Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgmen
- Abbreviation
- WAR AND PEACE
- WORLD WRITER(S)
- ANIMAL AND NATURAL WORLD
- WRITING AND WORLDMAKING
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out
- Upheavals of Intimacy in To the Lighthouse
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts; or, Why It's “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf's Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix: Virginia Woolf Conference Exhibit Items, Newberry Library
The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf's Creative Worldmaking
from WRITING AND WORLDMAKING
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgmen
- Abbreviation
- WAR AND PEACE
- WORLD WRITER(S)
- ANIMAL AND NATURAL WORLD
- WRITING AND WORLDMAKING
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out
- Upheavals of Intimacy in To the Lighthouse
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts; or, Why It's “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf's Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix: Virginia Woolf Conference Exhibit Items, Newberry Library
Summary
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (63)Let me begin by crossing my fingers as a sign of my ambivalence about what I am about to undertake here. I fear that I may be walking a little too close to the edge of apologetics for dominant cultural (white, Western, US-based, educated, middle-class) privilege than is comfortable or safe for my soul—but I am willing to risk that damnation in order to reassert the value of the imaginative, the well-wrought, the beautiful, to the common weal—the public good. This may sound a bit too much like David Brooks, who wrote a moving, but ultimately mistaken, lament for the state of the humanities last year in The New York Times :
Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence's phrase, “the dark vast forest.”[…]The humanist's job was to cultivate this ground—imposing intellectual order upon it, educating the emotions with art in order to refine it, off ering inspiring exemplars to get it properly oriented. Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission.
The culprits in this sad story of lost faith are those who allegedly abandoned notions of “truth, beauty, and goodness” in order to espouse ideas about “political and social categories like race, class and gender” (Brooks). In other words, according to Brooks, you can have your truth and beauty or you can have your social justice but you can't have both because that will just confuse the youth of America and drive them away from our inspiring exemplars to more prosaic pursuits like accounting or engineering.
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- Virginia Woolf: Writing the World , pp. 204 - 210Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015