Hellerstein, Marjorie

About the author: Marjorie Hellerstein received her PhD from New York University. She has taught at Fenn College, Cleveland, Boston University, and Massachusetts College of Art as Professor of Humanities and Literature.

Virginia Woolf’s Experiments with Consciousness, Time and Social Values

2001 0-7734-7421-8
There were many paradoxes Virginia Woolf had to resolve in her fiction writing: how to bring readers into close touch with life and yet keep them at a distance by means of the special life in fiction; how to follow the details of real life and yet symbolize meaning; how to write prose and yet discharge some of the functions of poetry. Consciousness was her way of contending with the paradoxes – consciousness by the characters of their unique selves, of the influence and interaction of other characters, a flow of inner consciousness. The consciousnesses are not abstract; they are always connected to a phenomenal world of action, environment, and time.