Part of a work-in-progress, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog, this paper learns a trick or two from Gates's Signifying Monkey, Levinas's stray dog Bobby, Deleuze's and Guattari's rhizomic street dog (who both “runs down the street” and “is the street”), and even Derrida's cat; it attempts to teach new tricks to Dr. Johnson's dancing dog, and frolics over Agamben's “Open” with Haraway's canid companion species. Woolf's most obvious signifying dog, Flush, is preceded (and followed) in Woolf's writings by numerous important instances, and “turns,” in a fascinating chain of canine troping, which breaks out of literary conceit into a historico-political zone in which Woolf's “Flush” and “Mrs. Brown” tangle and cavort with poets, suffragettes, and eugenicists. Woolf, I have argued elsewhere, rhetorically remodifies patriarchal and racist dog tropes to the point of Benjaminian allegorical ruin, refiguring and resignifying them, turning them to feminist advantage, and she ventriloquises her feminist manifesto, A Room ofOne's Own (1929), as a dog-woman (I will elaborate on this below, but this dog-woman may be understood as a woman who seems to inhabit a canine morphology or one who seems to haunt the margins between human subjectivity and canid animality or one who is used to being treated or figured as a dog). I worry over the dogginess of the dog in all this, but concur with Haraway's estimation that “Woolf understood what happens when the impure stroll over the lawns of the properly registered … when these marked (and marking) beings get credentials and an income” (Companion Species 88). What happens to modernist writing when the impure get their paws on it? What kind of subjectivities are inscribed or produced in the urban contact zones where Woolf's chimerical canines encounter humanity?

My colleague Vassiliki Kolocotroni has been pointing me towards Dürer's icon of Melancholy (1514), I think as a warning on the dangers of obsessive study, although it has hardly cured me of my canine obsession since Dürer's melancholic artist-scholar is flanked by a sleeping dog—which I can hardly let lie. Vassiliki has also been pointing to Walter Benjamin's reading of Dürer's melancholic dog: