Ch. 7: Peace, Friendship, and “The Educated Man’s Sister” in Woolf’s Pacifist Writing
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Description
This chapter appears in the book, Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Vol. 1 Transnational Circulations. Edited by Ariane Mildenberg and Patricia Novillo-Corvalan.
Chapter abstract: This chapter explores the connection between Woolf’s notions of friendship and her critical writings about peace and pacifism. For Woolf, friendship not only constitutes a personal intimate relationship with another person, but it also represents a force that stands in opposition to oppressive impersonal concepts like nationalism, imperialism, and militarism—and is thus deeply intertwined with her particular brand of pacifism. In order to make this argument, the chapter employs Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and explores the place of the sister in his text. Though Derrida traces the relationship between the friend and the brother throughout the history of western thought concerning friendship, he often stops to ask about the absence of the sister. His book ultimately shows that this figure of the “friend in the feminine” could be the key to thinking politics “beyond the principle of fraternity.”
ISBN
978-1-94997-935-0
Publication Date
2020
Publisher
Clemson University Press
City
Clemson (SC)
Keywords
Virginia Woolf, Jacques Derrida, Friendship, Sisterhood, Pacifism
Disciplines
Cultural History | Literature in English, British Isles | Place and Environment
Recommended Citation
Haffey, Kate, "Ch. 7: Peace, Friendship, and “The Educated Man’s Sister” in Woolf’s Pacifist Writing" (2020). English & Linguistics Books. 12.
https://scholar.umw.edu/elc_books/12