Transformative Impetus: A Look at Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) works against the grain of understanding human subjectivity and its relationship with environment as mechanistic, primarily anthropocentric or teleological. It puts forth worlds that crisscross boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the animal. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s portrayal of a decentralized, temporal relativity finds voice through principles of co-evolution and complexity theory, highlighting the co-dependency operating within evolutionary development as a transformative impetus.