Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience

In her timely contribution to revisionist approaches in modernist studies, Lorraine Sim offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's conception of ordinary experience as revealed in her fiction and nonfiction. Contending that Woolf's representations of everyday life both acknowledge and provide a challenge to characterizations of daily life as mundane, Sim shows how Woolf explores the potential of everyday experience as a site of personal meaning, social understanding, and ethical value. Sim's argument develops through readings of Woolf's literary representations of a subject's engagement with ordinary things like a mark on the wall, a table, or colour; Woolf's accounts of experiences that are both common and extraordinary such as physical pain or epiphanic 'moments of being'; and Woolf's analysis of the effect of new technologies, for example, motor-cars and the cinema, on contemporary understandings of the external world. Throughout, Sim places Woolf's views in the context of the philosophical and lay accounts of ordinary experience that dominated the cultural thought of her time. These include British Empiricism, Romanticism, Platonic thought and Post-Impressionism. In addition to drawing on the major novels, particularly The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Sim focuses close attention on short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Solid Objects', and 'Blue & Green'; nonfiction works, including 'On Being Ill', 'Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car', and 'A Sketch of the Past'; and Woolf's diaries. Sim concludes with an account of Woolf's ontology of the ordinary, which illuminates the role of the everyday in Woolf's ethics.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience

Part 1. Quotidian Things

1. Factualism and the Search for Ordinary Things

2. Blue and Green: Sensations of Colour

Part 2. Rethinking Ordinary Experience

3. Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life

4. Motoring from Beauty to the Sublime

5. Moments of Being: Little Daily Miracles

Part 3. The Ordinary, Being, Ethics

6. Tracing Patterns

7. Woolf and the Ethics of the Ordinary

Bibliography

Index

"Sim prompts the reader to think in dialogue, and to think back, through Woolf, to the dusty roads, scraps of newspaper and daffodils in the breeze that bind the world together in a common mind. In this, she has succeeded, making the work a welcome contribution to Woolf studies, and modernist and inter-modernist debates more generally." --Cercles

"In all of its permutations, the keynote of the New Modernist Studies over the past ten or fifteen years has been a fascination with the ordinary. Lorraine Sim's Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010), which, in the cultural studies tradition, smoothly blends philosophical history with textual attentiveness and a keen awareness of the material conditions of Woolfian literary creation, represents the most thorough such contribution exclusively to Woolf studies of late." --Todd Avery, Virginia Woolf Bulletin

"Sim's careful, even-handed and meticulous book certainly enriches our understanding of Woolf, but also offers a nuanced and novel model of literary criticism in the field of everyday life studies." --Bryony Randall, Woolf Studies Annual