Ella Zohar Ophir is lecturer at the University of Toronto. Forthcoming essays include a study of the fictions of Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis and an inquiry into modernist treatments of everyday life.
The Note Books of a Woman Alone (1935), the posthumously published notebooks of an impoverished London clerk, provokes reconsideration of what counts as an individual voice. More than half the text is comprised of quotations and extracts; Evelyn Wilson’s textual collecting, however, was deeply enmeshed with her diary writing. Blurring transcription and expression, her practice of self-inscription lays bare the intersubjective nature of self-definition and the composite nature of any textual voice.
Countering the trend of modernist fiction, Wyndham Lewis and Laura Riding sought to eliminate, rather than illuminate, psychological depth. The Wild Body (1927) and Progress of Stories (1936) issue from a critique of the role of empathy in the arts, which is rooted in anxiety about power and culture in mass democracies. Theories of abstraction and of comedy are implicated in these fictions as means to a primary end: the replacement of empathetic response with an "anesthesia of the heart." Lewis hoped to effect a fundamental political transformation, Riding, a spiritual one. In the service of their visions, they used fiction to resist imagining other subjectivities
Offering a thoughtful consideration of the everyday in modernist literature and art, Ella Ophir (University of Toronto) situates modernist literature in a ‘long and broad aesthetic trend’ beginning with the Romantic glorification of the commonplace. Suggesting that everyday objects, exchanges and actions function beyond the concept of ‘defamiliarization’, Ophir reframes modernism's engagement with the quotidian to include ‘the reclamation of undistinguished life, the constitution of character and the representation of consciousness and temporality’.
Woolf’s diary served manifold purposes; this paper addresses Woolf’s intention, explicit and sustained, to create a detailed record of the past for the future. As a diarist Woolf becomes at once archivist, historiographer, and her own posterity—both actual, in her periodic rereading of her record, and projected, in the form of “Old Virginia,” the future self she imagines sitting down to write her memoirs. Once treated largely as a mass to be mined, Woolf’s diary has now been situated as a “work” among her others. I emphasize, rather, the difference of the diary as a process and practice that became an ongoing crucible for Woolf’s thinking about the past and its representations. In creating a record of her days, Woolf becomes intimately familiar with the ideological, idiosyncratic, and aleatory nature of the historical record and, further, with the unpredictable value of its contents, as their significance shifts under the continually altering lights of time. In the periodical structure of “A Sketch of the Past,” and in Woolf’s gently ironized regard for posterity, we see the diary’s lesson on the perpetual mobility of perspective on the past.
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