Title: Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Abstract: Virginia Woolf and Edmund Husserl both offer highly stratified visions of consciousness, relying on an interplay between “natural” and “transcendental” strata, to use Husserl’s phenomenological vocabulary, or between “being” and writing, to use terms closer to Woolf’s. Furthermore, stratification is also a feature of their respective conceptions of the work of art, in which visual representation is understood as including physical as well as psychological layers: looking at a painting always means adding one’s own conceptions and intuitions to the original stratum of the painted canvas. In Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe strives to complete her portrait of Mrs Ramsay by relying on memories from the past, thereby exemplifying Husserl’s theory of image consciousness as well as incorporating it into a larger understanding of the intermingling of art and life. Although Husserl focuses upon the phenomenological instability of the image as an object made of shifting layers of meaning, Woolf extends this vision to suggest that creation ultimately rests on the interrelatedness of past and present, of imagination and reality, and that all these different experiences rightly belong to the stratification of the image.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-07-11
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot