‘We are extinct, lost in the abysses of time’: Temporality and the Nonhuman in Virginia Woolf’s Late Novels

Case, Oliver J. (2024) ‘We are extinct, lost in the abysses of time’: Temporality and the Nonhuman in Virginia Woolf’s Late Novels. PhD thesis, University of Worcester.

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Abstract

Temporality and the Nonhuman in Virginia Woolf’s Late Novels argues that the works studied herein offer provocative and urgent ways of understanding the position of the human as part of an ecology. In the process, the texts reconceive human mortality to offer an ethics of extinction conducive to a more sustainable approach to the environment. Five novels are studied in chronological order: To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), Flush (1933), and Between the Acts (1941). The first of these works evinces an interconnection between the author’s handling of narrative time and her representations of human/nonhuman entanglements. This evolving interrelationship is traced across the subsequent novels, producing a reading of them which reveals a latent environmental ethics of post-anthropocentrism concerning the human approach to mortality and possible understandings of species extinction. This study argues that Woolf’s late novels are an invaluable resource for contemporary discussions in literary studies regarding the response of the humanities to the climate crisis that we are currently facing.
This thesis establishes a theoretical framework for textual analysis which combines the works of Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Bergson. The first four of these figures provide the postmodernist ideas and provocations necessary for reinvigorating the relevance of Woolf’s writing for contemporary posthumanist debates. Of particular significance to this thesis are the ideas of the rhizome, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible, the nomadic subject, zoe-centered egalitarianism, and the iterable trace. Where the analysis of Woolf’s narrative temporalities is concerned, the works of Bergson offer an intuitive and complex refiguration of time as it is experienced, and a contextual touchstone for the philosophical ‘moment’ during which Woolf wrote the novels studied herein. This interweaving of theorists allows an image of posthuman time to be
explored in Woolf’s writing which is central to the novels’ significance for the evolving and burgeoning field of modernist ecocriticism.
The thesis is comprised of four chapters preceded by an introductory section and appended by a brief afterword. The four substantive chapters each take a single novel as their primary focus to show the evolutions in Woolf’s writing of both time and the nonhuman, and for the interconnection of these elements to be realised.

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