" 'The Shapes My Brain Holds': Kantian Spontaneity and Virginia Woolf's The Waves"

This chapter suggests a blueprint for reading literature and philosophy together, through a Kantian notion of spontaneous cognitive form that is flexible and linked with the underpinnings of objective knowledge. While “stream-of-consciousness” fiction is often recruited to enforce empiricist paradigms of the mind, this chapter argues that Woolf’s The Waves discloses what Kant called the mind’s spontaneity. Due largely to her well-known description of the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that rain down on the mind, Woolf has been almost exclusively interpreted as an empiricist. This chapter argues, by contrast, that while Woolf may take the sensory impression as a central unit of analysis for her depictions of a consciousness at work, she also routinely exceeds and indeed ironizes the empiricist framework she inherits, laying bare its limits. Woolf most clearly moves beyond the conceit of naturalistically rendered consciousness in the The Waves, which reveals modernist production of fiction at its most Kantian, or at least as a form working in the impasse between Hume and Kant. In representing the internal synthesizing abstractions that underlie the appearance of objects, Woolf’s fiction joins Kant’s epistemology in requiring a type of representation different from description, since what is being rendered has not yet taken the form of an object. Drawing not on Kant’s third Critique but on an anti-psychologistic reading of the first Critique, the broader aim of this chapter is to suggest the real untapped potential that cognitive spontaneity in its theoretical use maintains for aesthetics.

Duke Scholars

Author Maya Kronfeld Literature

Contributor Maya Kronfeld Literature