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

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 settingpopulated by individuals that are often traumatized, hurt, and socially isolatedThe 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; while others highlight the historically contingent features of Woolfs dramatic interpretation of her times, Michael Weinman detects the emergence of an expressly atemporal model from this historical moment. The key mechanism that makes a new insight into Woolfs modernist agenda possible is the discovery of Judith Butlers theory of subjectivity as presenting a thesis that analyzes precisely that which Woolf, in this work of fiction, dramatizes: a figure, argued here to be the protagonist of Woolfs work, called the conspiratorial intersubjective self. In short, Weinman demonstrates that the historical circumstances of Woolfs modernist project in The Waves serve both concrete and allegorical roles, and that thinking about this work together with Judith Butlers performativity thesis is the best way to see how.