ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that I. A. Richards’ version of the destructive element fed into a dominant modernist mythology whereby epistemological and cultural violence was avowed and, thereby, transcended through art. It aims to approach rhythm in Virginia Woolf’s work with the suggestion that it was precisely a collision between the attempt to articulate a counter-poetics of being and writing, and a dominant and oppressive cultural and historical iconography that interested and perturbed Woolf in her last writing. In Woolf studies the interest in rhythm can be traced back to the influence of Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language in the 1970s and 1980s. Woolf’s doubts about rhythm in 1932 can be read as a symptom of the way in which she, was compelled to reassess her own modernist practice in the light of the unremitting political spectacles, illusions and rhetorical displays that were being played out all around her.
