The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce (Florida James Joyce)

In a comparative study, Galya Diment draws a novel comparison between two giants of Modernism and a relatively obscure nineteenth-century Russian Realist, claiming that the three writers all reinvented the idea of duality in literature.  Focusing on Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Joyce's Ulysses, and Goncharov's A Common Story, she introduces and refines the idea of "co-consciousness" as the mechanism that allows each work to transcend the genre of the autobiographical bildungsroman and the classical tradition of duality, represented by the doppelgänger.

 Defining co-consciousness as the means by which writers fictionalize what appear to be equally conscious sides of their personalities, she argues that this concept is the telling distinction between these three "divided-they-stand" writers and the "divided-they-fall" approach of other celebrated masters of the double.  A crucial feature of the three writers is their tendency to tolerate the split personality as an inevitable yet not life-threatening condition.

Galya Diment is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Thomas L. & Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author, among others, of Pniniad (1997) and A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury (2011).