"To have the reader work with the author": The Circulation of Knowledge in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Toni Morrison's Jazz

This essay, situated within the theoretical framework authorizing the juxtaposed readings of African-American and white women writers, interrogates the narrative methods by which Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison incorporate their readers in the search for understanding in To the Lighthouse and Jazz. Using dislocations in time and space, free indirect discourse, polyphonic narrative voices, and skeins of freighted images, these texts problematize memory, history and knowledge. Because sites of narration are mystified and perhaps unreliable, readers are encouraged to become co-creators of the narratives by interpreting the submerged and difficult histories that that have shaped characters and circumstances.