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A Specially Tender Piece of Eternity: Virginia Woolf and the Experience of Time Teresa Prudente. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009) xiv +193 pp.
Those of us who work on and teach Woolf often find ourselves making statements to the effect that Woolf's work is characterized by a productive tension or internal contradiction between active and passive, internal and external, mystical and political, cyclical and linear, and so on. Of particular relevance here, we will often say that innovations in the representation of temporality are among her texts' most significant qualities, asserting that, in various different ways, her work challenges the notion of linear, chronological time as the guiding temporality of narrative fiction. But precisely because we often say these things, they sometimes risk taking on the status of truisms; we may lose a sense of the specific features of the narratives on which such assertions are based. One of the significant qualities of Teresa Prudente's book is its careful and sustained grounding in Woolf's statements about time and fiction in her essays, and, more significantly, in close attention to the content, style and structure of her novels. Particularly when the discussion becomes-as perhaps is inevitable when the topic is so slippery and complex as time itself-fairly dense, it is reassuring to the reader that the analysis frequently returns to and locates itself in specific and close textual readings.
This admirably nuanced and well-structured monograph "aims at shedding light on the stratified temporality characterising Woolfs novels" (ix): the a-linear temporalities of Woolf's texts (following Ricoeur), and in particular temporalities of eternity and the ecstatic. But in doing so it necessarily touches on many of the internal contradictions which make Woolf's work so enduringly intriguing -indeed, in many ways the coexistence of apparently mutually exclusive, or at the very least contrasting, facets within Woolf's narratives is Prudente's central critical concern. The first part of the book reads To the Lighthouse and Orlando with special reference to "moments of being," in which, Prudente argues, "the coexistence and interdependence of the two feelings of ecstasy and emptiness ... appear as the climax of Woolf's insistence on the modem subject's divided perception" (63). Moments of being are in fact offered throughout the book as exemplary, particularly condensed instances of the kind...