Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Description

Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf's introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory - particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva - it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Judith Butler Roger Fry Luce Irigaray Julia Kristeva Virginia Woolf Note on Sources Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy Chapter 1: Jacob’s Room: Modernist Melancholia and the Eclipse of Primal Intimacy Matricidal Modernity and the Persistence of Archaic Intimacy “Pure from all Body, Pure from all Passion”: Non-Violence and the Imprint of Primal Sadness Formalism, Melancholia and the Ethics of Affective Detachment Chapter 2: “An Inner Meaning Almost Expressed”: Introspection as Revolt in Mrs Dalloway Self-Control, Aggression and Ethical Violence “Reuniting with Affect”: Intimacy, Bliss and Revolt in the Timeless “Odd Affinities She Had with People She Had Never Spoken To”: The Intimate Opacity of the Account Chapter 3: Post-Impressionist Intimacy and the Visual Ethics of To the Lighthouse A Formalist Literary Ethics: Fry, Woolf, Irigaray Beyond Solipsism: Post-Impressionism, “Time Passes” and the Suspension of the ‘I’ Defamiliarising the Seen: Depicting Mrs Ramsay’s Integrity Seeing Together: Vision, Design and the Intimacy of Shared Perception Chapter 4: Chalk Marks: Violence and Vulnerability in The Waves “A Mind Thinking”: Woolf’s Soliloquy and the Dissolution of Boundaries Waves and Torrents: The Aesthetic Politics of Rhythm “Our Senses Have Widened”: Sensitivity and Non-Violence Relational Monologues: Intimacy and the Singularity of the Voice Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Bibliography Index