What is psychoanalysis talking about when it is talking about ‘Virginia Woolf’? My project explores the reception of Woolf's works in psychoanalytic literary criticism produced in English and Francophone contexts between the late 1980s and early 2010s. Confronting differing analytical schools and critical traditions, I test the hypothesis that Woolf’s poetics frustrate oedipal scenarios and undermine the founding psychoanalytic metaphor of the phallus.
The project expands on my MA dissertation ‘The Whole, the Hole and the Border: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Frame in To The Lighthouse (1927)’ in which I try and show how Woolf’s widening of the signifier/signified gap makes the unspeakable palpable.