Virginia Stephen (Woolf) et le rire comme horizon

• Main Author: Christine Reynier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2011-05-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: H. Bergson; V. Woolf; aesthetics; disturbance; essay; ethics
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2365

It is quite unusual to connect Virginia Woolf with laughter. However, in 1905, Virginia Stephen published in The Guardian an essay called ‘The Value of Laughter’. Laughter is what the young essayist calls for. Laughter which is, according to her, regarded as unworthy of civilised society and as inferior to language, is also what literature despises, preferring more often to turn to more noble modes like tragedy or more refined tones like humour.This seemingly nondescript eulogy of laughter deserves to be analysed and confronted with the fiction that the writer published in the following years. The essay will first be compared with Bergson’s contemporary work on laughter; then laughter, through its defining characteristics which now meet those of Bergson now depart from them, will be shown to be paradigmatic of Woolf’s fiction in so far as it delineates Woolf’s own literary horizon.