Thesis
Manufacturing a woman's sentence: uncovering Virginia Woolf's Écriture féminine mécanique
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2013
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/101993
Abstract
Virginia Woolf devoted volumes to practicing a new kind of writing. She worked to develop a thoroughly feminine writing style and infused a bit of herself into each of her characters. Despite this pointed and explicit effort, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous found her efforts lacking and each excluded her from their definitions of écriture féminine (translated as women’s bodily writing). In an effort to uncover what was so different about Woolf’s writing and what made it so loathsome to the French feminists I discovered a modern and potentially postmodern characteristic of her writing that set it apart from the other more fluid styles that post-structuralist feminists such as Kristeva and Cixous supported. My readings suggest that we might recategorize Woolf as not écriture feminine, but as something that came with modernism and with Woolf’s lived experience: as écriture féminine mécanique (women’s mechanical bodily writing.) Through a careful study of To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, I will explore the ways in which Woolf’s concern with mechanization and with her own bodily failures prevented her from becoming a foremother of écriture féminine and instead led her to embody écriture féminine mécanique.
Metrics
16 File views/ downloads
44 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Manufacturing a woman's sentence
- Creators
- Courtney Elizabeth King
- Contributors
- Jon Hegglund (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- English, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Identifiers
- 99900525043501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis