Trailing the forest: Virginia Woolf and the essayistic

Virginia Woolf writes her essays in an essayistic mode, which allows a deconstruction of the hegemonic order of things—through the jarring and arduous process of digressing through disparate topics one starts to disrupt the underlying dialectic and recognize the ideology at play--and a novel (re)construction of the disparate topics into a novel constellation. The essay mode is a simultaneous (deXre) construction. This process houses revolutionary potential. It encourages a specific mode of reading, what Paul de Man calls rhetorical reading. Althusser calls symptomatic reading, and has elements of a close or critical reading of a text. This thesis mimics the essayistic mode of writing, while exploring Woolf, the essay, language, and reading, in order to construct a novel constellation on the essay mode.