Virginia Woolf’s Microgenesis : Mental States and Conceptual Worlds

Omtale

Virginia Woolfs Microgenesis analyses Virginia Woolfs novels through her own methodological approach to mind, to meaning, and to making whole. This volume argues that Woolfs preoccupation with the metaphysics of wholeness, a dread, indeed, of both fragmentation, and of what endures, places her writings alongside Jason Browns microgenesis, formulated as an unfolding, emergent, and evolutionary process of cognitive activity. However, and crucially, it is not by assembling multiple flows of sense data into more complex constructions that we might perceive the objective world, but by sculpting away the unfit to reveal the structure of the world as a surfacing reality. In so many ways, Woolfs novels represent an enactment of microgenetic theory as they emphasise the mind/brain state as a process of continual unfolding through progressive differentiation and discrimination to a distinct configuration. That is not to say that Woolfs writings should be understood as anticipating Browns formulation of microgenetic theory as such, but that they should be understood as unearthing the adaptive and evolutionary significance (and signification) of microgeny through her own myriad methods of composition: tunnelling, transmuting, moments of being/nonbeing, and depth-and-surface, through which she may arrive at what she labels the whole conception. Virginia Woolfs Microgenesis is essential reading for researchers and students in Woolf studies, process philosophy, new materialisms, literary theory, and modernist literature.