Parker Dixon, Amy (2011) Towards a poetics of criticism: Adornoian negativity and the experiential in the essays and musical marginalia of Virginia Woolf. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2338/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/
[email protected] Towards a Poetics of Criticism: Adornoian Negativity and the Experiential in the Essays and Musical Marginalia of Virginia Woolf Amy Parker Dixon BA (Hons), MMus Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature and Department of Music Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow June 2010 © Amy Parker Dixon, June 2010 2 Abstract Through an analysis of the work of Virginia Woolf and T.W. Adorno’s theory of the aesthetic, this dissertation seeks to develop a poetics of criticism that takes account of the philosophy of the non-identical in subjective experience. As the subversion of the positivist and subjectivist tendencies of identity thinking, Adorno’s negative dialectic is read here in parallel with Woolf’s work as an example of a discourse that preserves the particularity of experience.