La fonction mémorielle des objets chez Virginia Woolf et Katherine Mansfield : vers une esthétique de l’objet entre matérialité et surinvestissement symbolique

Abstract

At a pivotal moment in history and in the evolution of European society after WWI, modernist authors—among whom Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf more specifically here—made objects a privileged material in the memorial process. Paradoxically, however, these highly symbolic material objects speak of absence rather than presence: they are part of a dialectical writing of the trace and of an aesthetic of the negative that speaks of an absence to the world. If objects are invested with a memorial power and sometimes, when part of ritualized mourning, become fetish objects, it is essential to see how they mainly express emptiness. This raises the question of the tension between the symbolic and the material, as well as that of the resistance of objects, in the diegesis as in the writing, to the over-investment of the imaginary and of memory.