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Olivia is an English literature and Spanish double major who received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) for her project titled “Poststructuralism and Virginia Woolf: Human Consciousness and Its Mediation of the External World.” Her mentor is Robin Hackett, a professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the �鶹app.

How did you get involved with your current research? What is the topic?

I had been planning to apply for SURF since my freshman year. I already completed a JROP project and wanted another research experience for grad school applications, as I plan to pursue a PhD in English literature in hopes of becoming a professor. For my English Lit capstone, I took a seminar on Virginia Woolf. We read seven of her novels and a handful of other books. I fell in love. I saw something special in her novels I’d never experienced before. I was overjoyed at the chance to continue engaging with her work. 

The Waves was one of the few major Woolf novels excluded from our curriculum, along with Between the Acts, Jacob’s Room, and the memoir Moments of Being, all of which I read for my SURF project. My original research question had to do with scope. Woolf often alternates between the minutia of social dynamics, consciousness, and everyday life, and larger scale themes like nature, history, identity, and geological time. I wanted to explore these variances in scope, focusing on nature, history, and personal identity, using a poststructuralist approach. Poststructuralism was a theoretical perspective I discovered during my capstone which organizes reality by identifying discursive systems—the way language functions to structure how we view reality—the functioning of these systems, their creation and their ultimate instability.

My SURF research explores how the consciousness constructs and defines places, investigating imagination, identity, and how subjectivity affects human connection in the novel The Waves. This topic is not only important to the novel but also provides a new perspective on what makes people individual and how these innate differences affect our relationship with each other and the world. I chose this topic because I have always been fascinated by the idea of personal identity and saw a great opportunity to further explore its manifestations in the novels of Virginia Woolf.

What was your research process?

I initially planned for my research to consist of four phases: reading primary materials (novels), reading secondary materials (literary criticism, theory), organizing/drafting, and editing. A week into my second reading stage, I met with my mentor to check in, and together we decided it would be best for me to dive straight into drafting, reading additional secondary materials along the way as needed. 

As I began writing my paper, I started questioning my original approach. I was thinking about literary criticism as a whole and its place in the modern world and I decided I wanted to try something new. I dropped my theoretical framework and started focusing on creating a paper that I thought would be most useful to the world within it exists. I wanted to serve as a sort of guide to the text, an interpreter instead of a scholar, helping my reader to notice the same patterns I did and discussing their implications. With this new perspective, I also changed my thesis. I was still intrigued by these variances in scope, but I began to look at them through a new lens. I noticed that throughout the novel, different characters’ minds create or occupy different places than their bodies. One character might be sitting in the grass but imagining themselves sailing on the ocean. Another character feels himself to have lived for hundreds of years. My focus then became describing the movement between these physical and imaginative spaces and exploring what this means for identity and human connection. My paper now investigates how differences in consciousness represent differences in identity and asks what kind of relationship between people can exist despite these differences; what, if anything, can transcend the barriers of individual subjectivity and be truly shared by separate minds that synthesize experiences in vastly different ways. 

My paper is divided into six major sections. I drafted each on paper, then typed them, revising as I did. I then printed this version of the paper and rewrote it from top to bottom, one section at a time. At this point I realized that I had fallen back into a sort of overly theoretical academic register, and printed and rewrote again from top to bottom, making my tone more neutral and exploratory, as I had originally planned. From this draft I began editing, first for content and structure, then for form and polishing. I am currently working on a few content edits suggested by my mentor, finalizing formatting and word choice, and making my bibliography.

What has been your favorite part of the SURF project?

My favorite part has been the opportunity to devote time to my work in a way I never could before. When I write a paper for class, I am always limited by time constraints every step of the way. With this project, I had the freedom to spend time exploring before I settled on an idea. I had time to thoroughly read and reread my material. I had time to read secondary materials that I didn’t end up including, or that educated me about the process of writing or different pieces of theory, contributing to my understanding of craft instead of the paper itself. I had time to thoroughly draft and rewrite and rewrite again, with plenty of space to think and brainstorm along the way. I have been luxuriating in the wealth of knowledge that exists and granting myself permission to truly explore it, without fear of wasting time, without subordinating the experience of learning to its results. But in terms of results…this paper is the best thing I have ever written by far, in no small part because I had the time to do what I love and do it well. This paper will be the foundation for an INCO project in the fall, where I will edit my work for submission to the Woolf Studies Annual conference and publication in their journal. I will also be using my current version as a writing sample when I apply to graduate programs in the fall.

Why is this research important? 

Research in the liberal arts is important not only for what it discovers, but for the changes it provokes in the discoverer. My research experiences have changed the way I think about and interact with the world. In liberal arts, we do not only learn information, we learn how to closely examine the world and share our findings with others. My goal in this project was to serve as a guide to patterns I noticed in a particular novel, but the process of noticing these patterns will always be infinitely more valuable to me than the patterns themselves. To me, a liberal arts research experience is about taking the time to really understand something and put it into words. The passion and attentiveness required to do this well does not end with the project but can be applied to every aspect of life. I hope to continue studying Woolf in the future, but also to expand my knowledge of other authors and texts within the modernist and postmodern movements.