Abstract
An investigation of the narrative voice in Jacob’s Room leads O’Hara to track occurrences of the “unseizable force,” tantamount to a force of nature, embedded in the text. Through this force, O’Hara demonstrates, Woolf invokes a romantic version of the sublime, an overwhelming form of nature juxtaposed with transcendent reason; and in doing so, she conjures echoes of the great thinkers of the past, particularly Wordsworth, Kant, Coleridge, and Shelley. In Jacob’s Room, reason takes the shape of social critique, thereby lacing the sublime with ironic overtones. O’Hara finds the modern ironic sublime in scenes in the British Museum and then heightened when Jacob visits Greece. The final chapter underscores the transparency of the sublime, O’Hara argues, by allowing readers to inconclusively access multiple earlier thinkers.
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Notes
See Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Wool/(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 50: “There is no doubt in my mind [on Jacob’s Room’s publication] that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice” (Diary 2 186).
See Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), chap. 3, pp. 63–86.
See Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino, eds. Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Suzanne Raitt, ed. Jacob’s Room: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), p. 124.
Sharon R. Yang, “Subversion of the Prelude in Jacob’s Room, or the Woolf Who Cried Wordsworth,” The Midwest Quarterly, 45, 4 (Summer 2004), 331–353.
See Sue Roe, ed. Jacob’s Room. Edited with an Introduction and Notes (London: Penguin, 1991), note 18, p. 168.
See “Lucretius,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/lucretius/). See also Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).
For his latest on the subject, see Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), p. 38.
Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Zackary Leader and Michael O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 114–115.
See Jean Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2014).
For the definitive critique of this painting and the scholarly controversy it sparked, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
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© 2015 Daniel T. O’Hara
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O’Hara, D.T. (2015). Burning through Every Context: On Narrating the Modern Sublime in Jacob’s Room. In: Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_2
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