Into the Heart of Silence: Human-Agent Interaction in Woolf’s Between the Acts

This paper, accepted by the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf held at California State University, Fresno, explores the dynamic relationship between culture and audience in Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941) as a shared experience between the characters within and the readers outside of the text. This paper investigates the culture-audience relationship as a striking historically specific example of human-agent interaction (HAI), particularly through the literary representations of artifacts like the paintings and newspaper, whereby characters encounter aesthetic, social, and political phenomena in a way that makes critical consciousness and agential thought possible, both characterologically and readership-wise. According to the research portal for the Human-Agent Interaction community (HAI-conference.net), HAI is defined as “the point where people shape their interactions with an object or technology as if it had purposes, motivations, or intentions.” In using this idea as a framework to study Woolf’s final novel, Oden’s paper investigates the ways in which Woolf models a kind of cultural engagement that reflects new subjective modalities made possible through technology and modernity.