The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose (Ad Feminam) - Hardcover

Little Ph.D., Dr. Judy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809320614 ISBN 13: 9780809320615

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic, Judy Little utilizes the insights of Bakhtin and theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard as strategies for examining the political complexity of the "self" as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christine Brooke-Rose construct it in their fiction.

Little demonstrates that the tradition of the self-as-individual belongs to a complex, intricately dialogic discourse, with the self being an ongoing experiment in heteroglossia rather than a single, monologic "ism." Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose, she argues, manifest a creative, experimental relationship to Western discourses of subjectivity, and their novels construct ideologically mobile selves that thrive on dialogic appropriation and transformation.

Among the novels in which Woolf explores subjectivity, Jacob’s Room and The Waves are the most complex. Little shows that in Jacob’s Room, Woolf reverses narrative tradition, the creatively dialogic female narrator appropriating a textually "masculine" status while reserving for Jacob the textual position of the "other," the feminine. The Waves questions subjectivity more radically, the fragmented soliloquies implying that the post-modern self has a relational and "feminine" origin after the demise of grand narratives.

Examining Pym’s major novels, Little locates the inventive discourse of the author’s eccentrics in their dialogic construction of the "trivial." Pym’s strategically conventional narrative style privileges the marginal symbolic discourses by which the experimental selves in her fiction appropriate the insignificant as a mode of signification.

Little notes that whether the experimental selves in the fiction of Brooke-Rose are human or mere texts on a computer screen, they all respond to crises with a courageous faith in the self-inventive capacity of language. These heteroglossic subjectivities appropriate, amalgamate, and generally maneuver the resources of narrative into fresh (and often comic) scenarios of origin, author, and self.

Discussing the novels of Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose, Little defines experimental in terms of subjectivity (how the text constructs the self) rather than in the more traditional terms of the transgression of narrative levels and typographical features. Little also breaks with tradition in her use of Bakhtin. Most studies discuss Bakhtin’s views philosophically and theoretically. By contrast, Little employs Bakhtin’s ideas as strategies for reading and analyzing the discourses that are present in a text.

About this title

About the Author

Judy Little is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her other publications include Keats as a Narrative Poet: A Test of Invention and Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism.

Review

"The Experimental Self draws on a sophisticated theoretical apparatus without that apparatus ever intruding on the most pleasurable aspect of this text: its lucid readings of the fiction. The book is superbly written, very clearly organized, and always accessible. It uses contemporary critical theory (e.g., Lacan, Barthes, Foucault) with a deftness that is quite unusual and also shows a rich awareness of the body of critical work on each of the writers treated. This is a model of how to write criticism that draws upon theories that are not specifically literary yet have clear implications for our understanding of the act of reading."—Mark Hussey, Pace University

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0809320614
• ISBN 13: 9780809320615
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224