dc.description.abstract | Within the paradigm of modernist “inward turn,” Virginia Woolf has often been regarded as a writer of consciousness and psychological depths par excellence. The overarching aim of this thesis is to contest this common understanding of Woolf and to reconsider Woolf’s famous plea to “look within life.” Following a renewed critical interest in issues of materiality evidenced by recent discourses called “new materialisms,” this thesis zeroes in on Mrs. Ramsay’s cashmere shawl in Virginia Woolf’s high modernist novel To the Lighthouse to engage with the irreducible vibrant materiality in her writing. While Mrs. Ramsay’s cashmere shawl has been recognized as an essential trope in the novel, I ask how a thing-centered reading that attends to its materiality can expand and complicate a traditional metaphorical interpretation of the shawl. As a counteraction against the linguistic turn or the cultural turn in poststructuralist theory, new materialisms draw attention to the agential forces of the matter itself. One of the major inspirations of this material turn is Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference-in-itself that foregrounds the continuous modulation of material forces. To illuminate the materiality of the shawl and its textile imagination, after delineating the development of Woolf studies and new materialisms, Chapter One draws on Deleuze’s operative concept of the Baroque fold as an organizing refrain of folding, unfolding, and refolding throughout this thesis. Bringing the Deleuzian fold into play with other two conceptual pairs of form and force, molar and molecular, I formulate two different kinds of approaches to the flowing materiality of Mrs. Ramsay’s cashmere shawl. Chapter Two performs what I call a molar-form reading that aims to unfold the history of Kashmir shawl. Building upon a thing-centered literary criticism that foregrounds the instability of metonymy and the concrete materiality of novelistic objects, this chapter takes the shawl literally as a historical object and attempts to unfold its imperialist history of production, circulation and consumption. In this way I argue that any formalist reading that disavows this imperialist history is questionable. Delving into the historical archive before returning to the textual figuration of the novel, I further suggest that a paradox of Kashmir shawl can be located between the discourses of Orientalism and the British imperial modernity, entailing an inner conflict at the heart of modernist aesthetics. To deal with this paradox of Kashmir shawl, Chapter Three as a molecular-force reading does not take this novelistic shawl as a metaphor, nor a metonymy, but a “matter-fold” that implicates the forces of impersonal duree in a differential relation. Taking the shawl as a matter-fold, this chapter suggests how it becomes an “event” of impersonal Memory and reveals the affect of childhood in Cam’s “becoming-child.” By reconsidering the questions of aesthetics in terms of affectivity and sensate perception, I argue that the radicality of Lily’s vision at the end does not lie in its correspondence to the Bloomsbury aesthetics, nor in its anti-representational critique of imperialism, but in an “aesthetics of impersonality” that replaces the molar distinction between subject and object with a molecular differentiation between “bodies of affectivity,” as in Woolf’s impersonal art of fiction. By refolding the matter-fold of cashmere shawl into the fabric of common life, this thesis affirms the singularity of Woolf’s impersonal aesthetics and evokes her conviction in literature as conclusion. As Woolf asserts, “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.” If Woolf’s writing embodies a “politics of aesthetics,” then it does not lie elsewhere but in this fabric of the essential thing that Woolf calls “life.” | en |