Download or read book The Reading of Silence written by Patricia Ondek Laurence and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of Virginia Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with silence and the barrier between the sayable and the unsayable. Using a wide range of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Kristeva and Derrida, Laurence demonstrates convincingly that Woolf was the first modern woman novelist to practice silence in her writing and that, in so doing, she created a new language of the mind and changed the metaphor of silence from one of absence or oppression to one of presence and strength. It suggests new directions for Woolf criticism.