This article investigates the rise of the feminine creative voice in the age of modernism through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s fictional and nonfictional writings. Her invaluable insights into the long history of women’s subjugation, as well as the fortunes of her contemporaries, provide a framework for an examination of how women established their position as capable members of society in the changing modern milieu. This essay examines Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, and her polemical essay A Room of One’s (...) Own, with a view to demonstrating modern women’s path to creating their artistic identity. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity, I investigate women’s unique way of (re)gaining their confidence and articulating their own voice during the process of self-formation. Following Woolf’s lead, I consider their double status: as both an object of fascination in works of literature and a source of oppression in real life. I also use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of historically effected consciousness (Wirkungsgeschichtes Bewusstsein) to reveal the productive interpretative distance that can help us unravel the complexities of the historical and contingent nature of the development of the female artistic genius. An interrogation of women’s imaginative self-manifestations opens the way to the discovery of crucial truths that pertain to the hermeneutics of female creativity. (shrink)

Proposing his conception of narrative identity in Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur holds that human life is comprehensible, once the story of a man’s life has actually been told, and it is the narrative of one’s life which constructs one’s identity. Developing his theory of heteroglossia and the polyphony of human speech, explicated chiefly in Speech Genres and The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin recognizes the intrinsically intertwining character of utterance and response. According to him, utterance is always addressed to someone (...) and antedates an answer. Bakhtin’s “addressivity,” as well as his view of discourse as fundamentally dialogic, are convergent with Ricoeur’s elucidation both of man’s answerability to the Other and of narrative identity. The dynamic character of narrative identity, as construed by Ricoeur, converges with the dynamic nature of language as viewed by Bakhtin. The aim of this article is to study the intersections of Ricoeur’s narrative theory and Bakhtin’s recognition of the polyphonic nature of speech. I view these as inherently interrelated, and as testifying, respectively, to the philosophical and linguistic aspects of one and the same phenomenological vision. That vision accounts for selfhood, understood as vulnerable and contextualized, while also recognizing that it is conveyed by means of language with its essentially dialogic openness. (shrink)

Proposing his conception of narrative identity in Oneself as Another, Paul Ricœur holds that human life is comprehensible, once the story of a man’s life has actually been told, and it is the narrative of one’s life which constructs one’s identity. Developing his theory of heteroglossia and the polyphony of human speech, explicated chiefly in Speech Genres and The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin recognizes the intrinsically intertwining character of utterance and response. According to him, utterance is always addressed to someone (...) and antedates an answer. Bakhtin’s “addressivity,” as well as his view of discourse as fundamentally dialogic, are convergent with Ricœur’s elucidation both of man’s answerability to the Other and of narrative identity. The dynamic character of narrative identity, as construed by Ricœur, converges with the dynamic nature of language as viewed by Bakhtin. The aim of this article is to study the intersections of Ricœur’s narrative theory and Bakhtin’s recognition of the polyphonic nature of speech. I view these as inherently interrelated, and as testifying, respectively, to the philosophical and linguistic aspects of one and the same phenomenological vision. That vision accounts for selfhood, understood as vulnerable and contextualized, while also recognizing that it is conveyed by means of language with its essentially dialogic openness. (shrink)

Addressing trauma as a phenomenon which happens on the level of the human psyche and body, this article explores the impact of the interlocking nature of human lingual and bodily being in discovering a fuller possibility of interpreting and understanding woundedness. The non-transparent and problematic character of trauma calls for a hermeneutic investigation in order to gain a far-reaching insight into what happens with us and in us in traumatic experience. The imperative to understand the situation of affliction is an (...) unending task which not only relies upon extant understandings but continually pro-vokes new ones. I argue that the process of healing, encompassing the spoken and bodily narrative, does not establish a secure equilibrium, but rather searches for self-restoring, healing energy and commences ever new understandings of what needs to be comprehended and healed. This article offers an examination of trauma as featured in three short stories by British authors: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to exemplify the possibilities of literature to shed light on the intricate nature of traumatic experience. It interrogates the ways in which literature, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis meaningfully converge. (shrink)

Proposing his conception of narrative identity in Oneself as Another, Paul Ricœur holds that human life is comprehensible, once the story of a man’s life has actually been told, and it is the narrative of one’s life which constructs one’s identity. Developing his theory of heteroglossia and the polyphony of human speech, explicated chiefly in Speech Genres and The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin recognizes the intrinsically intertwining character of utterance and response. According to him, utterance is always addressed to someone (...) and antedates an answer. Bakhtin’s “addressivity,” as well as his view of discourse as fundamentally dialogic, are convergent with Ricœur’s elucidation both of man’s answerability to the Other and of narrative identity. The dynamic character of narrative identity, as construed by Ricœur, converges with the dynamic nature of language as viewed by Bakhtin. The aim of this article is to study the intersections of Ricœur’s narrative theory and Bakhtin’s recognition of the polyphonic nature of speech. I view these as inherently interrelated, and as testifying, respectively, to the philosophical and linguistic aspects of one and the same phenomenological vision. That vision accounts for selfhood, understood as vulnerable and contextualized, while also recognizing that it is conveyed by means of language with its essentially dialogic openness. (shrink)

The supple and ever-present search for the possibilities offered by the narrative form in fictional writing corresponds to the use of the narrative as a mode of understanding and explaining our being-in-the-world in philosophy. The intimate liaison between the realm of fictional imagination and that of human everydayness inspires writers to seek ways to tackle issues of temporality, the conflicting character of human drives, and the ultimately unresolvable tension between finitude and infinitude. As a literary and philosophical category, the narrative (...) remains an inexhaustible space for the exploration of the way we understand our lives. I propose a hermeneutic investigation of the interactions between the art of narration and the categories of space, presence/absence, and (be)- longingness as evoked in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This article engages Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and, more specifically, his notions of homelessness and homecoming, to shed light on the inimitable character of Woolf’s artistic representations of the spatial dimension of human existence, reality viewed as both tremulous and solid, as well as of human embodiment and the disparity/closeness between the corporeal and the spiritual. (shrink)

The supple and ever-present search for the possibilities offered by the narrative form in fictional writing corresponds to the use of the narrative as a mode of understanding and explaining our being-in-the-world in philosophy. The intimate liaison between the realm of fictional imagination and that of human everydayness inspires writers to seek ways to tackle issues of temporality, the conflicting character of human drives, and the ultimately unresolvable tension between finitude and infinitude. As a literary and philosophical category, the narrative (...) remains an inexhaustible space for the exploration of the way we understand our lives. I propose a hermeneutic investigation of the interactions between the art of narration and the categories of space, presence/absence, and (be)longingness as evoked in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This article engages Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and, more specifically, his notions of homelessness and homecoming, to shed light on the inimitable character of Woolf’s artistic representations of the spatial dimension of human existence, reality viewed as both tremulous and solid, as well as of human embodiment and the disparity/closeness between the corporeal and the spiritual. (shrink)