I like this Proust post, Intermittencies of the heart, in group reading blog Involuntary memory so much, I have linked to it in Moleskine Modality and here. Something I refer to so often, it is easier to find here than the other.

While tidying bookmarks, came across this EpistemLinks page on Nietzsche, which looks like a reasonable place to pick up the basics if you can’t be bothered to tackle the source.

For example Frederick Nietzsche: A Snapshot is probably quite enough to fool a dinner party companion into believing you have read the originals.

Reality and Virgina Woolf

By

Brian Phillips

Originally published in Hudson Review Autumn 2003

* The easiest to read
* Most valuable
* If you write or try to write you will learn from it

There is an ideal of the sympathetic imagination that passes from eighteenth-century moral philosophy into nineteenth-century literary criticism, which holds that an effort of imaginative sympathy makes it possible for the mind to break through the barrier that separates it from its object, and, for a moment, to inhabit the object in an act of whole identification. This ability then becomes the writer’s most important faculty and is in a sense the natural instinct of the poet. “He had only to think of any thing,” as Hazlitt wrote of Shakespeare, “in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.” “If a Sparrow come before my Window,” Keats wrote, “I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” In entering an object outside the self, the imagination is able to perceive the inmost nature of the object with an intensity and a fullness that reason cannot match; but the absorption of the mind in what lies outside the self necessarily requires the self to be, at least temporarily, extinguished. This is what Keats meant when he wrote that “Men of Genius have not any individuality, any determined Character.” It is a mystical, impersonal aspiration, almost always associated with literary creativity, and it accords deeply with Woolf’s sense of character, inwardness, and impersonality in fiction. Not surprisingly, the older idea is most frequently employed in describing Shakespeare, the writer Woolf most admires, and whose unimpeded clarity she is most apt to praise. It is for Shakespeare that Keats coins the expression “negative capability,” Shakespeare who prompts Hazlitt to write that “He was nothing in himself, but he was all that others were.” Hazlitt continues:

When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, ’subject to the same skyey influences,’ the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.

“These Emotions of the Body”: intercorporeal narrative in ‘To the Lighthouse.’ - book by Virginia Woolf

By

Laura Doyle

Twentieth century Literature, Spring 1994


* some on Merlot-Ponty vs. Sartre (phenomenology)

The housemaid and the kitchen table: incorporating the frame in ‘To the Lighthouse.’ - book by Virginia Woolf

By

William R. Handley

Twentieth century Literature, Spring 1994

A bit heavy going academic tripe, but has its moments.

Three from the inestimable 3 Quarks:

Evolving Thoughts science blog : Basic concepts : A List

If a non-scientist mostly reading fiction but wanting some science, then this might be the place to start.

Even Tierra Fuegans Do IT

The Uncashed Metaphor of Natural Selection

Long essay by Justin E.H. Smith

How Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca Telegraph 19 April 2008

Very good documentary/discussion programme on BBC Radio 4 chaired by John Tusa: 1968, The Year of Revolutions.

What really happened? What was the long-term impact?

Includes Olivier Todd, mellifluous tones intact, who popped up on TV a week or two ago. Thought he was long gone. Fractious French intellectuals interrupting each other at every opportunity, but worth the effort. 44 mins.

In the news yesterday, reports that James Murdoch is complaining about BBC iPlayer taking trade from, well people like him. Its called ‘distorting the competitive landscape’. What the report failed to mention is that it works slightly differently from the way he imagines. Though the BBC have pumped tens of millions of tax payer’s money into setting up iPlayer (ITV’s version costing a fraction of the iPlayer at something like £30m, is a pale imitation and too fiddly), it is free to use from the BBC’s point of view. However, the ISPs do not like it either. For example BT are charging for GB used on top of the monthly bandwidth allowance. This seems to work out at about 25 - 30 p for a GB or slightly more, which is not unreasonable.

So the shift in the competitive landscape is not only between broadcasters like Sky in competition with the BBC but from people like Sky to the ISPs such as BT, who don’t even produce the materials they are charging for!

The debate on iPlayer did not start with Murdoch. For example, this August 2007 article in The Register, BT rubbishes BBC bandwidth throttling reports, mentions :

(1) bandwidth demands of the iPlayer may be too much for ISPs to bear

(2) BT’s only concern over iPlayer was that people would be unaware that the Kontiki P2P distribution system which runs in the background would be eating into their monthly GB usage allowance even when they are not viewing or downloading.

everyclick.com

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

U. of Adelaide e-text


wiki: To the Lighthouse

Large parts of Woolf’s novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking. In order to be able to understand thought, Woolf’s diaries reveal, the author would spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw.

