Book Section
Teresa Prudente

The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement

Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue
In: Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 127–53
Open Access
The essay focusses on how Woolf’s quest for a ‘universal’ language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, The Waves offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf’s stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge’s perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
Keywords: Modernism; Woolf; feminist theory; consciousness; linguistics
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of Untying the Mother Tongue Containing:
Introduction / Antonio Castore, Federico Dal Bo
But You Don’t Get Used to Anything / Deborah Achtenberg
Philosophy’s Mother Envy / Michael Eng
‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’ / Federico Dal Bo
The Mother Tongue at School / Jakob Norberg
Scarspeak / Juliane Prade-Weiss
The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement
‘I know you can cant’ / Jeffrey Champlin
The Mother Tongue of Love and Loss / Caroline Sauter
The Staircase Wit / Antonio Castore
Wandering Words / Libera Pisano
Title
The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement
Subtitle
Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue
Author(s)
Teresa Prudente
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_6
Description
The essay focusses on how Woolf’s quest for a ‘universal’ language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, The Waves offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf’s stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge’s perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
Is Part Of
Untying the Mother Tongue
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
4 September 2023
Subject
Modernism
Woolf
feminist theory
consciousness
linguistics
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
127
page end
153
Source
Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 127–53

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Cite as: Teresa Prudente, ‘The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement: Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 127-53 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_6>