A Form for Writing 20th Century Loss: Aesthetics of Absence in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room
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Published:2021-07-30
Issue:25
Volume:
Page:35-53
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ISSN:2013-3294
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Container-title:452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada
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language:
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Short-container-title:452ºF
Abstract
Considered her first modernist novel, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) would be remembered for its experimental techniques to tell the story of Jacob who died in the First World War. Woolf’s construction of her ultimately unknowable character offers a distinct response to the changing realities of warfare and serves as a literary mode of mourning that seeks not to console, but rather to preserve and transmit absence provoked by the losses of the Great War. Here I offer an analysis of Woolf’s aesthetics of absence, which I contend anticipates later concerns in addressing experiences of mass violence in literature. In particular, I trace parallels in Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001).
Publisher
Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory