ENGLISH WRITTEN TEST I; SECOND TERM.

Answer the following questions going straight to the point.

1. What kind of education did V. Woolf receive?

Virginia grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and her education consisted in private Greek lessons. She ever read everything she wanted choosing the books from her father’s ones.

2. What was the trauma of her life?

Her life was signed by some traumas, by the death of the people he considered the most important in her life. The first trauma was the death of her mother, she died in 1895 when she was a child. Her death brought about her first nervous breakdown. She began to revolt against her father, whose death was the second trauma of her life but also the beginning of her literal production.

3. What was the Bloomsbury group?

The Bloomsbury group was a small, informal association of intellectuals who lived and worked in the centre of London. They questioned both the most important Victorian values and the concept of the personal relationship in the Victorian society. They had no political interest.

4. In which novel did V. Woolf experiment with new narrative techniques?

V. Woolf experimented new narrative techniques in her novel entitled Mrs Dalloway. Here she does not elevate the character to the level of myth, she shows their inner situation using the stream of consciousness.

5. What is the Common reader?

The common reader may be the reader that reads V. Woolf books without any possibility to understand them; the reader that used to read something else and is not used to read similar novels.

6. What makes of V. Woolf a modernist novelist?

V. Woolf is a modernist novelist because she wants to give voice to the inner world of the person, to the memoires and the feelings or emotions of the person. Her modern way of writing is expressed by the use of the stream of consciousness to underline all the characters’ thoughts connecting ones to another’s.

7. What kind of narrative technique/s did she privilege and why?

She privileged the use of the stream of consciousness, as already said in the previous answer. She realized a connection between the thoughts of the different characters bounding them through free relationships. She went inside the character’s minds presenting their ideas and momentary impressions as a continuous flux.

8. What is the relationship between the inner and outer world in her fiction?

V. Woolf wants to give voice to the inner world of her characters so the events of the story are only a way to go inside the character’s thoughts and them are not important in any other different way.

9. Why is plot reduced to the minimum in her fiction?

The plot, the events are reduced to the minimum because of the wanting of the woman as said in the previous answer: V. Woolf wants to give space to the interiority and not to the physical part of the characters’ lives so the events are not important and not said.

1. What is the difference between J. Joyce and V. Woolf fiction?

Bothe the writers use the stream of consciousness. V. Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control; she maintains logical and grammatical organization. She bounds the stream with the use of a third person narration. J. Joyce abandons every kind of organization.

1. What is a moment of being?

V. Woolf moment of being is similar to J. Joyce epiphany: it is a moment of daily life in which the person cans really see behind the appearances. The use of words is mainly poetic, allusive and emotional. In the moment of being the character experience what real life means and understands the real meaning of life itself. The moment of being can be compared to the authentic life of the Italian writer Pirandello.

2. Discuss the most relevant narrative features in the extract Clarissa and Septimus.

The extract is form the V. Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. It contains all the most relevant narrative techniques used by the novelist: the passage from Clarissa to Septimus is one of the changes of the stream of consciousness; there are direct and indirect speeches, introduced and not introduced; the setting refers to the characters’ feelings (flower’s description); the two characters’ are bounded by grammatical and ideological connections.