Female Subjectivity and Narrative on the Move

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that affective relationships develop a processual conception of female subjectivity in modernist literary works by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The affect-charged narrative not only interweaves subjective and objective perspectives but also floats force encounters, discrepancy, and potentiality on the move. I reconsider the modernist epiphanic transcendence as a moment of bodily intensity in flux, experienced either on a molecular level or through tactility. This corporeal capacity each female character dares to confront enables them to glimpse a non-conscious understanding of their identity, an emancipatory sense of survival, and transversal solidarity. The first chapter reexamines Woolf’s characteristic narrative schemes, tunnelling and free indirect discourse, to consider how they liquidate the subject-object problematics and simultaneously create interpersonal group consciousness. The second chapter focuses on Woolf’s envisioning of processual and relational female subjectivity, especially by discovering the affective nature of her moments of being. The third chapter analyzes a “glimpse” by Katherine Mansfield to examine how bodily intensity, which is specifically experienced by touch, leads the female characters in her short fictions to transformation, realization, ambiguities, and potentiality. The last chapter showcases how the shared feeling of hollowness reimagines a hybrid model of an Asian American female subject and establishes transcultural solidarity.