The shuffling of feet on the pavement : Virginia Woolf on un-learning the mother tongue
- The essay focusses on how Woolf's quest for a 'universal' language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, "The Waves" offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf's stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge's perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
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| Author: | Teresa PrudenteORCiD |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-755973 |
| URL: | https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-26/prudente_woolf-on-un-learning.pdf |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_6 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-050-3 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-051-0 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-049-7 |
| ISSN: | 2627-731X |
| Parent Title (English): | Untying the mother tongue / ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo ; Cultural Inquiry ; 26 |
| Publisher: | ICI Press |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2023/09/11 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2023 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2023/09/21 |
| GND Keyword: | Woolf, Virginia; The waves; Sprache <Motiv>; Muttersprache |
| Page Number: | 27 |
| First Page: | 127 |
| Last Page: | 153 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 512765561 |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
| 8 Literatur / 82 Englische, altenglische Literaturen / 820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen | |
| Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
| CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International |
