ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a critical reading of Virginia Woolf's third, experimental novel Jacob's Room. His critique of Woolf's novel combines three distinct but interrelated practices: the scholarly article, one short extract from his fiction work-in-progress Imagine Jacob, and an analysis of his short film Jacob's Storyboard. The last was made especially for the conference New Languages for Criticism. The conference presentation extended itself into the miniature fiction and the film. To a degree, Imagine Jacob is inspired by Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, one section of which cites but remakes the Clarissa of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway by recasting her as a publisher in the New York of 2002. Cunningham's novel can be read as a critique of its model, Mrs Dalloway while Imagine Jacob aims to be an imaginative analysis of Jacob's Room. In Woolf's novel, the narrator and characters explore the gaps between media, building strips of theory and fiction to communicate across the divide.
