« Perhaps silence is better » : de quelques paradoxes du silence littéraire

Abstract

This paper tries to address some of the theoretical questions raised by the use of ellipses and silences in Virginia Woolf’s short fictions and in other modernist and modern texts. How can we define literary silence ? Isn’t any attempt at definition bound to depend on a specific historical and cultural context and a specific situation of utterance ? Can we define literary silence outside a theory of language ? My analysis will take as a starting point an extract from one one Woolf’s most mysterious fictional conversations and will go on to revisit the implicit critical doxa on literary silence and its paradoxes.