[Vwoolf] Woolf and memory

[Jeannette Smyth]

Here's a pdf for the Pericles Lewis, which is fascinating. (And as a lagniappe has VW's full critique of Ulysses (to which, Lewis argues, Proust was her antidote), which isn't wrong. Joyce can be a showoff.)

https://webspace.yale.edu/pericleslewis/documents/Romanic99i01PERICLESLEWIS.pdf

Thanks
JS

On Oct 10, 2012, at 1:29 PM, coruscate818 wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
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> >
> > Jeannette Smyth
> > jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
> > 1522 San Patricio Ave. SW
> > Albuquerque, N.M. 87104
> >
> >
> >
> >
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Jeannette Smyth
jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
1522 San Patricio Ave. SW
Albuquerque, N.M. 87104



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