Display Full Text | Download Full Text
211.75 kB PDF file

Degree

BA, Oberlin College Honors Theses, English, 2010.

Abstract

Can words ever express a truth beyond language? Virginia Woolf explores this persistent question most directly in two of her late novels, The Waves and The Years. The two appear to sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of her writing, The Waves embodying interiority and vision and The Years embodying exteriority and fact. The apparent realism of The Years, following on the heels of the impressionism of The Waves, has caused many critics to dismiss it as an aberration. But in fact the later novel is far from a regression to traditional realism: it takes up where its predecessor leaves off, attempting to find a transcendence through language while looking honestly at the conditions and limits of that transcendence. Examining them as a pair illuminates both novels, showing The Years to offer a surprisingly strange and even mystical model of language and the world.

Subject Headings

English literature

Keywords

Virginia Woolf; Woolf; The Years; The Waves; language; narrative; sound; music

Committee / Advisors

David Walker (Advisor)
Jennifer Bryan (Committee Member)
Sandra Zagarell (Committee Member)

Pages

45p.

Document number: oberlin1273546229
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1273546229

This ETD has been downloaded 161 times (through March 2013)