Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker: Parallels between Woolf’s Fiction and Process Philosophy
Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker: Parallels Between Woolf’s Fiction and Process Philosophy introduces Virginia Woolf as a nondualist and process-oriented thinker whose ideas are, despite no direct influence, strikingly similar to those of Alfred North Whitehead. Veronika Krajíčková argues that in their respective fields, literature and philosophy, Woolf and Whitehead both criticized the materialist turn of their time and attempted to reattribute importance to experience and undermine long-rooted dualisms such as subject and object, the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman, or the self and the other. By erasing the gaps between these dualities, the two thinkers anticipated the poststructuralist thought with which Woolf has been anachronically associated in the last decades. Krajíčková shows that there is no need to analyze Woolf’s fiction via critical and philosophical theories that developed much later. This book demonstrates that Woolf and Whitehead’s ideas may help us adopt more ecologically friendly, selfless, intersubjective, and harmless modes of being in the present day. Both figures emphasize the intrinsic value and importance of each constituent of reality and teach us to appreciate the aesthetic values dispersed throughout our environment.
About the Author
Mgr. Veronika Krajíčková, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia. Her dissertation, entitled “The Problem of the Fixity of Tables: Virginia Woolf as a Non-Dualist and Process-Oriented Thinker”, focused on Virginia Woolf’s fiction analysed by means of process philosophy. It was awarded the Prof. Martin Hilský Prize for the Best Dissertation in 2021. Veronika’s first monograph, Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker, based on her dissertation, was published in 2023. Veronika is mainly interested in English and American modernism, particularly in modernist women authors such as Woolf, Mansfield, Barnes, or Rhys, but also in contemporary British fiction. She is a member of the International Virginia Woolf Society and the European Society for Process Thought and she has presented papers at various conferences both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She is also a student and early career researcher representative of the International Process Network. She has published a couple of translations of Woolf’s essays in Host literary magazine. She contributes regularly to the online literary magazine iLiteratura.cz.
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