Three Guineas : Virginia Woolf's poetics of community

Authors

  • Chantal Delourme Paris Ouest Nanterre

Keywords:

community, myth, banishment, politics, profanation

Abstract

The paper addresses Virginia Woolf's approach of the political in Three Guineas through her placing the political under the paradigm of community. The import is manifold : it implies her anatomizing lethal and mortifying patriarchal structures and disclosing their paradoxical logic akin to what Agamben and Nancy have exposed as the structure of banishment. It rests on an ironical rhetoric of profanation which resemiotizes the sacred and redirects its demotic potential. It interrupts (as Jean-Luc Nancy would say) the myth of community and elaborates the risk and the chance of an "unfounded" community through the liminal position of the outsider.

Author Biography

Chantal Delourme, Paris Ouest Nanterre

Professeur de littérature anglaise. A publié un ouvrage sur Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse et de nombreux articles sur la fiction moderniste et postmoderniste. S'intéresse en particulier à la représentation de la question de la communauté et aux articulations entre philosophie et critique littéraire.
Couverture-L'Atelier-2.2-2010

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Published

2010-10-27

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2010): L'Essai

Section

ARTICLES

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