How does Virginia Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects” challenge reader response theory in the age of artificial intelligence, when predictive algorithms offer readers instantly coherent readings? This article explores whether Woolf’s story invites a durational engagement of modernist fiction in which meaning comes together only after impressions have had time to become clear in the reader’s mind through a patient holding process rather than predictive models of calculative thinking. Following the development of reader response theory from Stanley Fish’s interpretive communities and Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader who fills narrative gaps in a text, through Peter Brook’s theory of reading for plot that anticipates an end that makes sense of the whole, to Cristina Brun’s post-Freudian D.W. Winnicottian reading as potential holding space, the survey reveals a progressively more explicit dimension of the importance of time-dependent reading that is essential to human meaning making. The article’s own methodology mirrors this retroactive process, having allowed its thesis to emerge from the act of attentive reading itself rather than from top-down argument. In a time period of wide-spread adoption of large-language models that synthesize meaning immediately, cutting readers from the process, the essay asks whether the reader’s capacity for sustained attention can remain the primary means of seeing what Woolf called the “pattern behind the cotton wool.”
Erik Robb Thompson (Sat,) studied this question.