This thesis explores how the novels of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Wide Sargasso Sea – despite being set in times of wars and social change that influence personal lives, maintain an attachment to and love for life. This thesis proposes that Woolf and Rhys ‘locate’ this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective, and oddly intimate moments and settings where (...) characters realise their bodily connection to the world of others, things, and places. This work suggests that this love for life is cultivated when life is seen as ‘a life’ and selves as ‘haecceities’ in the Deleuzian sense, and when we consider modern life as enchanted, not disenchanted. To examine the love for life and strange intimacies further, this thesis rethinks the works of Hélène Cixous in the light of contemporary theories of affect and new materialism that are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophies. This theoretical framework allows the examination of the complex ways in which intimacy, selfhood, and desire are portrayed in Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernist fiction. This thesis also demonstrates how post-structural feminism’s focus on radical alterity and its emphasis on and turn to materiality, the non-human, bodies, and affects, which are drawn together in the notion of écriture féminine, pre-figures the concerns of affect studies and new materialisms. The reading of Cixous’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Bennett’s works performed in this thesis demonstrates how their theories of affect and the non-human help us to further our understanding of intimacy in the works of Woolf and Rhys and to reconsider the life-affirming, affective, and anti-Oedipal qualities of their modernism. Such an approach allows not only the discovery of a new understanding of Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings, but it contributes significantly to how we understand these theories and modernism in general. (shrink)

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for (...) a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being. (shrink)