Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article aims to analyze Virginia Woolf's short story "In the Orchard" (2023), focusing on the nature of the narrator. The story is composed of three sections that narrate the same scene using different perspectives. We will observe the techniques used and the impact of these uses on the interpretation of the text. One of the problems to be developed in this article is based on how the Woolfian narrator seems to distance themselves from the human perspective, narrating nature by nature. Therefore, this study will investigate the codes that identify the different types of narrators, such as a non-human perspective of nature, and how the form of the story is intertwined with its content. We will use the works of Susan Lanser (1992) as a theoretical framework to discuss the character of the narrative voice employed by Woolf and how this is reflected in the representation of nature in the work. Additionally, we will use Peter Adkins's The Modernist Anthropocene (2022) to formulate how the characterization of the non-human occurs in the author's work.To discuss the structures of the short story, we will start from Piglia (2004) to consider how Virginia Woolf subverts the author's maxim that every short story presents two plots/stories and what this subversion implies for the reading of the work. If, for the author, the short story narrates two stories, we argue that in this specific text, Virginia Woolf intertwines more than two plots from a non-human perspective, seeking an experimental alternative instead of following tradition to weave a narrative that, from our perspective, is anti-authoritarian, in the words of Lanser (1992).
Source: Inventário
Author: Borba, Lucas Leite
Institution: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7218311925