Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf's "The Waves" The Subject in Empire's Shadow

by Weinman, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780739147122
• ISBN10: 0739147129
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-12
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Focusing on the importance of formal experimentation for matters of content and meaning, this original interpretation of what Woolf called her play-poem, argues that with its depiction of a certain social setting, populated by individuals that are often traumatized, hurt and socially isolated, The Waves must be read both as an attestation to the social estrangement inherent in modern and metropolitan life and as an allegory of the collapse of the classical subject itself, as a model and a phenomenon, both in literature, and in ordinary life. This book differs from other approaches to Woolf as a modernist dramatist of modernity because, while others highlight the historically contingent features of Woolf's dramatic interpretation of her times, Weinman detects the emergence of an expressly atemporal model from this historical moment. Historical circumstances thus play a double role here: they expose the concrete background that allowed for this model's emergence, but they also allegorize the cultural diffusion of shift in the development of new models of subject construction. The key mechanism that makes a novel insight into Woolf's modernist agenda possible is the discovery of Judith Butler's theory of subjectivity as presenting a thesis that analyzes precisely that which Woolf, in this work of fiction dramatizes; a figure, argued here to the be the protagonist of Woolf's work, called the conspiratorial intersubjective self. In short, Weinman shows how the historical circumstances of Woolf's modernist project in The Waves serve both concrete and allegorical roles, and that thinking this work together with Judith Butler's performativity thesis is the best way to see how.

Author Biography

Michael Weinman is assistant professor at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses in the humanities and social sciences. His previous works include Pleasure in Aristotle's Ethics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Performativity and Subjectivity in The Waves
Butler's Performativity Thesis	p. 3
The "Crisis of the Subject" in The Waves	p. 8
Three Chiasmic Relations that Constitute this Crisis	p. 14
The "Conspiratorial" Intersubjective Self and the Crisis of the Subject	p. 22
The First Chiasm: Identity and Language
From the Latin Lesson to the Ball: Neville Steps, Rhoda Tiptoes, on the Verge	p. 31
The Dinner Party, the Music Hall, the Attic Room: Setting a Square upon an Oblong	p. 37
Dawn or Break of Day: Bernard and "The World without a Self	p. 40
The Second Chiasm: Time and Narrative
Stamping Beasts: Hearing the Rhythm of Life	p. 49
The Interludes: Naming the Chronic Condition of Nature's Speechless Cycles	p. 53
Bernard against Death: The "Majestic March of Day across the Sky"	p. 61
The Third Chiasm: Unity and Diversity
A Kiss Apart, a Sorrow Shared: Primary School and the Problem of Intersubjectivity	p. 77
"Love is Simple": Bodies Collide, Souls Connect at College, at the Ball	p. 79
"Hold it": Percival and the "Seven-Sided Flower"	p. 83
"These Meetings, These Partings, Finally Destroy Us": Neville and Jinny as Lovers	p. 95
"The Shock of Meeting": Can We "Mount Together" at Hampton Court?	p. 105
"The Outskirts of Every Agony": The "Terrible Suffering" of Separate Existence	p. 113
"I am not One Person": Bernard, Life, and the Lives of "Our Friends"	p. 117
Conclusion: Identity as Intersubjective Performance in The Waves	p. 131
Appendix: Text of "Imagic Themes" from Chapter 2.2	p. 143
Bibliography	p. 153
Index	p. 159
About the Author	p. 163
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