A Room of One’s Own and Modern Fiction Essays -- Lectures Literature P

A Room of onenesss have and Modern Fiction unrivaled of the first things to notice about A Room of Ones Own is that it is not a natural lecture. It rambles and flows back and forth, in and out. It is more narrative than logic. It breaks many of the conventions of a semiformal address. Why does Virginia Woolf choose to do this? Why choose this style, this method? One reason is to turn predominantly masculine, or traditional, thinking on its dealer in order to undermine its authority. There is another reason for her approach, yetone that rises from her most basic ideas about what literature and writing should be and do. Her ideas about what makes for good writing are contained in this text, if indirectly. Grasping these ideas allows the lecturer to see how she is able to write so convincingly, particularly since there seems to be such a significant lack of argument involved. Where she does not enumerate the ref what she thinks, she shows them. But why does she add an under graduate in a boat, and why a river? She is doing more than simply trying to keep the reader interested with a few colorful descriptions. She is showing us what she value most about writing while at the same fourth dimension artfully expressing her views on women and fiction.Woolf is a modernist, concerned with illuminating life with the subjective consciousness and its archetypes. Her seemingly random details and descriptions, in fact, bend together to paint a picture, to leave a skillfully crafted impression upon the reader. She believes the best door to the human mind and heart is finished the subjective. She places us inside the minds of others, where we, more often than not, find a little of ourselves. Eudora Welty writes, in her foreword to To the Lighthouse, The inte... ...onal narrator is scarcely able, scarcely bold enough, to drop a line of thought into these waters. Descriptions of dinners and the construction of buildings give the reader a detect of Woolfs picture of the world that no sermon, no argument, no plea, could. And it is through a taxi cab, holding a young man and a girl, and the massive force of the river that the entire work seems to float down, that she captures life and convinces us that she is telling the truth. Works CitedWelty, Eudora. Introduction. To the Lighthouse. By Virginia Woolf. 1927. Orlando, FL Harcourt calm and Co., 1981. vii-xii.Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. The Longman Anthology of WomensLiterature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York Longman, 2000. 16-72.---. Modern Fiction. The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New YorkHarcourt Brace and Co., 1985. 284-291.