Virginia Woolf's Women Discourse and Its Impact on World Literature

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the Acropolis exemplifies this one-of-a-kind blend of the two: a structure rich and layered in multisensory iconography, culture and ritual. But in investigating the monument outside the traditional travel narrative, she positions it as a site for consideration of self-identity and realisation. (The visual, haptic and kinaesthetic details in her descriptions, especially in Orlando, contrast ancient “silent composure” with modern hecticness.) Instead of simply preserving history, this practice joins her broader conversation about the ways in which gender, transfiguration and women’s identity were negotiated. While the literary analysis uncovers the radical use of imagery that would characterise her writing, the practice of computational linguistics provides quantitative tools through which to map these themes. Scholarship on word embeddings and diachronic mapping provides the ability to: Identify and mitigate implicit gender bias in large data sets. Track the semantic trajectory of “womanhood” through literary epochs. Situate Woolf’s modernist prose within an international, transhistorical framework. Finally, the intertwining of multi-sensory literary techniques with algorithmic frames provides intricate roads for the reconsideration of female subjectivity and its dissemination through world literature.