“A Very Remarkable Piece of Iron”: Towards a Theory of Material Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects”

M. Štefl
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the supposed lack of “humanity” in Woolf’s short stories and novels by identifying its source in the sphere of “solid objects” and in the way these “objects” destabilize the coherence of what the western philosophical tradition typically refers to as “subject” (in the Cartesian sense). Referring to Moore’s direct realism as well as James’s and Mach’s radical empiricism, the discussion focuses on specific states of heightened perceptive intensity in which the perceiving subject stumbles on the verge of collapse and “mixes” itself with what it perceives. By considering these limit cases, this paper tries to demonstrate the way in which Woolf’s fiction might in fact be understood as illustrative of the process of de-humanizing de-centralization and dispersion of the already fluid consciousness and its blending with the impersonal material objects, resulting in a complete loss of one idea of “the human” (an idea based on the intellectual autonomy and sovereignty of a unified subject) and pointing towards a post-human and post-modern condition in which human becomes defined by the ever-widening circle of its own outside
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“一块非凡的铁”:弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫《固体》中的物质想象理论
摘要本文探讨了伍尔夫的短篇小说和长篇小说中所谓的“人性”的缺失,通过确定其在“固体物体”领域的来源,以及这些“物体”如何破坏西方哲学传统中典型的“主体”(笛卡尔意义上的)的一致性。参考摩尔的直接现实主义以及詹姆斯和马赫的激进经验主义,讨论的重点是提高感知强度的特定状态,在这种状态下,感知主体在崩溃的边缘绊倒,并将自己与它所感知的东西“混合”在一起。通过考虑这些有限的案例,本文试图证明伍尔夫的小说实际上可以被理解为一种说明过程的方式去人性化,去中心化和分散已经流动的意识以及它与非个人的物质对象的融合,导致“人”的观念(一种基于统一主体的知识自主和主权的观念)的完全丧失,并指向一种后人类和后现代的状态,在这种状态下,人被自身外部不断扩大的圈子所定义
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