The production of a reading: Self and world in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In my thesis, I investigate the reading process and the resultant literary work which a reader, in this case myself, produces by working on a literary text. I assume competent readers share certain modes of appropriation which enable them to constitute virtual texts from the novels they read. In my introduction,I investigate the reading process by describing it, by defining a literary text, and by investigating the ways I make information meaningful and use redundancy, constraints, gaps of indeterminacy, and my codification process to read a text. I also investigate my discursive and non-discursive experiences in reading a novel by examining several of Virginia Woolf's texts, which I analyze in the body of my thesis, several of her essays which deal with reading, and the unpublished An on in which I focus on the development of that self who becomes the modem reader. In my next three chapters , I also use the methodological assumptions I discuss in the introduction to investigate the literary works I produce, in Chapter Two , by reading The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves where I relate my conception of the self to character in a literary work and constitute the characters repudiating their individuality in favor of a collective consciousness. In my third chapter I discuss Night and Day, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and The Years and investigate the characters' relationships to a society which impedes rather than helps them exist in the intersubjective world. In my final, concluding chapter, I investigate my experiences in reading Between the Acts and two of Woolf's shorter texts where I confront similar problems which are relevant themes in my work on Woolf's other texts.