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JBais - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf - Structural Analysis of the Extract - page 531
by - (2012-01-15)
Up to 5B - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce
Jessica Bais 5B
The text is an extract from "The Common Reader" , a collection of essays, written by Virginia Woolf in 1925.
Mrs. Woolf's aim is to express her opinion about the way the novel should be written with. The extract develops in two sequences. In the first one Virginia Woolf states that the old novel isn't able to express life. To sustain her thesis, she develops an argumentation: she says that old novelists focus their attention so much on the book length, on useless details, and on a reality different to the vision of our mind that they lose sight of the true sense of life. Old novelists follow this writing way so much that all they seems equal, "constrained by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant".
In the second sequence Virginia Woolf analyses what life really is: it isn't " a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged", it isn't a regular and rational process of events, but it's "a luminous halo", a continuous and varying flow of perceptions which strike the human mind. Consequently, in order to convey the true sense of existence, modern novelists tell the story exploring characters minds, through new innovative narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness, the shift of the point of view and the interior monologue. Furthermore, new novelists focus their attention on the psychological and subjective sphere, neglect objective and useless aspects of live and develop a more complex but more brief plot.
The text is an extract from "The Common Reader" , a collection of essays, written by Virginia Woolf in 1925.
Mrs. Woolf's aim is to express her opinion about the way the novel should be written with. The extract develops in two sequences. In the first one Virginia Woolf states that the old novel isn't able to express life. To sustain her thesis, she develops an argumentation: she says that old novelists focus their attention so much on the book length, on useless details, and on a reality different to the vision of our mind that they lose sight of the true sense of life. Old novelists follow this writing way so much that all they seems equal, "constrained by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant".
In the second sequence Virginia Woolf analyses what life really is: it isn't " a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged", it isn't a regular and rational process of events, but it's "a luminous halo", a continuous and varying flow of perceptions which strike the human mind. Consequently, in order to convey the true sense of existence, modern novelists tell the story exploring characters minds, through new innovative narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness, the shift of the point of view and the interior monologue. Furthermore, new novelists focus their attention on the psychological and subjective sphere, neglect objective and useless aspects of live and develop a more complex but more brief plot.