TRACING POSTMODERNISM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF`S THE WAVES
VIRGINIA WOOLF`UN `DALGALAR` ADLI ROMANINDA POSTMODERNİZMİN İZLERİ

Author : Banu AKÇEŞME -- NeŞe ŞENEL
Number of pages : 91-104

Abstract

Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the leading British modernist novelists. Woolf, with her radical innovation and experimental styles, can also be acknowledged as the precursor of postmodernism. This paper aims to discuss Woolf`s the most challenging and innovative novel The Waves as a novel bearing postmodernist novel features although it is categorized as a modern novel. Woolf employs the very postmodernist techniques such as intertextuality, metafictionality and pastische. She rejects not only the established literary traditions of the earlier periods but also the socio-cultural values and sets out to come up with something novel to provide insights into the psychology of the characters to examine their reactions against the absence of stability, order, continuity and wholeness. Woolf exposes the voices of six characters, which calls into question the concepts such as unchangeable and timeless truth, objective reality and meaning. The Waves does not offer characters who are whole and knowable; rather, they are characterized by fragmentation, discontinuity, and multiplicity which are preferred in postmodern literature to the ideology of unity and continuity. The characters pursue an existential quest to be complete, whole, stable and solid but this quest results in failure and the characters have gained the postmodern awareness that self is not single, unique and unified but many, fluid and in constant process.

Keywords

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Postmodernism, Postmodernist Fiction, Multiplicity

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