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
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
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
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Que sais-je?
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne Virginia Woolf, ‘Montaigne’, The Common ReaderFor language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another tomorrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did the reporter's.
Walter Lippmann, Public OpinionMy first epigraph, ‘Que sais-je?’ [‘What do I know?’] – used as Montaigne's ‘motto’ and significantly ‘inscribed over a pair of scales’ (II:12, 393) – was appropriated by Virginia Woolf as the last line of her essay, ‘Montaigne’ (CRI 68). Reading his Essays in English, and eventually in French, she deemed him ‘the first of the moderns’ in her 1905 essay, ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, and gave him a prominent placement as the first single-author essay in The Common Reader in 1925. Woolf's lifelong dialogue with Montaigne, and with the multitude of ancient voices that permeate his Essays, enabled her to infuse her own works with commentary about his writing, to compare his methods with those of other writers, and to use his ideas, and his methods, to inspire her future writings. Woolf's veneration of Montaigne prompted her to make three visits – with Leonard – to his Tower in the Dordogne region of France, the place of his creative efforts.
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- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010