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Article: Woolf's 'The Waves.' (Virginia Woolf)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- September 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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While scholars have for some time pointed out Woolf's concern with subject construction and the construction of the world, they have not analyzed how this interest appears on grammatical, rhetorical, syntactic, and figural levels. Accordingly, I want to explore The Waves, where, I suggest, Woolf's investigation of subject construction manifests itself primarily in linguistic terms, leading her to use constructs of language in such a way as to critique traditional assumptions about unified selves and patriarchal systems.
This concern with the relation between the grammatical and the ontological emerges most clearly when Louis claims, '"I know my cases and my genders; ...