The immanent life of things : embodiment, materiality, and agency in Virginia Woolf’s “A sketch of the past,” and To the lighthouse

This report explores the agency of material entities in Virginia Woolf's autobiographically-influenced works, "A Sketch of the Past," and To the Lighthouse. It argues that Woolf's stream-of-consciousness aesthetics underscores the agency that material objects hold in, and via, human actions, encounters, and relationships. This agency comes about, or is manifested, through the ways in which these human actions, encounters, and relationships communicate emotion and affect. The material entities participate in such human phenomena as active agents, sorting and regulating them -- either in/via the human memory, or through the ways in which human emotions are channelled. In order to demonstrate the affective and embodied intimations by which material entities are attributed agency in Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, the analysis draws on Bruno Latour’s theory of “protoactants,” Jane Bennett’s distinction between thingness and object-ness, as well as Stacy Alaimo’s theory, “trans-corporeality.”

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Aycicegi, Mustafa

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Merle), 1964-

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Salgado, César

• Virginia Woolf
• Object
• Thing
• Stream-of-consciousness
• Affect
• Embodiment

Language dc:language.iso

English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/59421

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/132077