Critics Flashcards
Lodge (1992)
“this kind of novel [stream of consciousness] tends to generate sympathy for the characters whose inner selves are exposed to view, however vain, selfish, ignoble their thoughts may occasionally be”
Woolf (1925)
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo… Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit?”
Ruhemann (1995) on the representation of life and reality
“Life, reality… Is much more tenuous and shifting than the conventional novelist… Would have us believe”
Brower (1971) on creative perception
“For Mrs Dalloway “enjoying” and “loving” is “creating” and “building up”, not passive enjoyment. Life is experienced in successively created “moments”; the sense of succession, of process, is inseparable from Clarissa’s feeling about life.”
“The exhilarated sense of being a part of the forward moving process and the recurrent fear of some big break in this absorbing activity… Symbolised by the “suspense” before Big Ben strikes”
Showalter (1992) on external events
“For Woolf, the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life”
Showalter (1992) on chronological and psychological time
“While an exterior incident or perception might be a brief flash of chronological time, its impact on the individual consciousness may have a much greater duration and meaning”
Showalter (1992) on multiple perspectives
“People are the product of their past as well as their present, the sum of multiple perspectives upon them, the ways that a variety of others perceive them”
Woolf (1923) ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’
The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing- room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat.
