- Title Pages
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- Roundtable: Woolf and Violence
- Intersections: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Just War
- Modernism and Memorials: Virginia Woolf and Christopher Isherwood
- Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?
- The Sex War and the Great War: Woolf’S Late Victorian Inheritance in <i>Three Guineas</i>
- Sky Haunting: The British Motor-Car Industry and the World Wars<sup>1</sup>
- The 1914 “Expurgated Chunk”: The Great War in and out of <i>The Years</i>
- “beauty, simplicity and peace”: Faithful Pacifism, Activist Writing, and <i>The Years</i>
- Virginia Woolf, Katharine Burdekin, and Britain’s Cosmopolitan Musical Culture
- Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II
- Teaching Privileges: <i>Three Guineas</i> and the Cost of Global Citizenship
- From Guineas to Riyals: Teaching Woolf in the Middle East
- Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s <i>Orlando</i>
- From London to Taipei: Writing the Past in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” and <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>
- An Estranged Intimacy with the World: The Postcolonial Woolf’s Planetary Love in <i>The Voyage Out</i>
- “Shakespeare’s Sister”: Woolf in the World Before <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Leonard Woolf: Writing the World of Palestine, Zionism, and the State of Israel
- “And the donkey brays”: Donkeys at Work in Virginia Woolf
- Companion Creatures: “Dogmanity” in <i>Three Guineas</i>
- Virginia Woolf’s Object-Oriented Ecology
- The Bodies In/Are <i>The Waves</i>
- Stretching our “Antennae”: Converging Worlds of the Seen and the Unseen in “Kew Gardens”
- “The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>
- “Whose Woods These Are”: Virginia Woolf and the Primeval Forests of the Mind
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf’s <i>The Voyage Out</i>
- Upheavals of Intimacy in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf’s <i>Between the Acts</i>; or, Why it’s “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf’s Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix
“The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in To the Lighthouse
“The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in To the Lighthouse
- Chapter:
- (p.167) “The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in To the Lighthouse
- Source:
- Virginia Woolf: Writing the World
- Author(s):
Kim Sigouin
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This essay argues that Virginia Woolf moves beyond commonplace understandings of language as a system of representation as she examines the interplay between ecstatic, motile forms of “embodied language” and transformative natural processes. Her interest in investigating the ecological implications of an embodied language is especially apparent in “On Being Ill” (1926) and later in “Craftsmanship” (1937), her contribution to a radio broadcast titled “Words Fail Me.” By placing these essays in dialogue with To the Lighthouse, we can see the development of an experimental language that frustrates denotative meaning in favor of evoking the sensorial apparatus of the body as it interacts with, affects, and is affected by volatile forces in the natural environment.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Craftsmanship, To the Lighthouse, Language, Body, Natural environment, Culture
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- Title Pages
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- Roundtable: Woolf and Violence
- Intersections: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Just War
- Modernism and Memorials: Virginia Woolf and Christopher Isherwood
- Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?
- The Sex War and the Great War: Woolf’S Late Victorian Inheritance in <i>Three Guineas</i>
- Sky Haunting: The British Motor-Car Industry and the World Wars<sup>1</sup>
- The 1914 “Expurgated Chunk”: The Great War in and out of <i>The Years</i>
- “beauty, simplicity and peace”: Faithful Pacifism, Activist Writing, and <i>The Years</i>
- Virginia Woolf, Katharine Burdekin, and Britain’s Cosmopolitan Musical Culture
- Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II
- Teaching Privileges: <i>Three Guineas</i> and the Cost of Global Citizenship
- From Guineas to Riyals: Teaching Woolf in the Middle East
- Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s <i>Orlando</i>
- From London to Taipei: Writing the Past in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” and <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>
- An Estranged Intimacy with the World: The Postcolonial Woolf’s Planetary Love in <i>The Voyage Out</i>
- “Shakespeare’s Sister”: Woolf in the World Before <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Leonard Woolf: Writing the World of Palestine, Zionism, and the State of Israel
- “And the donkey brays”: Donkeys at Work in Virginia Woolf
- Companion Creatures: “Dogmanity” in <i>Three Guineas</i>
- Virginia Woolf’s Object-Oriented Ecology
- The Bodies In/Are <i>The Waves</i>
- Stretching our “Antennae”: Converging Worlds of the Seen and the Unseen in “Kew Gardens”
- “The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>
- “Whose Woods These Are”: Virginia Woolf and the Primeval Forests of the Mind
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf’s <i>The Voyage Out</i>
- Upheavals of Intimacy in <i>To the Lighthouse</i>
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf’s <i>Between the Acts</i>; or, Why it’s “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf’s Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix
