ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

hetoric of newspapers rather than encompassing large-scale historic events into the
same voice that narrates individual consciousness. Each attempt to include what is
unnarrated in “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” comes up against some sort of
barrier or limit.
On the one hand, these limits might be read as failures of bourgeois
modernism or of Virginia Woolf in particular. In this sense, “Time Passes” serves
primarily as a critique of the still-developing conventions of modernism, and an
acknowledgment of the limitations that came with Woolf’s own privileged
perspective. “Time Passes,” with its remarkable narrative agility and the collage-like
intrusion of bracketed narration, compellingly gestures to what is beyond the novel’s
primary mode of stream-of-consciousness narration. In so doing, it suggests the
epistemological limitations of any particular mode of narration. As such, it is both an
extension and a self-critique of this particular mode of modernism. Its function as
critique, rather than solution, to the limitations of narrative, is consonant with much
of modernism which, even in the hands of revolutionaries such John Dos Passos, was
geared more towards critiquing the modern world than providing it a positive
direction. “Time Passes,” then, on multiple levels, cannot escape the limitations of
either modernism or narrative.
On the other hand, we can see the limitations of “Time Passes” as the
limitations not of modernism, but of the middle. “Time Passes” struggles both to
establish its independence as a narrative unit and to maintain its status as the middle
of a larger narrative. As a middle, it necessarily comes between the beginning and the
end of the novel. It challenges the very vagueness of that Aristotelian definition of the
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