Date of Award
2006
Degree Type
Dissertation
First Advisor
Stephen M. Barber
Abstract
Riding the Hyphen forms a deconstructive conversation that features Derrida, Woolf, and a host of other modern and contemporary thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In the first chapter, "The Religion Question: When Faith Encounters Critique," I examine the ways in which both Woolf and Derrida dissolve the dichotomy between faith and critical thought in order to arrive at a purer and more productive mode of critique. The second chapter, "Being and Sacrifice," in which I theorize and ontology of sacrifice, argues, with recourse to Heidegger, for a secularized understanding of "spirit" that maintains the play between the "spiritual" and "responsibility." This chapter ends with a discussion of Derrida's work on friendship as a prelude to my investigation of the philosophy of friendship that is at the center of Woolf's penultimate novel The Years. "Silent Guests: The Echo of the Other," my third chapter, extends the Derridian and Woolfian problematizations of friendship and introduces the concept of the "arranger," which embodies both the concept of a narrator and of a signature distinct from the author. The fourth chapter carries the arranger concept through to a discussion of Woolf and Derrida's respective philosophies of language, which is also to say their respective philosophies of being and politics. I conclude this work by arguing for the significance to our present moment of the mode of thinking these two writers enable when brought to encounter.
Recommended Citation
Yates, Andrea L., "Riding the hyphen: Derrida-Woolf" (2006). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 2087.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/2087
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