful in renewing our appreciation of the 21st century metropolises. Her guidance and inspiration allow us to restore life to dying cities, while being ceaselessly attentive to urban phenomena that can be easily degenerated by our abuse.

울프가 베버를 만날 때: "직업"으로서의 글쓰기와 모더니스트의 "소명"

손영주 ( Young Joo Son ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2011 현대영미소설 Vol.18 No.3

Virginia Woolf`s ambivalence towards women`s entry into the world of professions is well known; she celebrated it as an instrument for woman`s emancipation, and yet she was worried that it might lead to woman`s complicity with the evils of the social system, the system that had perpetuated inequality, injustice, and violence throughout history. Some critics value Woolf`s feminist project while others criticize her class allegiances; all of these critics tend to equate rather simplistically Woolf`s view of profession with that of masculinity, oppression, or capitalism. The purpose of this paper is to show that Woolf`s concern with profession encompasses a much broader question of constructing a freer self and community. Examining Woolf`s view of profession side by side with a lecture entitled "Science as a Vocation" by German sociologist Max Weber, this paper argues that both Woolf and Weber invite us to rethink the function and meaning of a ``profession`` in a highly professionalized society. Weber tells us how to fulfill the inner vocation of science in the age of rationalization, intellectualization, and disenchantment where science has been deprived of its authority as a universal truth about a human being and the world. Likewise, Woolf urges us to use the profession as a way of achieving a freedom from "unreal loyalties," a freedom which is a basis for a freer and more peaceful community, while remaining acutely aware of the various obstacles that professional women confront in the capitalist, patriarchal, and professional world. For both Woolf and Weber, the true vocation of professional writers and scholars in this modern world is to restore the mysteries, the obscure, the forgotten realm of life by means of working only for the sake of work. Weber and Woolf also demonstrate how the professional commitment to work can be compatible with the dialogues and collaboration between teachers and students, writers and readers. The autonomy of art and science in Weber and Woolf, therefore, does not so much reflect or aggravate the division between the individual and society as it does lead to taking a transformative participation in society. In these ways, Weber and Woolf show us how it is possible for a modernist to pursue a vocation in a world where the divine meaning of a vocation has almost lost its ground.

도시의 거북이와 맘모스: 버지니아 울프의 런던 기행문과 글쓰기의 윤리

김영주 ( Youngjoo Kim ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2016 제임스조이스저널 Vol.22 No.2

Virginia Woolf was a prolific essayist whose writing appears both in mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass circulation of women`s magazines. Until recently has not much of critical attention been drawn to Virginia Woolf`s essays on London, the six essays which were originally published as serial articles in a popular women`s magazine Good Housekeeping during 1931 and 1932. The Good Housekeeping essays show Woolf`s continuous journalistic efforts since she started it as early as 1904. Early critics of Woolf`s London essays have noticed the pro-urban sentiment in an appreciative observer of modern city life and even found Woolf`s identification with the consuming middle class problematic. Such readings disregard Woolf`s ambivalence and anxiety about commercialization of her writing and her concerns on the ethics of writing popular journalism. This paper aims to examine Woolf`s Good Housekeeping essays, “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide” in particular, and discuss Woolf`s anxiety as an essayist about mass print journalism and the aesthetics of the essay form in capitalist commercial culture. The subtle language and conversational style of her journalistic writing often conceal Woolf`s scathing and comprehensive commentaries on global capitalist commercialism of which she is clearly part of. The curious animal trope Woolf employs in the two essays the tortoise and the mammoth encapsulates the process of capitalist commodification and yet opens up enigmatic narrative space for the flaneuse-essayist. Woolf not only examines the dilemma between the liberating engagement with culture industry and the fear of intellectual contamination but also successfully inscribes her aesthetics and ethics of the essay form in the Good Housekeeping essays.

초상화와 전기문학: 버지니아 울프의 전기문학과 시각예술

손현주 ( Heon Joo Sohn ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2014 제임스조이스저널 Vol.20 No.1

In her essay, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), Virginia Woolf asserted that the painter Sickert is “a great biographer” while his portraits are more efficient than biographies at conveying the personality of a person. Reading this essay along with other Woolf’s writings concerning biography, I would like to argue that Woolf’s experiments with the form of biography can be considered in conjunction with the changing ideas and forms of visual art of her time, which may help us understand Woolf and her idea of “new biography” in a broader perspective of her contemporary cultural environment. In “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1924), Woolf boldly claimed that “in and about December, 1910, human character changed,” implicitly referring to the famous exhibition, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” organized by Roger Fry. By this occasion Fry introduced the revolutionary idea of Post-Impressionism which was foreign to the British public at that time. Refusing the traditional realistic representation of the subject, the tenet of this new trend of fine art was to express the subjective and more personal impressions of the artist, emphasizing the effect of lights and colors. In the essay, Woolf argues that the changing concept of reality necessarily asks for new ways of expression in art, endorsing modernist writers’ experimentations of character-making including her own, against Arnold Bennet’s criticism. In fiction, according to her, what is at stake is how to convey the character. Woolf is prone to making scenes rather than telling stories. As she observes in “A Sketch of the Past” that her desire to make scenes out of her experience is what made her a writer, Woolf’s writing has a strong affinity towards visual art, such as pictures, photos, and even the cinema. It seems that there is an interesting parallelism between Woolf’s idea of fiction and that of biography in terms of people in them either fictional or factual. While she was struggling with the problem of how to make a character real, she was also grappling with that of how to transmit personality of a person in biography. In this paper I venture to review Woolf’s idea and practice concerning biography in terms of visual art of the time, particularly portraits painted by Walter Sickert. It seems that Woolf took more conservative attitude towards biography than fiction. While she tried to incorporate the more radical ideas of contemporary culture of visual art, such as Post-Impressionism and Cubism in her fiction, which I believe shares the avant-garde sensibility of Bloomsbury intellectuals and artists, in biographical writings she kept herself contented with more realistic representation of Sickert. It may be because unlike in fiction, in biography she accepted the idea of the biographer is not free to invent and has to stick to “facts.”

