Dr. Quigley's article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. She argues that, like some recent readers of the Tractatus, we should think of The Voyage Out as therapeutic nonsense. What does that mean? The “resolute" approach to the Tractatus argues that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s own assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. Dr. Quigley proposes that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a similar approach to the nineteenth-century novel, fully investing in the conventions of the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot only to ruthlessly dispense with them. Both works use a particular kind of modernist therapeutic pedagogy reliant on logic and form.
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