弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫,文学风格与审美教育

Virginia Woolf,Literary Style,and Aesthetic Education

文学作品的内容表征了故事、角色和事件,它们通常是虚构的,但也是用独特的写作风格来进行叙述的。我们把这些独特的写作风格视为作者独特的声音,而这种独特的声音正是本文考察的对象。本文的核心问题是,文学作品借助它们的风格是否不仅仅表征了那些虚构的内容,而这对审美教育可能产生什么启示。这两个问题虽然可以被看作分析艺术哲学在艺术表征论和艺术知识论上的推进,但本文的重心却主要落在弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫关于文学风格的洞见上。本文在第一部分引入伍尔夫的风格论,在第二部分把它提炼为一种具有明确哲学论点的风格表征论,并在第三部分回应对风格表征论可能产生的质疑。在第四部分,本文将会进一步讨论风格表征论在审美教育领域可能产生的建树,即通过文学风格的创新,读者可以怎样获得理解世界的新视角。

Works of literature represent stories,characters,and events:these are the contents of a work.Often,the contents of literary works are fictional;however,it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing,in an author’s distinct literary'voice.'In this paper,I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might have for our thinking about aesthetic education.Both of these concerns-with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us-have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art.While I will pay due attention to these debates,my main route into the question will not be through philosophy but by means of considering Virginia Woolf’s writing on the modernist break with earlier stylistic conventions.Introducing the question in the context of Woolf’s writings will take up section 1 of this paper.I section 2,I will formulate a theory of stylistic representation inspired by some of Woolf’s essays.According to this view,a literary style represents a cognitive disposition:a distinct,dispositionally defined cognitive habit of making sense of the world.In section 3,I will compare this theory with some possible contenders drawn from analytic philosophy of art,and,in section 4,I outline how such a theory might help us evaluate innovations in literary style in terms of the kind of aesthetic education they make available to the reader.In this way,I suggest we may read Woolf’s remarks on the modernist experiment in literary style as preliminary work for a theory of how innovations in style make new kinds of understanding available to the reader.