버지니아 울프의 『막간』: 지적인 싸움으로서 생각하기

김금주 한국현대영미소설학회 2020 현대영미소설 Vol.27 No.1

The late 1930s, the setting of Between the Acts, was a chaotic period, and at the same time saw the rapid growth of the mass media and the popular book market. The propagandistic public voices about the war and Fascism through the mass media, and the immense volubility and vulgarity of popular books intensified Woolf’s concern about the problem of people’s passive and uncritical thinking. And in times of crisis, she hoped that the public would be able to think critically without falling into delusion. Thus Woolf sought the form and the content to stimulate the reader’s perceptivity and to challenge them to think. And as an artist, Woolf tried to resist grim realities between the wars by an intellectual writing, opposing political participation. In Between the Acts, Woolf presents the problems issued from the mass media and commodity-driven books and seeks the possibilities to overcome them. Woolf seeks these possibilities by representing the process of the expansion of Isa's imagination and La Trope’s parodic pageant-play. In addition, Woolf tries to represent her vision by formal experiments in the novel. Between the Acts is an experimental novel where a number of genres come together. The novel is composed of dialogue, poetry, play, and prose. This layered text challenges her own readers to strive to understand the true meaning of the text. Woolf provides the reader like the audience of the pageant-play with chances to pause, think and feel through the layered style and words which rouse “the imagination, the memory, the eye, and the ear” as she says in “Craftsmanship.” Woolf also shows interruption, shock and silence as main sources of occasion for a critical thinking that induces a change of consciousness for both the audience and the reader. Woolf’s assertion of mental fighting is to think against the current and to explore new possibilities against chaotic reality. Like Woolf’s declaration that “thinking is my fighting,” to write Between the Acts is her intellectual fighting. And she requires the reader to join in her intellectual fighting.

버지니아 울프의 『3기니』속 감정 연구 : 반전주의적 전략으로서의 무관심을 중심으로

이서현 Ewha Institute of English and American Studies 2022 Journal of English and American studies Vol.21 No.1

Virginia Woolf’s struggle to find the answer to the question, “how in your opinion are we to prevent war?” is illustrated in her work Three Guineas. Following Woolf’s formulation of strategic pacifism in Three Guineas, this paper attempts to shed light on certain emotions—patriotism, anger, hate, horror, disgust, and indifference—that, according to Woolf, can either encourage or discourage people to go to war. In the first chapter of Three Guineas, Woolf defines patriotism and anger as the emotions that “lead men to go to war.” I contrast these emotions with “horror and disgust,” which Woolf describes as “positive emotions” that make both men and women oppose the war. In the third chapter of the essay, Woolf, by contrasting patriotism and anger with indifference, claims that maintaining the emotion of indifference is required for a particular class of educated men’s daughters, which she terms the Outsiders’ Society because, for Woolf, indifference is a nonviolent yet powerful emotion that elicits practical actions to prevent war from women of her class. In accordance with Woolf’s position, this paper does not present indifference as a mere emotion that is a temporary response to external stimuli but as an “emotional attitude” that must be consistently and consciously practiced based on one’s reason and should lead to methods of war prevention. To understand Woolf’s strategic pacifism through her advocacy of an emotional attitude of indifference, this paper analyzes two anti-war strategies in Three Guineas. To advance the termination of war without any violence and to eradicate differences between women and men, the first strategy she adopts is her cautious attitude towards anger, and the second is her choice not to show war photographs but simply depict it only in writing. Drawing on Judith Butler’s discussion of nonviolence, I read these strategies as significantly contributing to peace. Lastly, Woolf suggests practicable methods of indifference to resist war for the members of the Outsiders’ Society.

Defamiliarizing Visual Displays of Male Spectacles in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas

Sewon Um Ewha Institute of English and American Studies 2022 Journal of English and American studies Vol.21 No.1

This paper examines Virginia Woolf’s unconventional usage of photographs in her 1938 essay Three Guineas by adapting Laura Mulvey’s notion of the “male gaze,” which she explained in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). While scholars have been paying an ample amount of attention to Woolf’s experimental usage of photographs, its significance and impact have been left less excavated. In this sense, I suggest that Woolf strategically uses photographs of extravagantly-clothed male spectacles in replacement of highly-exposed female spectacles to challenge the dominance of the male gaze, which has been prevalently objectifying the female body within society. I further assert that Mulvey’s “male gaze” remains noteworthy in subversively analyzing Woolf’s text as her experimental usage of photographs underscores Woolf’s critique of the power of patriarchy in relation to war. By eliminating explicit war pictures, Woolf shifts our attention toward what remains unseen; the implicit power of patriarchy. Woolf’s experiment does not stop there as her method defamiliarizes readerly experiences on multiple levels—from the addressed reader “you” within the text to the readers outside the frame of her essay. The gazers of Woolf’s photographs undergo different readerly experiences based on gender; while the female readers gain autonomy in observing male spectacles, the reading experiences of the male readers are defamiliarized. Woolf’s defamiliarizing strategy further functions in her unconventional usage of photographs as the visual impact of these photographs associates with other sensory reactions, only to highlight the plausibility of constructing “the Outsider’s Society” and to envision what is not yet visualized. I hereby claim that this new mode of reading becomes meaningful in that it provides the possibility of analyzing Woolf’s text in a discursive way, connecting the past and the present feminist ideas of the modern days.