O corpo que escreve: Virginia Woolf tateando o indizível

Abstract

“Modern Fiction,” one of the essays that Virginia Woolf included in The Common Reader (1925), was an edited version of “Modern Novels,” originally published on April 10^th, 1919, in the Times Literary Supplement. In the meantime, Ulysses (1922) was finally published — whose author Woolf mentions in both of her texts. James Joyce, among other authors, is mentioned among praise and criticism, and Woolf’s ultimate defense in “Modern Fiction” is that there is no such thing as the method of fictional writing. She examines a writer’s perception of reality, and her essay — which obviously revolves around the prose of her time — thus considers the mental processes necessary or pertinent to writing. However, Woolf does not completely separate the mental realm from the corporeal; on the contrary, the writer reflects on inhabiting/being a body that writes. Remembering the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, this article aims to bring together some of Virginia Woolf’s reflections on writing and corporeity. In addition to “Modern Fiction”, other texts are also cited, such as “The Leaning Tower”, “Craftsmanship”, and “On Being Ill”, as well as Nancy's Corpus.