The Mind, A Room of One's Own: An Epiphanic Moment in Virginia Woolf
José Angel García Landa. "The Mind, A Room of One's Own: An Epiphanic Moment in Virginia Woof." In The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood. Ed. Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
18 Pages Posted: 3 Mar 2021 Last revised: 31 Mar 2021
Date Written: 2019
Abstract
This paper examines in detail an epiphanic moment in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' in the light of George Herbert Mead's social interactionist theory of the mind and of cognition. The epiphanic moment is experienced as an unexpected synthesis of multiple identities and experiences, a conjunction whose very contingency opens up unforeseen possibilities of creative experience. Creativity, openness, unexpectedness, complexity—memorable moments that make the most of this synthesis provide the experience of the subliminal or the unconscious coming to consciousness, and they tend to return to mind and to become milestones in personal development, and in the story of one's relation to oneself. The attention Virginia Woolf pays to the complexity and density of the moment is a tribute both to the present and to the mind—if the mind is to be defined, for the sake of this argument, as the management of emergent complexity, and the present as the locus not just of reality, but of the mental activity that synthesizes it.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Epiphanies, Modernism, Emergence, Cognition, Self, George Herbert Mead, Consciousness, Cognitive Narratology
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