The Aesthetics of the Constant Mutability of Verbal Creation in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

 

Laura Catalina Arias Barragán

 

Abstract

This study presents a reading of The Waves by Virginia Woolf as an account of her aesthetics, created with the voices that constitute the novel as well as the explicit manifestation of it by means of its architectonic form. The aesthetics proposed is based upon the constant mutability in which verbal creation comes to life. Thus, the novel explores the limits of language in creating art, and the limits between literaryness and reality. The material and content are analyzed from an approach to the interludes and the soliloquies in order to understand how these are actualized in the form in order to present the aesthetics of the characters and become a portrayal of the aesthetics in the novel itself. This way, the absolutes in life and literature are demolished, presenting the waves that move within the characters while facing the waves of the shifting society they live in and the literal waves that allow the metaphor.

 

Keywords

Aesthetics, architectonic form, mutability, polysemy, verbal creation, literary truth.

 

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