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Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’

Mildenberg, Ariane (2004) Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’. Études britanniques contemporaines, . pp. 69-80. ISSN 1168-4917. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:55290)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

Abstract

Nearing the end of writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf struggled with the book's closure. "[H]ow to [ . . . ] press it into one", she wondered, "it might be a `gigantic conversation"'. The Waves never presents us with "conversation" in the usual sense of the term. Instead the book's six voices "melt into each other with phrases [ . . . ] are edged with mist. [ . . . ] [and] make an unsubstantial territory" (W, ii). In The Visible and the Invisible, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty provides us with a term for this "unsubstantial territory": "flesh" (la chair). "The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance" but rather a "general thing" (1‑39), a phenomenon of reciprocal contact between perceiving subjects.

Item Type: Article
Additional information: Article is from special issue of Études britanniques contemporaines, Automne 2004, entitled Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s Works (edited by C. Reynier). Based on conference of the Société d'Etudes Wolfiennes, held in Montpellier, 2003.
Subjects: P Language and Literature
P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Kate Smith
Date Deposited: 06 May 2016 09:34 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:22 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/55290 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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