Unveiling the Contemporary in Virginia Woolf

This article aims to discuss Virginia Woolf’s critical appraisal of the contemporariness of her contemporaries’ production, focusing on her 1923 essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”. To that end, it contextualizes the publication of The Common Reader – First Series (1925) so as to problematize its conversational quality as a philosophical principle inherent to Woolf’s oeuvre (Pinho 2020). A comparison is also drawn between Woolf’s “How It Strikes a Contemporary” and Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” (2009) in order to shed light on the intersections between contemporary philosophy and the philosophical questions we find in Woolf’s writing.