Virginia Woolf's Common Reader

Katerina Koutsantoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754662648
• eBook ISBN: 9781317001560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the first comprehensive study of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, Katerina Koutsantoni draws on theorists from the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to investigate the thematic pattern underpinning these books with respect to the persona of the 'common reader'. Though these two volumes are the only ones that Woolf compiled herself, they have seldom been considered as a whole. As a result, what they reveal about Woolf's position with regard to the processes of writing, reading, and critical analysis has not been fully examined. Koutsantoni challenges the critical commonplace that equates Woolf's strategy of self-effacement and personal removal from her works as a necessary compromise that allowed her to achieve authorial recognition in a male-dominated context. Rather, Koutsantoni argues that an investigation of impersonality in Woolf's essays reveals the potential of the genre to function both as a vehicle for the subjective and dialogic expression of the author and reader and as a venue for exploring topics with which the ordinary reader can relate. As she explores and challenges the meaning of impersonality in Woolf's Common Reader, Koutsantoni shows how the related issues of subjectivity, authority, reader-response, intersubjectivity, and dialogism offer useful perspectives from which to examine Woolf's work.

Chapter 1
Why go on with these essays?

This book is based on the theory of the ‘essay’ as a genre, by concentrating on its key parameters of personal expression and dialogic intent. The aim is to focus on the subjective and dialogic facets of the essay genre and point out the relation such aspects bear to issues of authority, authoritarianism, power, solidarity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, so as to challenge the claim for impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s essays. Making its appearance in sixteenth-century France with Michel de Montaigne, the essay has not been discussed to exhaustion by critics. There is, consequently, a scarcity of scholarship on the subject, which renders the exploration of its features problematic.

Defining the Essay Genre

There is dispute over the definition of the essay and its classification as a distinct genre. In 1982 Heather Dubrow defined it as ‘the notion basically alluding to literary types’, by exploring the relationship between author and reader further. For her, genre functions like a code of behaviour established between the author and their reader.1 This is the tool a writer utilises in order not only to make certain statements about his or her art, but also to respond to others’ pronouncements and expectations. As Bakhtin and Medvedev have claimed, every genre represents a special way of constructing and finalising a whole, finalising it essentially and thematically. In other words, a genre is viewed as an instrument conferring thematic unity on a text and presupposes a particular audience, constructing a relationship between the audience and the author.2

In his Structuralist Poetics Jonathan Culler suggests that genres constitute sets of expectations which allow sentences of a language to become signs of different kinds. The same sentence can adopt a variety of meanings and interpretations depending on the genre in which it is situated.3 Similarly to Culler, Bakhtin’s definition of genres focuses on their linguistic versatility.4 On the other hand, Tzvetan Todorov has commented on genres only to remark bluntly that it is a vain, if not an anachronistic, pastime to persist in being concerned with them.5 They do exist but are by no means clear-cut nor do they obey distinct rules of categorisation and trait-description. It is more than common that a genre derives from another and constitutes the corollary of combination, replacement or even inversion of several genres.6 If ‘genre’ is taken to be a synonym of ‘literary field’, as Bourdieu perceived it in his sociological model of literary analysis, then it is a social microcosm that has its own structure and its own laws. Writers, publishers, critics, printers, distributors and readers are all specialists with particular interests that fit in this self-contained world.7

Attempts to define the genre of the essay have touched upon its different aspects, ascribing to it a distinct multi-perspectivism that renders its description less than concrete. This is where the uniqueness of the essay lies: in its indefinability, its inability to be neatly labelled. Edward Said, perceiving the essay as the medium in which criticism is expressed, posits questions on the genre which are not immediately answerable. Some include:

Does it [the essay] stand between the text and the reader, or to one side of one of them? How great, or how little, is the ironic disparity between its essential formal incompleteness, because it is an essay, and the formal completion of the text it treats? … What is the essay’s marginality to the text it discusses? … Is the essay a text, an intervention between texts, an intensification of the notion of textuality, or a dispersion of language from a contingent page to occasions, tendencies, currents, or movements in and for history?8

I will address some of these questions in this and in the chapters to come, but the uncertainty Said discerns will remain. The effort to erect frontiers between genres, after all, has never been particularly easy. It is true that generic boundaries are drawn with sharpness only to be erased with new ease; it is often impossible to establish where they have been erased or where certain of the warring parties have already crossed over into alien territory.9 This admittedly presents extreme difficulties for any analyst but it need not always be viewed as a problem, especially not in the case of the essay where it has proved to be a blessing in disguise. The initial motivation of the essay was the desire to move away from genre restrictions, in the direction of formlessness. Whereas established genres carry with them a whole series of prescriptions and limitations, some codified in the pronouncements of rhetoricians and others less so, the essay disrupts the status quo by refusing to succumb to rules of definition, in the sense of predetermined guidelines.10

