“I am not one person; I am many people”: Reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as Cubist Writing
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In this paper, I reevaluate Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel, The Waves, and the fragmentary nature of her compositional method as Cubist art in the literary field. I argue that Woolf was also conceptualizing and practicing similar Cubist techniques with language in her novel, such as ambiguous pronouns, repetition of similar sentences or phrases, and images of abstract lines that divide the character’s view into multi-faceted planes or cubes. Many theories have been proposed to explain and explicate Woolf’s Post-structuralist breakthrough in the context of the avant-garde art movement, but only a few researchers have suggested a relationship between Woolf’s novel and Cubism. To make my case, I first observe what Cubism means through the examples of the literary works of Gertrude Stein and the visual art of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, as well as what constitutes a Cubist reality and how Stein’s Cubist art aesthetic and its language experiments apply to Woolf’s notions of language, subjectivity, and reality in The Waves. My findings should revise readers’ common understanding, not only about the novel itself but also about how the innovative techniques of repetition, ambiguous pronouns, and collage in The Waves mark the introduction of completely different ways of thinking about the world, language, and its relation to the human subject, contradicting the nineteenth century’s realistic mode of thinking.
Abstract
In this paper, I reevaluate Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel, The Waves, and the fragmentary nature of her compositional method as Cubist art in the literary field. I argue that Woolf was also conceptualizing and practicing similar Cubist techniques with language in her novel, such as ambiguous pronouns, repetition of similar sentences or phrases, and images of abstract lines that divide the character’s view into multi-faceted planes or cubes. Many theories have been proposed to explain and explicate Woolf’s Post-structuralist breakthrough in the context of the avant-garde art movement, but only a few researchers have suggested a relationship between Woolf’s novel and Cubism. To make my case, I first observe what Cubism means through the examples of the literary works of Gertrude Stein and the visual art of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, as well as what constitutes a Cubist reality and how Stein’s Cubist art aesthetic and its language experiments apply to Woolf’s notions of language, subjectivity, and reality in The Waves. My findings should revise readers’ common understanding, not only about the novel itself but also about how the innovative techniques of repetition, ambiguous pronouns, and collage in The Waves mark the introduction of completely different ways of thinking about the world, language, and its relation to the human subject, contradicting the nineteenth century’s realistic mode of thinking.
참고문헌 (25)
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