Modernity and aesthetics: The example of Virginia Woolf

This study proposes a reading of two short stories by Virginia Woolf ("The Mark on the Wall" and "Monday or Tuesday"). Both of them explore the modalities of the modern subject/artist confronted with the failure of master-discourses and with the existential void. The link between the metafictionality of "The Mark on the Wall" and the highly poetic mode of "Monday or Tuesday" lies in the vital need of filling in the structural lack of the Other through the work on the Letter.