Craftmanship
What is the author's perspective in the nonfiction book, Craftmanship?
Craftmanship
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Craftmanship
Craftsmanship is written and delivered in the first person perspective. More specifically, Woolf delivers her talk using first person plural pronouns like "we," "our," and "us." In so doing, she creates a sense of community around her talk. But this communal phrasing sits in tension with the frequent alienation through which Woolf puts her audience, most notably when she jumps from a relatable concept (like the signs at King's Cross Station) to literary allusions. While her audience might be familiar with the texts to which Woolf alludes, the structure of her essay relies on the alternation between the accessible and the obscure, or the concrete and the abstract. It is strange, then, that Woolf chooses to write from the perspective of a single community. Ultimately, however, her use of first person plural pronouns underscores her broader argument about words and how we use them. She uses herself, her literary knowledge, and her often esoteric thought process to illustrate a larger concept of the mind at work. As such, she is able to showcase the importance of individual writers' creativity while also providing her audience with an understanding of how broader society reads, experiences, and interprets language.
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