The new waves: the influence of avant-garde film of the 1920s and 1930s on Virginia Woolf's the Waves

In this thesis, I explore the influence of the experimental avant-garde cinema on the Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves.

As evident from her diaries before the publication of The Waves in 1931, Woolf found herself increasingly frustrated with the medium of language and novel forms already exhausted in the nineteenth century. In addition, Woolf felt pressure to protect her art from, the novel, from the encroaching film industry, which she believed had the power to usurp the literary audiences she enjoyed before the advent of film. In her 1926 article "The Cinema," she contends that films only create lazy audiences who will inevitably lose appreciation for "true" art. However, her rhetoric in "The Cinema" also demonstrates that she also believed that films had access to extraordinary techniques that were not properly realized in contemporary popular cinema. Woolf's clear understanding of cinematic techniques in the article as well as her connection to the contemporary avant-garde film movement in France and Russia led her to incorporate cinematic techniques into her most experimental novel, The Waves. Yet, Woolf does not merely surrender to the cinema and declare it the superior art form in The Waves. Instead, she surreptitiously reappropriates the techniques of avant-garde film into her novel and creates a new language that concomitantly combines linguistic and cinematic art forms.