- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
Dancing To the Lighthouse
- Chapter:
- (p.122) Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- Source:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Author(s):
Janet Winston
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter offers a kinetic reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. More specifically, it discusses the ways that To the Lighthouse depends upon movement for its effect, thereby making it a “kinetic art.” To the Lighthouse deals with ephemerality and shares a preoccupation associated with dance. A focus on what Randy Martin calls “the kinesthesia of daily life” reveals Woolf's reliance on descriptions of movement to delineate character, create narrative tension, and construct ontological and epistemological oppositions that underlie To the Lighthouse. The chapter explores To the Lighthouse's concern with “temporal movement” in relation to the movement of the thinking mind. It considers descriptions of body language and locomotion as characters go about their business, as well as the characters' and the reader's sensate experience of motion achieved by Woolf's use of imagery and metaphor, and by changes in prose tempo—a kind of literary kinesthesia.
Keywords: dance, To the Lighthouse, kinetic art, ephemerality, kinesthesia, temporal movement, body language, locomotion, imagery
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
