버지니아 울프 소설 『막간』에 나타난 타자 철학

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s novels largely focused on questions of self and other, intimacy and distance, communication and alienation. In Between the Acts, the final novel published after Woolf’s suicide in 1941, Woolf concerns herself with questions of how other people can be known and understood. Through the crises of faith in the possibility of ultimate knowability and complete understanding that emerge from the war, a prevalent sense of unpredictability saturates and shapes Woolf’s Between the Acts. Such failures of communication are a familiar characteristic of modernist novels. However, I argue that Between the Acts portrays such gaps as the very encounter with alterity that can define the ethics of modernism. The rethinking of ethics focused on responsibility for the absolute other, associated closely with Emmanuel Levinas, enables a more complex understanding of the novel. Focusing on its status as deeply engaged with questions of war, death, and sympathy for others, I suggest that Between the Acts interweaves epistemological, ethical, and political concerns. Reading the novel in dialogue with Levinas helps to clarify the philosophy of the other in Woolf’s Between the Acts.