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ELT 46 : 2 2003 some of the other essays is left with the uneasy feeling that it may have become a meaningless phrase after all. K. P. S. Jochum ______________University of Bamberg, Germany Woolf: The Visible vs. the Writeable Emily Dalgarno. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 219 pp. $54.95 THE TITLE of Emily Dalgarno's book does not capture the range of material covered in this challenging and original work. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World focuses on the centrality of the "visible," as distinct from the "writeable," in Woolf s essays and fiction; however, Dalgarno's development of this focus incorporates a number of eclectic interests, such as photojournalism, astronomy, Renaissance notions of beauty, Lacan 's theory of subjectivity, and Woolf s translations of Greek literature. Like Alex Zwerdling's Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986), Dalgarno 's study considers the importance of historical forces and social institutions to Woolf s writing, but Dalgarno is less concerned with the impact of external forces on individual behavior than with their relevance to the problem of subjectivity. Like Daniel Ferrer's Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (1990), Dalgarno's study draws on psychoanalytic theory to articulate how the subject emerges in language, yet unlike Ferrer, Dalgarno roots Woolf s understanding of subjectivity in "the events and ideology of twentieth-century history." Like Makiko Minow-Pinkney's Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (1987), to which Dalgarno acknowledges her indebtedness, Dalgarno's book brings a feminist focus to her readings of French psychoanalytic theories to show how Woolf genders the Imaginary. Although heavily indebted to Lacanian theory, Dalgarno's work critiques that theory, from the perspective of gender, at "the juncture of visibility and language" where the subject comes into being. Consistent with her focus on subjectivity rather than identity, Dalgarno makes no effort to offer a developmental narrative of Woolf s writing , chronologically tracing the same theme or motif through the major works. Instead, she approaches the idea of the visible from a "different angle of vision" in each chapter. Her concern is less with coverage than with a set of related explorations that together illuminate the complex relation between Woolf s formalist interest in language and her feminist interest in social critique. 188 BOOK REVIEWS For example, chapter 2, which provides a reading oÃ- Jacob's Room as well as The Voyage Out, analyzes the significance of Woolf s studies of Greek literature to her understanding of "the limits of the visible world." Woolf s study of Greek is central to her emerging feminism, especially her adoption of an outsider's perspective, and to her narrative style, providing her with "new modes of signification." Indeed, Dalgarno argues that "a biography that focused on Woolf s intellectual development," rather than her family relationships, "would give priority to her study of the Greek language and literature," as Dalgarno does here. Dalgarno's focus on Woolf s Greek translations carries into subsequent chapters, where it receives a different emphasis. Whereas chapter 2, for instance, uses Woolf s translations to show how she came to critique the education system from the perspective of gender, in chapter 3, Dalgarno shows how her study of Greek allowed Woolf to grant "cognitive authority" to the language of madness (in Mrs. Dalloway) and to redefine the notion of beauty for modernists (in To the Lighthouse), and in chapter 6 Dalgarno traces the ideology of gender and the concept of an outsider's society in Three Guineas to Woolf s early notes on the Greeks. For those readers concerned primarily with social history, chapters 4 and 6 may hold the most interest. Beginning with a discussion of Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture," and the significance of the Greeks to the development of his thought in that 1938 lecture, chapter 4 focuses primarily on The Waves and the emergence of the subject out of "the ruins of an identity forged by the Imperialist ideology." Central to this chapter is Woolf s witnessing of the solar eclipse while drafting this novel and the way this experience "furnished a new model of the gaze": "It...

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