2b Work in pairs and discuss:

1. Which painting shows the world as it really looks, and which shows it as it feels?
2. Which painting seems more objective — describing visible reality? Which seems more subjective — expressing personal emotion or mood?
3. What do these artistic choices make you feel as a viewer? Which painting tells you more about the artist’s inner world?
4. If the paintings were stories, what kind of story would each one tell:

• What kind of narrator might paint like Shishkin?
• What kind of narrator might paint like Monet?

2c Summarize your thoughts:
Modernism in art often moves from objectivity (recording facts) to subjectivity (recording perceptions).

• How do you think this change might affect the way writers tell stories?

3 Read the article about the author and answer the questions:

1. What was Virginia Woolf's contribution to world literature? What themes did she raise in her works?
2. Why were short stories important for Woolf?
3. What does “stream-of-consciousness” mean in simple terms?
4. Why did Modernist writers like Woolf focus on the inner world instead of external action?
5. How does this focus change our reading experience — do we understand a work of fiction faster or slower?
6. Why might Woolf choose a male narrator to tell a story about a woman’s inner life?

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is one of the most important novelists of the 20th century. Influenced by writers like James Joyce and Marcel Proust, she experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing — a style that tries to capture the flow of thoughts and emotions in the human mind. Woolf believed that life is not a sequence of neatly arranged events but a “luminous halo” of impressions and moments of consciousness.

Her most famous novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). In these works, Woolf rejects chronological storytelling and focuses instead on the inner world of her characters — how they think, remember, and feel. "Examine for a moment," wrote Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader, "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." Thus, Woolf presents all events, from different times, which enter the character's consciousness.

Her short stories — like “A Haunted House”, “Kew Gardens”, and “The Legacy” — served as a testing ground for the narrative techniques she later developed in her novels. the stories reveal the evolution of Woolf's experimental methods and the origin of some of the major themes in her novels. In October 1940, in response to a request from the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Virginia Woolf wrote "The Legacy" about a widowed politician who reads his wife's diaries. However, much to her anger, the editor rejected the story, and she did not receive payment for it. "The Legacy" was published posthumously in the collection A Haunted House.

Besides her novels, Woolf was a feminist essayist and literary critic. Her social and political concerns revolved chiefly around the rights of women and women writers. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf argues that "a woman must have money and a room of her own" if she is to write fiction of any merit.

Virginia Woolf (born Stephen) came from an affluent and elite background. Despite the material comforts enjoyed by her family, Woolf's childhood was a traumatic one. She suffered sexual abuse by her half brothers. She had to contend with frequent bouts of depression throughout her life. Sensing the onset of another breakdown, on 28 March, 1941 Woolf drowned herself.

5 Name the means of indirect characterization listed below

1 _________ How does the character behave?
2 _________ What type of dialogue is created for the character?
3 _________ What do they think about themselves or others? What are their main concerns?
4 _________ How is the character received by other characters?
5 _________ How do minor things (e.g., someone’s dress) color our perception of their character?