Uma frase própria: literatura e emancipação na obra de Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The work of Virginia Woolf can be understood as an emancipatory thinking she developed both as an essayist and as a writer of fiction. The main purpose of this dissertation is to problematize that very notion of emancipation as singularly linked to writing and reading. Such a concept of emancipation entails a reconsideration of the ideas of History and History of Literature. The unifying thread of the notion of emancipation would be the conceptual literary character of the anonymous, or “Anon”. That character allows to conceive the specific effects that literature has over subjectivities, since it represents the possibility of existing in a short of double life while living in a context of given conditions that might be discriminatory or not, creating at the same time an alternative existence. It constitutes a mixed an ambiguous figure only possible through writing, one which becomes visible during the act of reading. In this dissertation, we aim at problematizing the political problem of the emancipation of women in literature -women understood here as “anonymous” in the sense described before- contextualizing it in the critique of the history of universal literature that Woolf provides in her essays, mainly through the figure of anonymous writers and readers.