The experimental self: dialogic subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose

Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin s concept of the dialogic, Judy Little utilizes the insights of Bakhtin theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard as strategies for examining the political complexity of the as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, Christine Brooke-Rose construct it their fiction. Little demonstrates that the tradition of the self-as-individual belongs to a complex, intricately dialogic discourse, with the self being an ongoing experiment heteroglossia rather than a single, monologic ism. Woolf, Pym, Brooke-Rose, she argues, manifest a creative, relationship to Western discourses of subjectivity, their novels construct ideologically mobile selves that thrive on dialogic appropriation transformation. Among the novels which explores subjectivity, s Room and The Waves the most complex. Little shows that s Room, Woolf reverses narrative tradition, the creatively dialogic female narrator appropriating a textually masculine status while reserving for Jacob the textual position of the other, the feminine. The Waves questions subjectivity more radically, the fragmented soliloquies implying that the post-modern self has a relational feminine origin after the demise of grand narratives. Examining Pym s major novels, Little locates the inventive discourse of the author s eccentrics their dialogic construction of the trivial. Pym s strategically conventional narrative style privileges the marginal symbolic discourses by which the selves her fiction appropriate the insignificant as a mode of signification. Little notes that whether the selves the fiction of Brooke-Rose are human or mere texts on a computer screen, they all respond to crises with a courageous faith the self-inventive capacity of language. These heteroglossic subjectivities appropriate, amalgamate, generally maneuver the resources of narrative into fresh (and often comic) scenarios of origin, author, self. Discussing the novels of Woolf, Pym, Brooke-Rose, Little defines experimental in terms of subjectivity (how the text constructs the self) rather than the more traditional terms of the transgression of narrative levels typographical features. Little also breaks with tradition her use of Bakhtin. Most studies discuss Bakhtin s views philosophically theoretically. By contrast, Little employs Bakhtin s ideas as strategies for reading analyzing the discourses that are present a text.