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 dev...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Untying the mother tongue |
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Format: | UnknownFormat |
Sprache: | eng |
Veröffentlicht: |
2023
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Zusammenfassung: | 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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ISBN: | 9783965580497 9783965580480 |