A．disparagingB．ironicC．facetiousD．skeptical but resigne……
TEXT E
"I want to criticize the
social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf’s
rovocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly
been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary
interests very different from the traditional picture of the "poetic" novelist
concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the
intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a
realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as
a visionary: literary critics’ cavalier dismissal of Wooff’s social vision will
not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged
by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed)by their social
environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class,
wealth, and gender help to determine people’s fates. Most of her novels are
rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical
time.
Woolf’s focus on society has not been generally recognized
because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers
in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is
fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform
their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest,
unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs.
Her Writer’s Diary notes:" the only honest people are the artists."
Whereas "these social reformers and philanthropists".., harbor.., discreditable
desires under the disguise of loving their kind .... Woolf detested
what she called "preaching" in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H.
Lawrence (among others)for working by this method.
Woolf’s own
social criticism is expressed in the language of observation rather than in
direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active art.
She describes phenomena and provides materials for a judgment about society and
social issues: it is the reader’s work to put the observations together and
understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist, Woolf, works
by indirection subtly underufining officially accepted mores, mocking,
suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating, bearing
witness: hers is the satirist’s art.
Woolf’s literary models
were acute social observers like Chekhov and Chaucer. As she put it in The
Common Reader, "It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one
stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we
read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore." Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to
understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch--a decision
crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic.
In the first paragraph of the passage, the author’s attitude toward the literary critics mentioned can best be described as______.
A．disparaging
B．ironic
C．facetious
D．skeptical but resigned
