SHREDDING, BURNING, TUNNELLING

Abstract

Abstract This essay marks the centenary of 1922, annus mirabilis of modernism but also the year when my grandparents became child refugees in the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In Mrs. Dalloway and her Diary, Virginia Woolf offers a figuration of modernity, which Toni Morrison critically revises in her master’s thesis and in Sula. I aim to show that Sula displays a fine-grained, pervasive and dispersive intertextual relationship with Mrs. Dalloway: a multi-form critical repetition, centred around the figures of shredding, burning and tunnelling; I then connect these figures to the lives of my grandparents. The figures that Woolf and Morrison develop anticipate and might indeed have influenced poststructuralist theory, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.