Virginia Woolf's Life Poetics

With Chinese and western poetics as research contexts, this dissertation is an attempt at a holistic approach to Virginia Woolf's theory of fiction, in order to clarify, on the one hand, the origin, contents and the value of Woolf s life poetics in terms of its nature, stance, critical methods, literary forms and artistic state, and to justify, on the other hand, Woolf s practice of life poetics in The Waves in the areas of creative conception, constituent, literary form and artistic state. It discloses the gist of Woolf s life poetics, which holds that literature is in essence an artistic form to express life, with the innate truth of life as the highest criterion of its writing, form and criticism, transcending rational cognition and realistic correspondence. The gist reveals that poetics is by nature a synthesis of aesthetics and arts, and any separation between the two may lead to its impasse. The original points of the present dissertation are as follows.It reflects upon limitations of traditional western poetics by means of Woolf s critique. The starting points of Woolf s poetics are refutations of the dominant tenets of western poetics, such as mimetic theory, rhetoric methodology, rational cognition and binary opposition, and the particular hypotheses refuted are as follows: literary reality is regarded as object or consciousness or truth represented; literary conception is considered to be material arrangement; literary criticism is defined as cognition of constituent or interpretation of context; literary form is deemed to be methods of representation or expression; literary truth is judged in accordance with its verisimilitude to the object itself; and binary opposition between material and spirit, subjectivity and objectivity, content and form, fact and imagination as well. To achieve a breakthrough in the field of poetics, Woolf attempts transcendence from five perspectives, namely, from appearances to essence by nature, from sensation to imagnation in writing, from cognition to perception in criticism, from binary opposition to unity in form, and from verisimilitude to sublime state in criterion.With Chinese poetics as research context, the present dissertation not only surveys the origin, contents and the value of Woolf s life poetics, but also reevaluates the significance of its synthesis of arts and aesthetics. It is owing to the unity of arts and aesthetics that Woolf is able to throw insight into the limitations of western poetics. The origin of Woolf s poetics is the sameness of life that human beings share, originated from the European literary canon, European artists' thoughts and her own writing perception. The content of Woolf's poetics can be summerized as follows: it defines literature in essence as an artistic form to record life, with life as its focus, reality as a unity of spirit and object, conception as an organic imagnative process, criticism as an aesthetic experience from perspective to perception, constituent of literature as emotions and thoughts, form as artistic expression of emotions and thoughts, truth as a synthesis of that of facts, imagination and inner life, artistic state as that of object, emotion and image, characterized with transcendence and pointing at the invisible essence of life. It's quintessence is identical with that of Chinese poetic ideas, such as Xujing, Shensi, Zhiyin, Miaowu, Quwei, Wenzhi, Zhenhuan, Yijing, etc. The significance of Woolf s poetics is that it breaks through the limits of human rationality and cognition, and reaches a world of unity with human beings and the Great nature being one.The present dissertation justifies the feasibility and value of Woolf's poetics by analyzing the practice of her theory in her masterpiece The Waves. The artistic features of The Waves are unique, with "memory narrative" as its conception model, "thoughts and emotions configuration" as its constituent characteristics, "formative relationship of emotions and thoughts" as its formal attribute, and "unification of emotions and scenes" as its artistic state. These practical features conform to the core of Woolf s poetics, which verifies its significance.In contrast to political and cultural approaches flourishing in recent years, the present dissertation restores the Woolfian study to her thoughts and works themselves, which is intended to question the negation of artistic perception in the field of literary theory, to appeal for unification of arts and aesthetics, and to promote an international recognition of the value of Chinese poetics.