[Vwoolf] Woolf and memory

[coruscate818]

See also:
 Gabrielle McIntire, *Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T.S. Eliot and
Virginia Woolf. * (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Pericles Lewis, "Proust, Woolf, and Modern Fiction," *Romanic Review* 99
(2008).

In addition to reading the *Recherche* while writing her major novels,
Woolf had also been reading (and arguably reworking) Wordsworth's "The
Prelude" (D 3: 236) while composing *The Waves.** *

Portions of *The Waves* alluding to "The Waste Land" touch on collective
and historical memory: “It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do
from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency—that sense of the
generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale
who sings conquests and migrations” (283).

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Jeannette Smyth <
jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Fascinating question.
> I would throw out her last novel Between the Acts, as addressing history
as memory. (As almost all of her novels are history or eulogy,  "memory" --
recherche de temps perdu, as you stipulate -- arguably can be the subject
of everything she wrote.)
> And, On Being Ill, an essay she wrote on the caves of thought one wanders
when ill, is as her biographer Hermione Lee points out, extremely
provocative.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/dec/18/classics.virginiawoolf
> Woolf wrote, in a letter to Ethel Smyth (#2254: 10/16/30) that everything
she wrote about arose from within her mental illness, specifically, the
second half of the 1915-1917 breakdown, in which she lay in bed at Hogarth
House and "thus sketched, I think, all that I now, by the light of reason,
try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew and
others, not in substance but in idea)". If that stream of consciousness she
seems to be describing can be called memory, then, yes.
>
> Thank you.
> Jeannette Smyth
>
> On Oct 9, 2012, at 8:35 PM, Sally Greene wrote:
>
> A friend asks, Did Virginia Woolf have anything to say about historical
memory, or issues of memory, say, the way Proust thought about memory (or
the way we do today when engaging in "memory studies")? I said I would ask
the highest possible authority.
>
> So . . . anyone?
>
> Thanks,
> Sally
>
> --
> Sally Greene
>
> Associate Director    |    UNC Center for the Study of the American South
> http://uncsouth.org   |    (919) 962-0553
>
> Papers on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/author=1095473
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
>
>
> Jeannette Smyth
> jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
> 1522 San Patricio Ave. SW
> Albuquerque, N.M. 87104
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20121010/f7fa3dac/attachment.html>