« Thoughts of an Outsider » : Virginia Woolf et la pensée du dehors

• Main Author: Marie Laniel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2015-05-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Woolf (Virginia); Oxbridge; intertextuality; the Outside; Foucault (Michel); Deleuze (Gilles)
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2208

In the essays which undermine male-dominated views on education, such as A Room of One’s Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938) or “The Leaning Tower” (1940), but also in her works of fiction, such as Jacob’s Room (1922) or “A Woman’s College from Outside” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes from the perspective of the outsider, who is made to watch the privileged happy few, “the unconscious inheritors of a great tradition,” from a critical distance. As she deliberately embraces the stance of the outsider, Woolf’s narrator or persona does not merely ignore the intellectual or literary tradition connected with Oxbridge, but rethinks it from “the Outside” in the Foucauldian and Deleuzian sense of the word, writing both from without and from within this masculine literary tradition.