The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.
Biljana Dojčinović has published a book on Virginia Woolf and modernism, the first written originally in the Serbian language.
Titled Susreti u tami: Uvod u čitanje Virdžinije Vulf (Encounters in the Dark: Introduction to Reading Virginia Woolf), it is published by Beograd. The title comes from a paraphrase of the Woolf quote from her essay “Character in Fiction” that is included above.
According to Dojčinović, her study puts Virginia Woolf in the context of modernism as a global(ized) movement.
“The beginning of 20th century was marked by the new ways of defining and using concept of tradition, as well as by new understanding of the notion of subject, as divided and paralyzed self, all the way from Serbia to China,” she wrote to Blogging Woolf.
“Seen in this context, Virginia Woolf’s both fictional and essayistic work demands a specific approach, a combination of close reading and cultural studies, including feminist and gender theories, so that the role of the reader, Woolf`s modernist views and their importance for understanding poetics of Henry James, as well as concepts of engramic poetics and performative history, can be grasped.”
For more on Woolf’s global popularity, as well as available translations of her work, read High-tech methods help gauge Virginia Woolf’s popularity.
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