Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

28 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
4. Adorno’s entire sentence in the original reads: “Insgesamt wäre er zu interpretieren als Einspruch gegen die
vier Regeln, die Descartes’ Discours de la méthode am Anfang der neueren abendländischen Wissenschaft und
ihrer Th eorie aufrichtet” (22).
5. David Held helpfully explains that identity thinking “aims at the subsumption of all particular objects
under general defi nitions and/or a unitary system of concepts. Th e tendency in contemporary social institutions
to ‘total’ organization is, Adorno claimed, the historical counterpart to this mode of thinking; the
particular is subsumed under the general concept as the individual is subsumed under ‘the plan’” (202).
6. 1922 is also the year, Michael North reminds us, that T. S Eliot’s Th e Waste Land made its debut, James
Joyce’s Ulysses appeared, and the translation of Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (who
was to be one of Toulmin’s professors at Cambridge in the 1940s) inaugurated philosophy’s “linguistic
turn” in the English-speaking world (31).
7. Virginia had written: “It is impossible to extract a straight answer from that subtle, half smiling, half
melancholy man, with heavy-lidded eyes and a dreamy, quizzical expression” (CR1 61). Nicola Luckhurst
smartly points to the way in which Virginia subtly incorporates her own self portrait in her essay on
Montaigne’s art of self-portraiture. And Luckhurst supports this argument by juxtaposing actual portraits
of a half-smiling Woolf and a half-smiling Montaigne within the body of her article (42). She also reads
Leonard’s echo of Virginia in the 1927 review as an indication of how their writings on Montaigne constitute
“an intimate and ongoing conversation” (43) with each other and with the Frenchman himself.
8. Th e most thorough case is probably presented by Georgia Johnston.
9. It is this essay that Melba Cuddy-Keane brilliantly uses to discuss what she has described as Woolf’s “turn
& turn about method” (138)—or, we might say, her unmethodical method.
Works Cited
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——. “Der Essay als Form.” Noten zur Literatur I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. 9-33.
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