Odd Affinities

Elizabeth Abel is the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow and the editor or coeditor of four collections, most recently, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Woolf TracksPart I: Woolf’s Room in African American ModernismChapter 1: Mrs. Dalloway in Harlem: Passing’s Contending ModernismsChapter 2: The Smashed Mosaic: Woolf’s Traces in Baldwin’s OeuvrePart II: Woolf’s Refuge in Late European ModernismChapter 3: Light Rooms: Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, and the Mediums of Maternal MourningChapter 4: Invisible Subjects: Woolf’s Flickering in Sebald’s AusterlitzAfterword: Vibrations and VisibilityList of AbbreviationsNotesIndex

"For Abel the ideal Woolf is imperfect and relative to the moment, 'rather than an icon frozen in time'. . . . Abel’s Woolf speaks in new contexts: in African American modernism, in relation to postwar trauma. At times the author’s bravura, intricate arguments feel almost deliberately baroque, as if she wants to stress that any effort to resituate Woolf is, after all, the work of reading. . . . Perhaps this is all that can be done with a figure so thoroughly read: continue to listen for all her resonances, as well as the notes that do not sound clearly."