Virginia Woolf’s Microgenesis

Virginia Woolf's Microgenesis analyses Woolf's works through her own methodological approach to mind, to meaning, and to making whole. This volume argues that this preoccupation with the metaphysics of "wholeness," a dread, indeed, of both fragmentation and what endures as an organic unity, places Woolf's writings alongside Jason Brown's microgenesis, formulated as an unfolding, emergent, and evolutionary process of cognitive activity. However, crucially, it is not by assembling multiple flows of sense data into more complex constructions that we might perceive the objective world but by sculpting away the unfit to reveal the structure of the world as a surfacing reality. In so many ways, Woolf's novels represent an enactment of microgenetic theory, demonstrating and alerting us to the mind/brain state as a process of continual unfolding through progressive differentiation and discrimination to a distinct configuration - albeit one which may be deemed imperfect.

That is not to say that Woolf's writings should be understood as anticipating Brown's formulation of microgenetic theory as such but that they should be understood as unearthing the adaptive and evolutionary significance, and signification, of microgeny through her own myriad methods of composition - that is, her processes of tunnelling and transmuting, moments of being/nonbeing, and depth-and-surface - through which she may arrive at what she labels the "whole conception."

Virginia Woolf's Microgenesis is essential reading for researchers and students in Woolf Studies, process philosophy, new aterialisms, literary theory, and modernist literature.