Making Thought Visible: Colour in the Writings of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot

Abstract

This thesis explores colour as a philosophical means of transit between literature and the visual arts. I explore a new way of thinking about the self and about thought, developmg the significance of colour alongside, and internal to, modes of representation in the modernist movement. The interaction of art and literature is crucial to much debate on modernist aesthetics. DevelopIng the debate into the history of colour phenomena, I argue that colour aHows a philosophical inflection to certain clich6s (such as stream-of-consciousness) that are attached to modernist writing. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Richardson and TS Eliot, I argue that the modernist preoccupation with the seeming unpasse between thought and representation can be seen to be 'made visible' through the theme of colour. Colour is a vehicle through which to explore the relation between thought and perception, subject and object, and offers a new way of engagement with recent research into theoretical comparisons between thinking, writing and visual arts.