
Unveiling the Contemporary in Virginia Woolf
Author(s) -
Patricia Marouvo Fagundes
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
ilha do desterro
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2175-8026
pISSN - 0101-4846
DOI - 10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e74632
Subject(s) - order (exchange) , literature , philosophy , contemporary theory , art , aesthetics , art history , epistemology , finance , economics
This article aims to discuss Virginia Woolf’s critical appraisal of the contemporariness of her contemporaries’ production, focusing on her 1923 essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”. To that end, it contextualizes the publication of The Common Reader – First Series (1925) so as to problematize its conversational quality as a philosophical principle inherent to Woolf’s oeuvre (Pinho 2020). A comparison is also drawn between Woolf’s “How It Strikes a Contemporary” and Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” (2009) in order to shed light on the intersections between contemporary philosophy and the philosophical questions we find in Woolf’s writing.