"Vociferating through the megaphone": Theatre, Consciousness, and the Voice from the Bushes in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

The megaphone in Virginia Woolf's last novel is a trope drawn from modernism and modern (c. 1930) communication technology. In its specific historical allusions to the theatrical collaborations of the Sitwells as well as Auden and Isherwood, the novel works through the layered potentialities of the relationship between the author's "call" and the constitution of the listening subject. The megaphonic voice represents the idea of discourse generally and art specifically as a conduit between individual consciousness and community, that I present as embodying concepts from the work of Martin Heidegger such as Being (Dasein), profound boredom, and art-as-process.