'The little twist of sound could have the whole of her': Silence, Repetition, and Musicality in Virginia Woolf's 'Between the Acts' and Gertrude Stein's 'The Mother of Us All'

This thesis tracks an alternative trajectory for thinking about the way in which modernist texts incorporate silence as an aesthetic and a theme, one that departs from those currently favoured by contemporary modernist criticism. Particularly, I wish to move away from the prevailing approach to Virginia Woolf's texts that borders on biographical criticism, an approach that theorizes silence as indicative of the author's trauma, pointing to that which is 'unsayable' as evidence of some psychically unassimilable event. Instead, I argue that by experimenting with an aesthetics of silence, repetition, and musicality, Woolf is participating in a wider cultural debate. With Between the Acts, I believe she seeks to incorporate sound to such a degree that the novel becomes a listenable art piece, requiring a reconceptualization of reading as not only a visual act, but an aural one as well. Here, textual silence acts as rests in a musical score, opening a paradoxically empty aural space that works in concert with the 'notes' of the novel.;In order to support this argument, I bring historical context and contemporary work on modernism and music to bear on both Between the Acts and Gertrude Stein's opera The Mother of Us All. Stein, whose work is increasingly discussed within the critical arena of sound studies, presents us with a text that is at once a literary work and a musical score, asking the reader to contend with both syntactical and musical notation simultaneously. Through close readings of both texts alongside theories of sound and a genealogical history of sound technologies emerging in the early twentieth century, as well as the philosophical and political implications of silence and repetition, my thesis aims to present these works not as participating in an aesthetics of the traumatic void, but as uniquely hearable, revolutionary works of art.