Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf's "The Waves" The Subject in Empire's Shadow

Focusing on the importance of formal experimentation for matters of content and meaning, this original interpretation of what Woolf called her play-poem, argues that with its depiction of a certain social setting, populated by individuals that are often traumatized, hurt and socially isolated, The Waves must be read both as an attestation to the social estrangement inherent in modern and metropolitan life and as an allegory of the collapse of the classical subject itself, as a model and a phenomenon, both in literature, and in ordinary life. This book differs from other approaches to Woolf as a modernist dramatist of modernity because, while others highlight the historically contingent features of Woolf's dramatic interpretation of her times, Weinman detects the emergence of an expressly atemporal model from this historical moment. Historical circumstances thus play a double role here: they expose the concrete background that allowed for this model's emergence, but they also allegorize the cultural diffusion of shift in the development of new models of subject construction. The key mechanism that makes a novel insight into Woolf's modernist agenda possible is the discovery of Judith Butler's theory of subjectivity as presenting a thesis that analyzes precisely that which Woolf, in this work of fiction dramatizes; a figure, argued here to the be the protagonist of Woolf's work, called the conspiratorial intersubjective self. In short, Weinman shows how the historical circumstances of Woolf's modernist project in The Waves serve both concrete and allegorical roles, and that thinking this work together with Judith Butler's performativity thesis is the best way to see how.

Michael Weinman is assistant professor at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses in the humanities and social sciences. His previous works include Pleasure in Aristotle's Ethics.