Making literature in the age of science: Woolf, Freud, and disciplinarity

This study is an inquiry into the status of Literature as a source of intellectual and social authority in the twentieth century. It explores how Literature's claims to such authority have conflicted with, and helped to constitute, those of science. Specifically, it considers how Freudian psychoanalysis has functioned as a bridge between privileged scientific methods and the production of Literature. Focused specifically on Virginia Woolf, it argues that psychoanalysis offered literary authors new ways of participating in the production of self-knowledge by making the self available to them as an object of scientific study. In doing so, it allowed Woolf to employ the discourse of "usefulness" which served to privilege science in her own arguments for the value of Literature.;In revisiting the disciplinary relationship between science and Literature, the dissertation reads Woolf's theories of fiction, her stream-of-consciousness method, and her fictional experiments in The Waves and The Years through the discourse of usefulness which she employed in her arguments for the value of her work. As psychoanalysis offered a bridge between scientific methods of knowledge production and the literary pursuit of self-knowledge, Woolf could enact such explorations while also using them to argue for Literature's usefulness. From this perspective, Woolf's writing--and the literary biographies which have become an integral part of Woolf studies--serve less to preserve the disciplinary hierarchy between science and Literature and, instead, challenge us to rethink it.;After exploring how science assumed its privileged status through both its association with natural philosophy and its ability to bridge practical and theoretical knowledge, the dissertation moves on to consider how Literature emerged in relation to science as Romantic poets constructed arguments for the value of their work. In reaching back to the eighteenth century, it situates Woolf's experimentation with fiction within the history of disciplinarity as a system of knowledge production and circulation. Rather than understanding the disciplinary categories of Literature and science as separate and stable, the project understands their continual negotiation in relation to each other as a primary part of the work performed in each of them.