모더니즘 작가론 : 『호텔 듀 락』에 갇힌 이디스 호프에게, 울프로부터

김정 ( Jung Kim ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2004 제임스조이스저널 Vol.10 No.1

This paper consists of three fictional letters of Virginia Woolf to Edith Hope, the heroine of Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Choosing an epistolary form as a way of writing a thesis is intentional under the presumption that this kind of new attempt fits to maximize the efficacy of Virginia Woolf`s writing technique which has been proved already by her ardent innovation of the form and contents of the novel. Woolf asks in her work A Room of One`s Own, Are you aware that you [women] are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Ironically, her heated question, now aims at herself making her perhaps, the most discussed woman in the universe. The extensive, sometimes distorted, representations of Virginia Woolf give her a contested place to become a `cultural icon.` This proliferation of her meanings throughout various media -including intellectual spheres and the more popular culture- transformed Woolf into a multifaceted iconic figure. Among others, in Hotel du Lac Woolf acquired the iconic status from Edith Hope who owns the image and status of Virginia Woolf as her own emblem without any explanatory identification. She likes nothing better than to be mistaken for Woolf. Edith, who writes romantic stories, adopts as a literary icon a popular conception of Woolf, to define both her public and private personae. But her choice is ironic. Her public Woolf persona receives little approbation from others. Moreover, Edith is never presented reading or reflecting on a Woolf text. This refusal, this tacit manipulation challenges the reader to confront what constitutes Virginia Woolf in the novel. This paper has grown out of that sense of challenge, and an attempt of vindication has been made. In the first letter, Woolf asks why she has become a role model for Edith and discusses the cause and effect of it. The second letter examines the novel Hotel du Lac as a whole under the critical eye of the eminent writer of The Common Reader and traces the heroine`s circumscribed life. Finally in the third letter Woolf gives integral advice to Edith and Brookner that what she has done is an attempt not only to vindicate herself but encourage the author, Brookner, to further the relationships through literary works that we have bred and continue to breed.

“Must I Join Your Conspiracy?”: The Politics of Passivity in Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas

김영주 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.2

Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf’s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf’s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf’s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women’s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf’s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately call for the politics of passivity as Woolf’s famous proclaim of the outsiders’ society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf’s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation. Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf’s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf’s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf’s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women’s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf’s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately call for the politics of passivity as Woolf’s famous proclaim of the outsiders’ society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf’s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation.

“울프 여사는 영화를 발견했다”: 1920년대 영화와 버지니아 울프의 영화적 글쓰기

손현주 ( Heon Joo Sohn ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.1

The purpose of the paper is to explore how the films of the 1920s had an influence on Virginia Woolf`s writing technique. Reviewing “Kew Gardens,” focusing on Woolf`s new experimental techniques, Winifred Holtby declared that “Mrs Woolf had discovered the cinema,” by which she meant that Woolf tried to adopt some techniques from the cinema in the short story, such as close-up, bird`s eye view, and shifting the camera angles. “Kew Gardens” is not the only one to be viewed in terms of the influence of the cinema of the times. Woolf`s writings, particularly following Jacob`s Room, may be read in relation with the cinematic culture of the 1920`s, which may yield more productive results. In 1926, the London Film Society was established by a group of intellectuals, including some members of Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and J. Maynard Keynes. The London Film Society became the site of introducing European avant-garde films as well as Hollywood films. The Woolfs were regular attendants to the Saturday film premieres. In her diaries and letters she put comments on and discussed the recent films she watched. She even published an essay titled “The Cinema” in which she discerned the great potentials of the burgeoning art, foresighting its glorious future as an art form on its own right. Woolf`s interest in the film could be dated back to her youth when she took photos and developed them with her siblings at home. Her creative imagination was almost always related to the visual. In one of her childhood memories recounted in The Moments of Being, she recalls that what made her a writer was her desire and habit to make a scene out of a shock or blow she received. Such visual imagination must have been developed and modified in the cultural environment of the 1920s when the film became an important cultural issue. This paper reads Woolf`s short stories written in 1929, “Three Pictures,” “The Lady in the Looking-glass,” and “The Fascination of the Pool,” along with her novels, Jacob`s Room and To the Lighthouse. In “Three Pictures,” Woolf presents three seemingly unconnected pictures, which eventually converge to form a drama of a tragic kind, adopting a filmic “montage” technique. “The Lady in the Looking-glass” tries to make reader reconstruct the image of a lady through the scene reflected in the mirror hung on the wall, using the frame of a mirror as an equivalent to the cinematic frame. “The Fascination of the Pool” explores Woolf`s long standing interest in water and its narcissistic pull, interrogating the validity of the views on the surface and trying to recover the lost memories accumulated underneath. By doing so, Woolf strongly suggests to see the filmic scenes as symbols, instead of watching them passively. The attempt to read Woolf`s writings in relation with the cinema of the times will provide the reader with yet another productive tool to appreciate Woolf by locating her in the cultural milieu of the early twentieth century.

