Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room - Jacob Flanders, Many Things to Many Readers

In this essay, the author

• Analyzes how woolf's novel is a revolutionary work of her unique enterprise to create character beyond the one-to-one mimetic method of conventional victorian and edwardian realism.
• Analyzes how woolf's style matured between the 1915 and 1917 publication of the voyage out, and her experimental short stories of the late 1910s and jacob'
• Analyzes how woolf was anxious about her novel's critical reception because of her radical experimentation in the work and its departure from the fictional conventions of bennet and wells.
• Analyzes how woolf subtly passes responsibility for the creation of character to the reader.
• Analyzes how woolf sought to achieve characterization beyond the limits of the one-to-one correspondence of realism.
• Analyzes how woolf's radical approach to characterization demands the direct experience of reality as the only possible way of knowing meaning.
• Analyzes how woolf's fiction is concerned with narrative techniques in general and is often narration about modes of narration, or metanarrative.
• Analyzes how woolf achieves greater expression of character through negative presence. jacob's character is most fully articulated by examining the space which remains in his absence.
• Opines that the columns and the temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year.
• Analyzes how jacob is defined more by his absence than his presence, a divergence in space and time. the coughing sheep underscores the crisis of masculine identity and historical and civilizational progress that symbolically ended with the great war.
• Analyzes how woolf's method is to offer parts to the reader to collect and construct into a meaningful whole.
• Describes the letters of virginia woolf. volume ii. 1912-1922. ed. by nigel nicholson. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1976.
• Analyzes how the air in an empty room is listless, just swelling the curtain, the flowers shift, and the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.
• Analyzes how woolf's technique for characterization in jacob’s room is metaphorical and symbolic rather than metonymic and mimetic.
• Analyzes how the narrative consciousness's indeterminancy and ambivalence render any reading of jacob through these objects problematic.
• Analyzes how woolf multiplies the sites of meaning through her narrator's placement of jacob in time.
• Argues that woolf is one of several modernist writers who carry on the romantic tradition which supremes the individual consciousness and its communicability.
• Explains that virginia woolf and postmodernism: literature in quest & question itself.
• Cites kiely, robert, and little, judy. "jacob's room and roger fry: two studies in still life."
• Cites pawlowski, merry, ruddick, marcus, schug, charles, and mcneillie. virginia woolf's between the acts: fascism in the heart of england.