The Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.

Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett find their most important subject in the inner life of the mind, and their techniques try to portray the mind as if it were in the process of receiving impressions about the outside world. They are convinced that a person's impressions are the real stuff of existence. Put simply, their epistemology suggests that each person lives in a world of impressions of the external world, not in that world itself. Hence the relationship between the perceiving mind and the outside world becomes problematic. The problem is, variously, how one ascertains that outside world or how one connects or communicates with it. At an extreme, this epistemology veers towards solipsism--the notion that one cannot ascertain anything outside the self and that one's impressions are the only reality. I am interested in the relationship between the form of a novel and the epistemology it implies. With these writers, the form--which can be grouped loosely under the heading of interior monologue--runs the risk of suggesting solipsism. My first question, then, is how these three authors in their mature fiction (especially in The Waves, Finnegans Wake, and The Unnamable) either circumvent or verify solipsism. Of course, many philosophers have debated this problem. My contention is that Woolf and Joyce--apart from the fact that they are artists, not philosophers--refute the possibility of solipsism in an original way. Generally, the refutation of solipsism relies upon some acknowledgment that the outside world exists independently, apart from the perceiving self. As such, one moves outward from the self to verify the outside world. But Woolf and Joyce, in The Waves and Finnegans Wake burrow farther and farther inward until the depths of an individual mind reveal universal patterns. Things are connected under the surface. These writers suggest that the sources of unity lie not in finding some publicly shared belief, but, paradoxically, in becoming more private, delving deeper into an individual self to find the point at which that self merges with others. Beckett, on the other h and , suggests an uncompromising allegiance to the solitude of individual perceptions. In The Unnamable and in How It Is, he burrows farther and farther inward and finds no such unity as Woolf and Joyce do--only a perceiving self that is increasingly doubtful about any of his perceptions of the outside world and is hence solipsistic. But I see another question. One does not generally pick up a novel to see how it illustrates this or that idea. I am trying to approach these novels as luminous, vital works of art, written by living, breathing persons. I want to ask, why, after all, one reads them. I include biographical or other contextual information with the hope of coming to terms with an author's sensibility. My method throughout has been to follow Hemingway's advice and to write the first true, simple, declarative sentence that you know. The risk of this method is a kind of vulgar impressionism; its merit, if it succeeds, is that the felt impinging of these novels on my single sensibility will exp and to others'.Ph.D.Modern literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158031/1/8025808.pd

The function of age and the history of women's work: the career of an Australian teacher, 1907-1947

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