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      How Should One be an Outsider?: Virginia Woolf's Common Reader as a Theory of Subjectivity in Interwar England

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      WINQUIST-DISSERTATION-2020.pdf (1.326Mb)
      Date
      2020-09-09
      Author
      Winquist, Martin E.
      ORCID
      0000-0002-6466-9366
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Doctoral
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      This project examines Virginia Woolf’s conceptualization of the outsider as a political position with recourse to the figure of the common reader she theorizes early in her writing career. Woolf’s common reader, I argue, is first and foremost a response to the interwar “battle of the brows.” Unique in their belief in the common reader, Woolf’s early essays on form and aesthetics ask readers to consider their position as consumers in relation to the writers who insisted upon the discourse of the great divide between high and middlebrow art. This project suggests the common reader is more than Woolf’s contribution to the “battle of the brows,” however, and it presents the common reader as the precursory figure in a theory of intersectional subjectivity that is the foundation for Woolf’s politics of everyday life, which reached maturity late in her career with the “Society of Outsiders.” Viewing the common reader this way helps connect Woolf’s later works, which are generally viewed as her more political writings, with her early, formally experimental works by way of a theory of subjectivity that makes one’s discursive subject position central to an outsider politics based on performative subversion. Woolf’s focus on subject positions and performative subversion marks hers as a politics of the body, and this work explores the role various social institutions, including the university, the military, the family, and the asylum, play in disciplining subjects and their bodies in Woolf’s fiction and essays. In texts including Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Between the Acts, as well as a number of Woolf’s shorter essays, I examine Woolf’s depictions of subjects, their bodies, and the institutions that shape and mould them, and through her theorization of the common reader and society of outsiders explore Woolf’s theory of subjectivity designed to confound and subvert these institutions using the very same bodies they sought to discipline and optimize to serve their ideological purposes.
      Degree
      Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
      Department
      English
      Program
      English
      Supervisor
      Martin, Ann R.C.
      Committee
      Ella, Ophir; Findlay, Len; Morrison, Melanie; Lindsey, Banco
      Copyright Date
      November 2020
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/13002
      Subject
      Virginia Woolf
      Modernism
      Cultural Studies
      Biopolitics Theory
      Subjectivity
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      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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