Unveiling the Contemporary in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This article aims to discuss Virginia Woolf’s critical appraisal of the contemporariness of her contemporaries’ production, focusing on her 1923 essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”. To that end, it contextualizes the publication of The Common Reader – First Series (1925) so as to problematize its conversational quality as a philosophical principle inherent to Woolf’s oeuvre (Pinho 2020). A comparison is also drawn between Woolf’s “How It Strikes a Contemporary” and Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” (2009) in order to shed light on the intersections between contemporary philosophy and the philosophical questions we find in Woolf’s writing.