Just Published: Dr. Megan Quigley on Woolf and Wittgenstein

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose article, "Reading Virginia Woolf Logically: Resolute Approaches to Woolf's The Voyage Out and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, was just published in the journal Poetics Today in a special issue focusing on the relationship between logic and literature.

Dr. Quigley's article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. She argues that, like some recent readers of the Tractatus, we should think of The Voyage Out as therapeutic nonsense. What does that mean? The “resolute" approach to the Tractatus argues that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s own assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. Quigley argues that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a similar approach to the nineteenth-century novel, fully investing in the conventions of the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot only to ruthlessly dispense with them. Both works use a particular kind of modernist therapeutic pedagogy reliant on logic and form.

See here for more information on the article and the special issue.