Les fictions emblématiques de la modernité littéraire détruisent ce qui faisait depuis Aristote le principe même de la fiction : l’enchaînement des actions selon la nécessité ou la vraisemblance. [...] En récusant cette structure de rationalité, la fiction nouvelle témoignait d’un bouleversement qui mettait à bas la hiérarchie des formes de vie.
The present volume seeks to explore the implications of Woolf’s contemporaneity in terms of her own era and of ours. By looking at how one can grasp the meaning of one’s time from within and without, it traces ways in which her fictional as well as non-fictional works reflect on or engage with those forms of untimeliness or out-of-timeness in the present which enable an author to see its shadows or perceive its obscurity.
How does Woolf’s work think? And what is it about her texts that makes this question a possibility? These were among the questions that an international conference, held in partnership with the “Collège International de Philosophie” at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris in March 2012, set out to unravel.