From Whose Face : Virginia Woolf and the Impossible Task of Criticism

In 1929 Woolf remarked that "to write criticism is now like keeping my hand clenched."Just eight years later she was dreaming of "a new method of writing criticism" that might take the form of an "essay-novel.""From Whose Face" explores this very particular Woolfian dream and does so, indeed, in the style of an essay-novel.The door is thereby opened not only to such familiar inter-war figures as the literary critics of Cambridge (F.R. Leavis et al) but also to such obscure or even fictional figures as a woman and a man from the northern town of Huddersfield.The woman is a millworker with whom Woolf corresponded, the man stands in a public lecture-hall and was wholly imagined by Woolf.What follows, then, is an attempt to capture something of literary criticism's extra-mural history or what Woolf calls "criticism [] without rules."This lawless school of criticism will be seen, in the first instance, to have questioned the rule of form that insist on the essay as the only way to do academic criticism.Woolf's lawless school will then be seen also to question various other kinds of rule or code that inform the emergent discipline of English Literature.These include a number of now-very-familiar codes relating to gender, class and sexuality.But also included are a number of less familiar codes such as Englishness, militarism, seriousness, propriety, marriage and (above all) realism.All these codes are brought into question as Woolf's anarchistic dream shows inter-war literary criticism to house (or attempt to house) such lawless forces as chance, error, laughter, blasphemy, orality, fear, the body, war and even the unemployed, the hungry and the dying.In sum, "From Whose Face" explores what Woolf calls "the dancing agony [] of criticism" and in so doing speaks to recent and major books on the very nature of criticism by such as Gerald Graff, John Guillory and Ross Wilson These studies, sensing the seeming end of literary criticism, all share my interest in the past of literary criticism.What, though, distinguishes my own raid on this history is that, by virtue of its fictionality, it incorporates pasts that never happened or were never allowed to happen.Until now, perhaps.