SparkNotes: To the Lighthouse

Themes, Motifs and Symbols - The Subjective Nature of Reality

Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to see Mrs. Ramsay clearly—to understand her character completely—she would need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only then would she be privy to every possible angle and nuance. The truth, according to this assertion, rests in the accumulation of different, even opposing vantage points. Woolf’s technique in structuring the story mirrors Lily’s assertion. She is committed to creating a sense of the world that not only depends upon the private perceptions of her characters but is also nothing more than the accumulation of those perceptions. To try to re-imagine the story as told from a single character’s perspective or—in the tradition of the Victorian novelists—from the author’s perspective is to realize the radical scope and difficulty of Woolf’s project.

Stream of Consciousness in To the Lighthouse

by Christie Lamon-Burney and Srirupa Dhar

Auerbach states that Woolf’s technique is achieved through “[t]he design of a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals….


Notes on Novels: To the Lighthouse

Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

deals with characterization of Lily Briscoe


Virginia Woolf’s Comments on To the Lighthouse

………………………………………………………………………………………..

I suddenly remembered Sartre’s description of light in Nausea, and decided to check how often the word was mentioned in To the Lighthouse in the e-text. I think he ripped the idea of light as a philosophical metaphor from Woolf !

Refs. on realism

Some Forms of Realism - A Critique of Representative and Presentative Realism

Subjective Realism and Phenomenal Consciousness - an essay

…………………………………………………………………………………………

There is an essay:

Light in To the Lighthouse
Jack F. Stewart
Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Oct., 1977), pp. 377-389

This essay refers to Stewart:

The Illuminating Gaze: Light and Consciousness in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

By Anne-Marie Walsh

There is :

Erich Auerbach’s essay, “The Brown Stocking”

which I have not found on online.

A man is always a storyteller; he lives surrounded by his own stories as well as those of others. Through them he sees everything that happens to him; and he tries to live his life as if he were fictionalizing it.

(Sartre)

Having finish Nausea, it only remains (ha!) for an explanation of its philosophy. First more on Sartre/Virgina Woolf.

Philosophy apart, I had, while reading Nausea, picked up on something about Nausea and Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. The only thing online I could find was this tantalising abstract:

This article analyses the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée [1938] and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse [1927], which share many textual details and a concern with the representation of traumatic loss. In both texts, there is an encounter with contingency and a quest for an ethical form that might symbolize suffering. Roquentin’s melancholic quest for an aesthetic vision to render loss constructs a false dichotomy of history versus art, in which the relation with the Other is abjected. Unable to find a form for his suffering - as he terms it, ’souffrir en mesure’ ['to suffer in time'] like the jazz tune which relieves his existential nausea - Roquentin ultimately retreats into narcissistic abstraction. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe’s post-Impressionist quest to represent her spiritual love for Mrs Ramsay in portraiture is more successful: in its eschewal of narcissistic signature and its hospitality to difference, Lily’s vision becomes an aesthetic space of encounter with the (m)Other, removed from the melancholic, narcissistic project of novel-writing that Roquentin envisages at the end of La Nausée.

of a paper: Mourning and the ethics of form in Sartre’s La Nausée and Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, by Ursula Tidd, published in The Journal of Romance Studies, Volume 6, Numbers 1-2, Spring & Summer 2006 , pp. 209-220 (12). If you’ve got a spare $39, or just under £20, you’ll be able to read it.

A discussion at Talking Philosophy on Virginia Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre.

A quote at Questia:

“I tried to profit”, explains Sartre, “from the research made by certain novelists such as Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf into techniques of narrative.

It remains to both try to specify what I want to find out and to decide how deep to go.

(1) More on Woolf’s narrative techniques. As in : “Explained by someone else not from a reading of her whole ouevre”. Also something more on comparison of technique s in Woolf ’s fiction and non-fiction.

(2) contingency

(3) Intentionality (wikipedia)

Intentionality (Stanford Enclyplopedia of Philosophy)

Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration though as a GoogleBook not complete is a great help.

[1] Chapter 6: Sartre and Realism-All-The- Way

[a] The Purification of the Consciousness, pages 94-99

[b] Objective realism, 99-100

[c] Radical continuity, 100-104

[d] Realism not contextualism, All the way down, 104-108 {107 missing}

Detailed notes useful 110 - 113

Back, too, to Dennett’s Consciousness Explained for what he says on intentionality. Trying to find his papers on the intentional stance. Probably not going as far as to read his book The Intentional Stance.

(4) Objective realism

John Duncan in Sartre Today :

In Nausea, Sartre crafts a portrayal of radical contingency, that assiduously rejects objective realism.

There is plenty of online help with objective realism. E.g.

wiki: objective realism

What is objective realism?

(5) Idealism

This by Ian Heath on objective idealism is useful. It takes us to the relationship between psychology and philosophy.

Allan Massie in the Spectator draws a distinction between open and self-enclosed novels in a short but succinct piece.

By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.