Gestalt Psychology in the Modernist Künstlerroman of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

Gestalt theory of perception proposes that humans perceive objects as components within a greater whole. Gestalt psychologists, such as Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, contend that the human mind is equipped with ‘gestalts’ - mental structures that help one process visual information in the most efficient way possible. This dissertation uses gestalt literary criticism to examine Künstlerroman novels in Anglophone modernism specifically: James Joyce’s "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Virginia Woolf’s "To the Lighthouse." Modernist fragmentation is based upon the relationships between fragments and their coming together to compose gestalts of narratives or characters. Gestalt formation is especially significant in the case of coming-of-age novels which describe the development of evolving artists. The protagonists of Joyce’s and Woolf’s novels, Stephen Dedalus and Lily Briscoe, compose gestalts of their artistic ideas and attempt to share them with others. While Stephen focuses on building a gestalt of his identity, Lily produces a gestalt of Mrs. Ramsay in order to finish her portrait. Gestalt literary criticism explains the complex processes of human perception and illuminates how artistic identity or artistic idea grows into a dynamic whole composed of seemingly unrelated fragments.