「목마와 숙녀」의 기호학적 연구 -‘버지니아 울프’와 ‘숙녀’의 차별성을 중심으로

박상수 한국근대문학회 2023 한국근대문학연구 Vol.24 No.2

「목마와 숙녀」는 박인환의 대표작으로 많은 논자들이 대체적으로 높이 평가해온 작품이지만 문학적 평가의 측면에서 엇갈리는 부분이 있다. ‘전후 최고의 대표시’라는 평가가 있는 반면 ‘감상적인 허무주의의 한계에 빠져 있고, 난해성의 문제가 선명하게 해결되지 않은 작품’이라는 평가가 공존하고 있다. 본고에서는 박인환의 「목마와 숙녀」에 나타난 ‘버지니아 울프’와 ‘숙녀’의 차별성에 주목하여 「목마와 숙녀」를 깊이 읽는 새로운 길을 제시해보고자 하였다. 먼저 2장에서는 시의 초반 (1)(2)(3)에 주목하여 박인환의 생애사를 통해 예술적 영감을 준 마리 로랑생, 로렌 바콜, 버지니아 울프가 유사한 의미 계열로 연결될 수 있음을 밝혔다. 특히 이들 여성 예술가가 융의 분석심리학에서 말하는 ‘아니마’일 수 있음에 주목하였다. 박인환의 시에서 ‘숙녀’라는 기호는 ‘미래’혹은 ‘이상(理想)’을 암시하는 기호이자 ‘부재의 기호’로 해석된다. ‘숙녀’는 그 자체로 ‘죽음’을 뜻한다기보다는 ‘화자에게 내재되었던 (맑고 희망에 찬) 이상적인 미래’를 의미한다. 결국 (3)“목마를 타고 떠난 숙녀의 옷자락을 이야기한다”는 구절은 ‘버지니아 울프의 죽음’을 의미한다기보다는 오래전부터 꿈꾸었던 ‘이상적인 미래가 속절없이 사라져버린 상태’(부재의 기호)를 의미하는 구절로 이해할 수 있다. 또한 [땅:하늘]의 이항대립에서 버지니아 울프는 박인환의 아니마가 투사된 현실 속의 인물로서 숙녀보다는 훨씬 더 현실에 가까운 근경에서 의지적으로 추구하여 도달할 수 있는 이상적 존재로 등장한다. 결국 버지니아 울프와 숙녀는 시의 초반부, 선명하게 구분되는 것은 아니지만 시가 전개될수록 ‘현실과 이상의 대립’을 구축하는 기호로 더욱 선명한 분화가 이루어진다. 3장에서는 (4)~(16)까지를 분석하였다. 숙녀의 부재 이후, 박인환은 과거로 돌아가서 현실을 잊는 것이 아니라 오히려 수십년 간의 패퇴와 몰락을 빨리감기로 다시 경험하는 것과 같은 과정을 겪는다. 과거는 결코 추억과 위로의 공간이 될 수 없었다. 숙녀가 보이지 않는 폐허의 현실에서 주의깊게 보아야할 대목은 (12)(13)(14)이었다. 문학과 인생과 사랑이 죽어가는 ‘한때의 저 세월’은 시들어가고, 이제 우리는 그 ‘한때’와 작별을 해야한다는 의지의 표명이 등장했기 때문이다. 「목마와 숙녀」를 전체적으로 보자면, “~해야 한다”는 강한 의지의 서술부가 총 5번 등장했다. 허무한 감상성을 드러내는 작품으로 이 시를 수용하는 일에 가장 강력하게 반대하는 지점이 바로 이 대목들이다. 박인환은 폐허와 죽음, 혹은 과거와 작별하고, 직시하고, 기억하고, 듣고, 눈 뜨고 술을 마시는 적극적인 행위를 통해 ‘숙녀(미래, 이상)’없는 현실을 끝까지 살아내고자 애쓴다. 4장에서는 ‘등대’ 이후 (17)~(23)까지 시의 후반부를 분석하였다. 여기서 중요한 것은 (19)에 등장하는 “페시미즘”이라는 단어의 맥락이었다. 「목마와 숙녀」에서 페시미즘은 닫힌 것이 아니라 ‘미래’를 향해 열린 맥락에서의 페시미즘이었다. 의지의 표명만으로 현실을 돌파하는 일이 쉽지는 않을 때, 숙녀(미래, 이상)는 부재하지만, 숙녀를 지금 이 현실, 혹은 이 땅의 삶에 암시적이고 지속적으로 연상시키는 매개기호로 기능하는 것이 바로 ‘목마’이다. 박인환은 (20)에 이르러 ‘현실 근경의 이상적 지향’으로서의... 「The wooden horse and the lady」 is Park In-hwan's representative work that has been generally praised by many scholars, but there are conflicting opinions in terms of literary evaluation. It has been described as 'the best representative poem of the post-war period', but it has also been criticized as 'a work that is mired in the limits of sentimental nihilism and whose difficulties are not clearly resolved'. In this paper would like to suggest a new way to read 「The wooden horse and the lady」 in depth by paying attention to the differences between "Virginia Woolf" and "the lady" in Park In-hwan's 「The wooden horse and the lady」 . First, in Chapter 2, this paper focused on the poem's opening lines (1)(2)(3) to reveal that Marie Laurentin, Lauren Bacall, and Virginia Woolf, who were artistic inspirations through Park's life history, can be connected in a similar semantic family. In particular, they noted that these female artists could be the "anima" in Jung analytical psychology. In Park's poem, the sign 'the lady' is interpreted as a sign of absence as well as a sign that suggests the 'future' or 'ideal'. 