Woolf’s Ethics of Reading and Writing

Abstract

The definition of the short story as a space of encounter between the self and the other as characters or entities belonging to the narrative, can be extended so as to embrace the encounter between the self as creator and the other as reader. Indeed, in most short stories, a silent conversation takes place between them through the staging of the story-telling process, the story-teller and the reader. This metafictional mechanism at work in Woolf’s short stories will be examined at length; how it opens onto a specific experience of alterity and a specific form of conversation involving writer and reader caught up in a collaborative process will then be analysed as well as the eminently ethical moment of encounter it creates.