Ranciere's distribution of the sensible in Jacob's Room
Date
2019
Authors
Quinter, Jacob, author
Trembath, Paul, advisor
Coffino, Kara, committee member
Sebek, Barbara, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
This essay provides a model of reading which combines Ranciere's distribution of the sensible and aesthetic with Deleuze's terminology of minor literature and affect. In doing so I aim to demonstrate how Virginia Woolf's third novel emerges as her first experimental, or modernist texts, in that it makes readers aware of and subverts the arrangements of their own senses by dominant ideology. Though Critical Studies has successfully overcome the false boundaries between formalism and historicism, approaches to texts from the perspective of Ranciere filtered through Deleuze are largely unexplored, and can help the field develop a more comprehensive sense of how texts can transform by way of style. Thus, popularized Baumgartian conceptions of aesthetic as idealist can be alternatively reconfigured towards materialist vocabularies.