Title: Diapositiva 1
1VIRGINIA WOOLF and the Modern Metropolis
2- 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
3Modern 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)
4Mr 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
9- 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
10Story 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.
11- 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
12Street Haunting
- Antecedents Flâneur
- The narrator represents a twentieth-century
adapted version of the nineteenth-century French
flaneur.
13Flâneur
- 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
16An 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.
17Cinema
- 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
18- 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.
25Limits 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)
26The 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
27City 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."
28Feminine 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
29Desire
- 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
31The 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
36Flying 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
38THE 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
40The 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