'the lady' does not mean 'death', but rather 'an idealized (sunny and hopeful) future that was inherent in the speaker'. In other words, the phrase (3), "The hem of the lady's dress as she rode away on her horse" does not refer to the death of Virginia Woolf, but rather to the state of the long-dreamed-of ideal future (a sign of absence). In addition, in the binomial opposition of [Earth:Sky], Virginia Woolf, as a figure in the reality projected by Park In-hwan's Anima, appears as an idealized being that can be willfully pursued and reached from a much more realistic perspective than the lady. In the end, Virginia Woolf and the lady are not sharply distinguished at the beginning of the poem, but as the poem progresses, they become more clearly differentiated as symbols that establish the 'opposition of reality and ideal'. Chapter 3 analyzed lines (4)-(16). After the absence of the lady, Park In-hwan does not go back to the past and forget reality, but rather goes through the same process of re-experiencing the decades of defeat and downfall in fast-forward. The past could never be a space of memories and consolation. It was (12)(13)(14) that the lady had to look at carefully in the reality of the invisible ruins. This is because there is a manifestation of the will to say goodbye to the "once upon a time" when literature, life, and love are dying, and now we must say goodbye to that "once upon a time". Looking at 「The wooden horse and the lady」 as a whole, the strong willed narrative of "I must" appeared five times. These are the points where I most strongly oppose the acceptance of the poem as a work of futile sentimentality. Through the active acts of saying goodbye to ruins, death, or the past, facing, remembering, listening, opening one's eyes, and drinking, Park strives to endure a reality without a 'lady' (future, ideal). In Chapter 4, this paper analyzed the second half of the poem after "Lighthouse," from (17) to (23). Important here was the context of the word "feminism" in (19). In 「The wooden horse and the lady」, feminism was not closed, but open to the future. When it is not easy to break through reality through the expression of will alone, the lady (future, ideal) is absent, but it is the 'the wooden horse' that functions as a mediating symbol that implicitly and continuously associates the lady with the present reality or life on earth. In (20), Park shows that he does not only endure the reality of the ruins by remembering 'Virginia Woolf' as the 'ideal orientation of reality', but also tries to incorporate the 'the lady' symbolizing 'high ideals and the future' without giving up. What is important here is that Park In-hwan is resolving his literary anguish with the help of his inner self, or "anima." If Virginia Woolf is more of an "ideal guide at the periphery of reality," ...

"Must I Join Your Conspiracy?": The Politics of Passivity in Virginia Woolf`s The Years and Three Guineas

( Young Joo Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.2

Virginia Woolf`s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf`s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf`s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf`s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women`s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf`s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately callfor the politics of passivityasWoolf`s famous proclaim of the outsiders` society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben`s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf`s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation.

