Les Lieux du Temps : contours du moi dans l’autobiographie et le journal de Woolf

Abstract

« 22 Hyde Park Gate », « Old Bloomsbury », « Warboys », Carlyle’s House » — places in Woolf’s Diary and Moments of Being are not mere landmarks of her fragmented path, but also associate spatial and temporal dimensions in order to structure the text. The retrospective character of autobiographical writing is counterbalanced by the omnipresence of death. In addition, the manuscripts — which can be read as topographical maps — reveal Woolf’s difficulty to put her self into words. Finally, this link between time and place, related to everyday writing, leads to an aesthetic compromise : a meteorology of the self.