버지니아 울프 소설에 나타난 타자 철학

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to throw new light on the novels of Virginia Woolf, whose fictions explore aesthetic, political, ethical, and epistemological concerns from the post-structuralist perspective. In Jacob’s Room(1922), Mrs. Dalloway(1925), and To the Lighthouse(1927), Woolf concerns herself with the issue of how another person can be understood and known. Emerging from the Great War crisis of faith in the possibility of truthful understanding and complete knowledge, a sense of unknowability shapes and saturates Woolf’s fictions. Such a failure of communication is a familiar characteristic of modernist works. However, I argue that Woolf’s novels emphasize the idea of reading such gaps as the encounter with alterity that defines the ethics of modernism. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics based on responsibility for the absolute other enables a more complex understanding of Woolf’s experimental fictions. Reading her novels in dialogue with Levinas helps to clarify Woolf’s philosophy of the other.