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.
Author: | Teresa PrudenteORCiD |
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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 |