'Our brains upon the same lines'---Collaboration as a mode of resistance against aesthetic dogmatism in Virginia Woolf's life and work

摘要

Virginia Woolf continuously grappled with the question of whether the artist was a solitary genius, and her position on the matter fluctuates both across time and between different iterations of her writing. Nonetheless, the notion of collaboration resonates through all of her life and work. My thesis, guided by an intermedial approach that draws on scholarship from art history and visual studies alongside literary criticism, suggests that Woolf's work demonstrates an awareness of the potential for resistance to traditional aesthetic concepts through collaboration. Collaboration across different art forms provides a new, more inclusive way of thinking about literary modernism. I analyze three art forms---painting, photography, and fashion---in three major texts---To The Lighthouse, Three Guineas, and Orlando---as well as in a number of other fiction and non-fiction words. Placing the notion of the solitary genius in her writing alongside her gestures toward a more collaborative model illuminates Woolf's preoccupation with creating new forms of expression, expanding the category of the artist and the circumstances of art's production to be more inclusive of women. Bringing the vocabulary and theory of visual art to bear on Woolf's life and writing introduces a different phenomenology to the study of literary texts; the conjunction of writing with visual art forms allowed Woolf to conceive of new spaces for the production of art, to make room for female artistry and their resistance to aesthetic dogmatism and established forms, the "tools of one generation" that "are useless for the next."