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; while others highlight the historically contingent features of Woolf's dramatic interpretation of her times, Michael Weinman detects the emergence of an expressly atemporal model from this historical moment. The key mechanism that makes a new 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 be the protagonist of Woolf's work, called the "conspiratorial intersubjective self." In short, Weinman demonstrates that the historical circumstances of Woolf's "modernist" project in The Waves serve both concrete and allegorical roles, and that thinking about this work together with Judith Butler's "performativity thesis" is the best way to see how.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The experimental novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf was published in 1931. By describing the search for identity Woolf has the aim to show that identity consists of a variety of selves. For that reason the question “Who am I“ is central to all characters in the novel. Woolf introduces a circle of friends that consists of seven people and describes the lives of the characters from childhood until they are old. Six characters, three men and three women, get voices and express themselves. The seventh, a man called Percival, does not speak, he is introduced by the other characters Susann, Jinny, Rhoda, Neville, Louis, and Bernard. The friends present themselves through their monologues, but they do not talk to each other, they just tell their own thoughts. The reader moves from consciousness to consciousness and only by the inquit formula “said [name of character]“, one can recognize who is speaking. Stylistic similarities of the monologues hint that Virginia Woolf actually intended to present the consciousness of a single person and not of six different individuals. Therefore this stylistic feature serves to illustrate the concept of a multiple self. The focus of this essay will be on Bernard because he is “[...] the primary voice in the novel“. His search for identity will be shown and it will be illustrated how Virginia Woolf’s uses this character to illustrate the concept of an identity that consists of various elements. At the beginning Bernard’s key position in the novel will be considered. Then some aspects of Bernard’s search for identity will be discussed and at the end Bernard’s function for the unity of the novel and of identity will be shown.

One of Woolf's most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.

Sublime Woolf was written in a burst of enthusiasm after the author, Daniel T. O'Hara was finally able to teach Virginia Woolf's modernist classics again. This book focuses on those uncanny visionary passages when in elaborating 'a moment of being,' as Woolf terms it, supplements creatively the imaginative resonance of the scene.

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

The year 1930 can be seen as the dawn of a period of darkness, the beginning of a decade that Auden would style “low, dishonest.” That year was one of the most reflective moments in modernity. After the optimism of the nineteenth century, the West had stumbled into war in 1914. It managed to survive a conflagration, but it failed in the aftermath to create something valued. In 1930, Europe was questioning itself and its own viability. Where are we heading? a number of public intellectuals asked. Who are we and how do we build moral social and political structures? Can we continue to believe in the insights and healing quality of our culture? Major thinkers—Mann, Woolf, Ortega, Freud, Brecht, Nardal, and Huxley— as well as a number of artists, including Picasso and Magritte, and musicians, such as Weill, sought to grapple with issues that remain central to our lives today: the viability of a secular Europe with Enlightenment values coming to terms with a darker view of human nature mass culture and its dangers; the rise of the politics of irrationality identity and the “other” in Western civilization new ways to represent the postwar world the epistemological dilemma in a world of uncertainty; and the new Fascism—was it a new norm or an aberration? Arthur Haberman sees 1930 as a watershed year in the intellectual life of Europe and with this book, the first to see the contributions of the public intellectuals of 1930 as a single entity, he forces a reconsideration and reinterpretation of the period.

Do liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.