Publicação
Scarred Language : Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts
| Resumo: | Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf's response to Nazism, the 2nd world war and patriarchy, is set at the very end of the period between de wars and largely written while Brittain suffered the Blitz. Her reaction to (the threat of) war is a daring formal experiment, her final attempt to incorporate life in art, facing the limits of representation. While the house and the pageant provide the text with both outer and inner frmaes, underlining continuity, stability of place, family and history, its actual form undermines and eventually deconstructs this whole façade. The imminence of war threatens to fracture and rip apart humanity, art and culture. In such circumstances, Woolf confronts the dislocation and demolition of language, the suffering of language. In Between the Acts both everyday language and literary language are permanently tormented by means of allusions, blank spaces, (mis)quotations, spoken and unspoken words, clichés repeated over and over again, predictable narrative situations revisited and parodied, the use of verse, drama and novelistic devices subverted in a deliberate process where the general syntax of the novel is taken to pieces, dismantling former conventions and readers' expectations. 'The gramophone gurgled Unity - Dispersity. It gurgled Un... dis... And ceased'. Presenting the demise of civilization through the decay of language, Woolf brings the war into her text, in a characteristically ambivalent lament for tradition and celebration of its collapse. |
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| Autores principais: | Flora, Luísa |
| Assunto: | Woolf, Virginia Language Suffering Second World War Experiment |
| Ano: | 2013 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | capítulo de livro |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso restrito |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf's response to Nazism, the 2nd world war and patriarchy, is set at the very end of the period between de wars and largely written while Brittain suffered the Blitz. Her reaction to (the threat of) war is a daring formal experiment, her final attempt to incorporate life in art, facing the limits of representation. While the house and the pageant provide the text with both outer and inner frmaes, underlining continuity, stability of place, family and history, its actual form undermines and eventually deconstructs this whole façade. The imminence of war threatens to fracture and rip apart humanity, art and culture. In such circumstances, Woolf confronts the dislocation and demolition of language, the suffering of language. In Between the Acts both everyday language and literary language are permanently tormented by means of allusions, blank spaces, (mis)quotations, spoken and unspoken words, clichés repeated over and over again, predictable narrative situations revisited and parodied, the use of verse, drama and novelistic devices subverted in a deliberate process where the general syntax of the novel is taken to pieces, dismantling former conventions and readers' expectations. 'The gramophone gurgled Unity - Dispersity. It gurgled Un... dis... And ceased'. Presenting the demise of civilization through the decay of language, Woolf brings the war into her text, in a characteristically ambivalent lament for tradition and celebration of its collapse. |
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