울프가 베버를 만날 때: "직업"으로서의 글쓰기와 모더니스트의 "소명"

손영주 ( Young Joo Son ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2011 현대영미소설 Vol.18 No.3

Virginia Woolf`s ambivalence towards women`s entry into the world of professions is well known; she celebrated it as an instrument for woman`s emancipation, and yet she was worried that it might lead to woman`s complicity with the evils of the social system, the system that had perpetuated inequality, injustice, and violence throughout history. Some critics value Woolf`s feminist project while others criticize her class allegiances; all of these critics tend to equate rather simplistically Woolf`s view of profession with that of masculinity, oppression, or capitalism. The purpose of this paper is to show that Woolf`s concern with profession encompasses a much broader question of constructing a freer self and community. Examining Woolf`s view of profession side by side with a lecture entitled "Science as a Vocation" by German sociologist Max Weber, this paper argues that both Woolf and Weber invite us to rethink the function and meaning of a ``profession`` in a highly professionalized society. Weber tells us how to fulfill the inner vocation of science in the age of rationalization, intellectualization, and disenchantment where science has been deprived of its authority as a universal truth about a human being and the world. Likewise, Woolf urges us to use the profession as a way of achieving a freedom from "unreal loyalties," a freedom which is a basis for a freer and more peaceful community, while remaining acutely aware of the various obstacles that professional women confront in the capitalist, patriarchal, and professional world. For both Woolf and Weber, the true vocation of professional writers and scholars in this modern world is to restore the mysteries, the obscure, the forgotten realm of life by means of working only for the sake of work. Weber and Woolf also demonstrate how the professional commitment to work can be compatible with the dialogues and collaboration between teachers and students, writers and readers. The autonomy of art and science in Weber and Woolf, therefore, does not so much reflect or aggravate the division between the individual and society as it does lead to taking a transformative participation in society. In these ways, Weber and Woolf show us how it is possible for a modernist to pursue a vocation in a world where the divine meaning of a vocation has almost lost its ground.

Virginia Woolf`s In/Visible Cities: A Reading of Woolf`s London Essays

( Eun Kyung Park ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.2

Virginia Woolf`s vision of the city in her London essays departs from male modernists` perceptions of a modern city. While T. S. Eliot and James Joyce often reduce the metropolis merely to a space for abstract and general psychological dramas, with their main concerns about urban evils and social pathology, Woolf does not focus on urban ugliness but embraces diverse aspects of city life and their abundance. I unfold a reading of Woolf`s London stories in parallel with Italo Calvino`s Invisible Cities. Both writers pay attention to the heterogeneous urban space, uncovering its fascinating and unattractive in/visible cities. Their phantasmagoric vision of the city is that of a modern metropolis that cannot be unitary, standardized, unchangeable, or immortal. However, Woolf does not share Calvino`s sense of urban blues and his apocalyptic vision of the city. As an urban flaneuse, Woolf enjoys the flitting, fragmented moments of street encounters in twisted streets. She celebrates human connectedness and glorifies subversive freedom in city streets. Observed with “an enormous eye,” not the egocentric “I,” Woolf`s London emerges as a dynamic, charming space, in its bustle and chaos, coloured with her own idiosyncratic, but, at the same time, starkly realistic vision. The eye of an urban haunter marks in/visible, heterogeneous mutipli-city, layer upon layer, in London. Woolf opens up the possibility of and necessity for ceaseless narratives about the modern city. To explore the urban blessings and vitality, travelling with Woolf, might be helpful in renewing our appreciation of the 21st century metropolises. Her guidance and inspiration allow us to restore life to dying cities, while being ceaselessly attentive to urban phenomena that can be easily degenerated by our abuse.

도시의 거북이와 맘모스: 버지니아 울프의 런던 기행문과 글쓰기의 윤리

김영주 ( Youngjoo Kim ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2016 제임스조이스저널 Vol.22 No.2

Virginia Woolf was a prolific essayist whose writing appears both in mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass circulation of women`s magazines. Until recently has not much of critical attention been drawn to Virginia Woolf`s essays on London, the six essays which were originally published as serial articles in a popular women`s magazine Good Housekeeping during 1931 and 1932. The Good Housekeeping essays show Woolf`s continuous journalistic efforts since she started it as early as 1904. Early critics of Woolf`s London essays have noticed the pro-urban sentiment in an appreciative observer of modern city life and even found Woolf`s identification with the consuming middle class problematic. Such readings disregard Woolf`s ambivalence and anxiety about commercialization of her writing and her concerns on the ethics of writing popular journalism. This paper aims to examine Woolf`s Good Housekeeping essays, “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide” in particular, and discuss Woolf`s anxiety as an essayist about mass print journalism and the aesthetics of the essay form in capitalist commercial culture. The subtle language and conversational style of her journalistic writing often conceal Woolf`s scathing and comprehensive commentaries on global capitalist commercialism of which she is clearly part of. The curious animal trope Woolf employs in the two essays the tortoise and the mammoth encapsulates the process of capitalist commodification and yet opens up enigmatic narrative space for the flaneuse-essayist. Woolf not only examines the dilemma between the liberating engagement with culture industry and the fear of intellectual contamination but also successfully inscribes her aesthetics and ethics of the essay form in the Good Housekeeping essays.