Such rejection of homogeneity that would result from placing the essay in a particular genre may stem from the belief that genre categories are often merely strategies for avoiding thought. One can also argue, of course, that genres exist to help organise thought by giving it structure. If we take genre to be the medium which offers the organisational framework mediating between text and context, as Felski contends, then the text has the potential of becoming meaningful insofar as it is read in relation to existing expectations governing the reception of forms of textual communication. The category of genre provides the cultural matrix against which the significance of the individual text can be measured.11 However, it also sounds possible that if one can categorise something, one does not have to think in too much detail about the specific text.12 Or, as Susan Suleiman writes, the perception and naming of a genre are interpretive and evaluative acts which indicate, prior to any commentary, a certain attitude on the part of the reader or critic. One can probably say about all genres that to name them is already to interpret them by half.13

Even though the essay tended to escape this intense struggle of categorisation, it has come to amass a group of characteristics over time, and is now recognised by the majority of critics as an independent genre. Hall defines the essay as ‘a kind of written discourse which allows the author to think freely outside the constraints of established authority and traditional rhetorical forms’.14 Similar to this view runs Brugman’s definition of the essay as constituting a subjective form of expression relatively free from the constraints of academic argument.15 Deriving from the verb ‘to essay’, the French ‘essais’, meaning to experiment, to try out, the principal idea of the essay genre consists in putting to a test, experimenting on one’s cognitive powers and limits.16 This explains the essay’s treatment as an informal, colloquial form of writing, flexible when being handled by writers in the sense of its offering a variety of content, tone and meanings, and easily accessible to readers.

Besides Montaigne’s key influence on the formation of Woolf’s position, through his focus on the subjective and the discursive elements, one ought also to consider the precedent set by Woolf’s English predecessors, essayists such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele or Leslie Stephen. In the early eighteenth century it was Addison and Steele who parodied the scholar-critic’s approach to literature and promoted instead a conversational perspective from which literary texts should be seen. Their essays encouraged reader-response at tea-tables and in coffee-houses allowing the discussion of literature within the range of the ordinary middle-class reader.17 Debates in such coffee-house societies were open to women, rendering Woolf’s own position as a female writer in relation to the essay particularly relevant. Leslie Stephen’s own active interest in essay writing can also be viewed as having clear influence on Woolf’s thought. Although there were differences in their regard of the established critic or reviewer and their importance in judging the value of literary texts, an element on which they both concurred was the pleasure the essay should offer. Writing on an obscure author, as Annan reported back in 1951, Leslie Stephen emphasised the view that ‘most readers … like things to be made pleasant’.18 Stephen’s ideas anticipate dialogic and pluralistic modes, as argued by Cuddy-Keane, thus foreshadowing those of Woolf.19

Critics view the essay as an open-ended personal commentary on a writer’s life and surroundings, leading to observations on the human condition, and written in a way that is unencumbered by rigid rules of form.20 The essay is characterised by an openness to any subject imaginable, charging it with a capaciousness and adaptability, similar to that found in the novel.21 But above all, the essay is an art-form, as Georg Lukács, one of the first people to celebrate its birth, argued in 1911.22 Due to its uniqueness in terms of form, which consists in great experience and truth to life and constitutes the foundation of the genre, the essay qualifies as a work of art. On first impression, Lukács runs diagonally antithetical to Adorno, the theorist who wrote about the essay genre in 1958, and who insisted that it is distinguished from art by its medium, its concepts and its claim to a truth devoid of aesthetic semblance.23 However, what Adorno is arguing for is a universal acceptance that art and science are in fact interwoven and find flesh in the genre of the essay:

Art has always been so intertwined with the dominant tendencies of enlightenment that it has made use of scientif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Conversing with the Reader
• 1 Why go on with these essays?
• 2 We must remain readers
• 3 I do not love to be led by the nose … by authority
• 4 To forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality … & practise anonymity
• 5 In all writing, it’s the person’s own edge that counts
• 6 Society is a nest of glass boxes one separate from another
• Conclusion – With this odd mix up of public & private I left off
• Bibliography
• Index