Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- 5 Thinking and Talking/War and Peace
- 6 Virginia Woolf, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘our prostituted fact purveyors’
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Thinking and Talking/War and Peace
from Part III - Dialogue and Dissent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- 5 Thinking and Talking/War and Peace
- 6 Virginia Woolf, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘our prostituted fact purveyors’
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’These are terrifying words, and certainly gain the reader's attention. My epigraph is the opening of Woolf's 1940 essay, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, conveying the voice of a witness to these bombings. From Woolf's letters and diary entries, we know that she was a witness, and suffered as witnesses of atrocities suffer. The immediate focus is sound, for ‘it is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers or anthems – that should compel one to think about peace’ (DM 243). It is always difficult to read Woolf's letters and diary entries from this period, for she talks of people who were killed by ‘bombs’ and ‘landmines’, and uses the word ‘terror’ in relation to the bombing; in relation to the war in Spain, she speaks of the ‘photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses’, the ones that she uses as a refrain (without photographs) in Three Guineas (1938). These words of war made up the lexicon of Woolf's life in the early twentieth century, but this war-time essay sends out a call for a different kind of language, some new ways of communicating or even negotiating – as words become the new weaponry.
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- Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language , pp. 85 - 96Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010