초상화와 전기문학: 버지니아 울프의 전기문학과 시각예술

손현주 ( Heon Joo Sohn ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2014 제임스조이스저널 Vol.20 No.1

In her essay, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), Virginia Woolf asserted that the painter Sickert is “a great biographer” while his portraits are more efficient than biographies at conveying the personality of a person. Reading this essay along with other Woolf’s writings concerning biography, I would like to argue that Woolf’s experiments with the form of biography can be considered in conjunction with the changing ideas and forms of visual art of her time, which may help us understand Woolf and her idea of “new biography” in a broader perspective of her contemporary cultural environment. In “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1924), Woolf boldly claimed that “in and about December, 1910, human character changed,” implicitly referring to the famous exhibition, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” organized by Roger Fry. By this occasion Fry introduced the revolutionary idea of Post-Impressionism which was foreign to the British public at that time. Refusing the traditional realistic representation of the subject, the tenet of this new trend of fine art was to express the subjective and more personal impressions of the artist, emphasizing the effect of lights and colors. In the essay, Woolf argues that the changing concept of reality necessarily asks for new ways of expression in art, endorsing modernist writers’ experimentations of character-making including her own, against Arnold Bennet’s criticism. In fiction, according to her, what is at stake is how to convey the character. Woolf is prone to making scenes rather than telling stories. As she observes in “A Sketch of the Past” that her desire to make scenes out of her experience is what made her a writer, Woolf’s writing has a strong affinity towards visual art, such as pictures, photos, and even the cinema. It seems that there is an interesting parallelism between Woolf’s idea of fiction and that of biography in terms of people in them either fictional or factual. While she was struggling with the problem of how to make a character real, she was also grappling with that of how to transmit personality of a person in biography. In this paper I venture to review Woolf’s idea and practice concerning biography in terms of visual art of the time, particularly portraits painted by Walter Sickert. It seems that Woolf took more conservative attitude towards biography than fiction. While she tried to incorporate the more radical ideas of contemporary culture of visual art, such as Post-Impressionism and Cubism in her fiction, which I believe shares the avant-garde sensibility of Bloomsbury intellectuals and artists, in biographical writings she kept herself contented with more realistic representation of Sickert. It may be because unlike in fiction, in biography she accepted the idea of the biographer is not free to invent and has to stick to “facts.”

버지니아 울프의 『막간』: 지적인 싸움으로서 생각하기

김금주 한국현대영미소설학회 2020 현대영미소설 Vol.27 No.1

The late 1930s, the setting of Between the Acts, was a chaotic period, and at the same time saw the rapid growth of the mass media and the popular book market. The propagandistic public voices about the war and Fascism through the mass media, and the immense volubility and vulgarity of popular books intensified Woolf’s concern about the problem of people’s passive and uncritical thinking. And in times of crisis, she hoped that the public would be able to think critically without falling into delusion. Thus Woolf sought the form and the content to stimulate the reader’s perceptivity and to challenge them to think. And as an artist, Woolf tried to resist grim realities between the wars by an intellectual writing, opposing political participation. In Between the Acts, Woolf presents the problems issued from the mass media and commodity-driven books and seeks the possibilities to overcome them. Woolf seeks these possibilities by representing the process of the expansion of Isa's imagination and La Trope’s parodic pageant-play. In addition, Woolf tries to represent her vision by formal experiments in the novel. Between the Acts is an experimental novel where a number of genres come together. The novel is composed of dialogue, poetry, play, and prose. This layered text challenges her own readers to strive to understand the true meaning of the text. Woolf provides the reader like the audience of the pageant-play with chances to pause, think and feel through the layered style and words which rouse “the imagination, the memory, the eye, and the ear” as she says in “Craftsmanship.” Woolf also shows interruption, shock and silence as main sources of occasion for a critical thinking that induces a change of consciousness for both the audience and the reader. Woolf’s assertion of mental fighting is to think against the current and to explore new possibilities against chaotic reality. Like Woolf’s declaration that “thinking is my fighting,” to write Between the Acts is her intellectual fighting. And she requires the reader to join in her intellectual fighting.