Société d'Etudes Woolfiennes

Carine Bratzlavsky soutiendra son mémoire de traduction littéraire :

Lettres de Virginia Woolf à sa sœur Vanessa (1901-1941)

le vendredi 20 octobre 2017 à 14h30

au Centre national du Livre
53 rue de Verneuil
75007 Paris
Salle Cahiers du Sud

Jury: Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (directrice du mémoire), Jacqueline Carnaud (traductrice), Jean-Claude Lebrun (éditeur), Françoise Wuilmart (directrice du CETL, Centre Européen de Traduction Littéraire).

*

Voix de la littérature anglophone dans l’expérimentation musicale contemporaine

Journée d’études organisée par le groupe Confluences du CREA

Vendredi 13 octobre 2017

Université Paris Nanterre

Comment sa transposition en œuvre musicale renouvelle notre écoute et notre interprétation d’un texte source ? Dans quels aspects d’un texte littéraire puise-t-on les ressources pour les voix dans l’expérimentation musicale contemporaine ? Cette mini-journée d’études réunira compositeurs, musicologues et littéraires autour de ces questions. On interrogera tout particulièrement le rôle de la voix comme outil d’analyse poétique et comme instrument musical, car dans la rencontre avec la musique, la capacité de la voix à faire entendre le sens d’un texte mais aussi de le dérouter ou de l’abîmer est mise en scène, de sorte que, très souvent, le statut privilégié de la voix comme véhicule de l’anima ou de la vérité est mis en péril. Nous chercherons également à mieux saisir comment le paramétrage de scènes d’écoute crée des lieux singuliers de réception d’un texte. Il serait enfin question des enjeux de l’écriture d’un livret, afin d’explorer comment la finalité musicale et scénique détermine la traduction d’un texte littéraire en livret ainsi que les spécificités de cet exercice d’écriture.

A 10h50, entretien avec Violeta Cruz autour de The Lake of My Mind, œuvre chorale tirée de The Waves de Virginia Woolf (création Paris 2015). Conversation animée par Naomi Toth.

Programme complet ici.

*

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

8-10 November 2018 (to be confirmed)

University of Rouen ERIAC,

with the collaboration of the University of Picardie – Jules Verne and the Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes

Dr. Anne Besnault-Levita, Dr. Marie Laniel, Dr. Anne-Marie Smith-di Biasio HDR

Proposal submission deadline: January 30th, 2018

Call for papers

We propose to examine Virginia Woolf’s relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history (see notes in link below), be that the history of her own time, of the past, women’s history or literary history. This will involve analysing how the literary and historicity are interlinked not only in her novels, but also in the essays, letters and journals. This in turn might lead us to consider the question of anteriority and tradition, engaging both the po-ethical and political dimensions of a Woolfian writing of history and of pre-history, such as that which informs her late essay “Anon,” but is also present throughout her writing in the attention it accords to a cultural unconscious, subtending the present of language like a sometimes conscious, sometimes not yet conscious memory of the past. We might also be led to see Woolfian historiography from the perspective of materialist revisionism, a feminist rewriting of the past, or an infinite working through the library of her father, Leslie Stephen. Other possible perspectives would be to consider her work as that of an archivist writing against the archives of patriarchy in search of her own arkhe, or examining how she reinvents the historiographical, biographical and literary traditions. Woolf’s engagement in the history of Modernity might in turn be considered from a Benjaminian perspective, as a form of historiographical reconfiguration anticipating post-modern philosophy.

The question of Woolf’s hermeneutics of history might lead us to define the different forms of her engagement in women’s history, in the history of class, of her queering of history, her heterodoxy. We can also read her writing as a form of archeology delving into the written and non- written traces of history, attentive to the emergence of spectres and forms of survival or survivance but also as a response to what Woolf herself called, in Three Guineas, “history in the raw.” Thus addressing how Woolf arrests the kairos of historical moment, her own inscription of two world wars as if in negative, might lead us furthermore to consider her writing as a form of resistance, nonetheless steeped in the Real of history, the present and the body.

Paper proposals (a 300-word abstract with a title plus a separate biographical statement) should be sent by January 30th 2018 to Anne Besnault-Levita (annebenobloy@gmail.com)_Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (amdibiasio@neuf.fr) and Marie Laniel (marie.laniel@gmail.com)

For more information (list of possible topics, organizing and advisory committees, selected bibliography), please click the link here.

*

Hélène Duval à Bordeaux Montaigne: Transmettre, apprécier, créer

Quelles formes, quelles dynamiques d’expression et de création entrent en jeu dans les mouvements conscients ou inconscients, chaotiques ou chorégraphiés, du corps humain? Un travail sur le regard, le geste et le mouvement peut-il contribuer à la compréhension d’une œuvre littéraire, en l’occurrence, La Promenade au Phare de Virginia Woolf (1927) ?

Le travail engagé sur les trois parties (The Window, Time Passes, The Lighthouse) et les trois personnages centraux (Mrs Ramsay, Mr Ramsay, Lily Briscoe) du roman de Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), fournit l’occasion de s’interroger sur la « signature motrice » des êtres, sur le rapport entre personnalité et mouvement, ainsi que sur l’expression kinésique des choses : vague géante, phare, temps étiré, pinceau égaré, toile impossible à terminer. La plasticité symbolique, le potentiel créatif et la dynamique du corps humain sont graduellement révélés au cours de trois ateliers.

Hélène Duval est professeure au Département danse de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) depuis 2005. Elle est spécialiste des pratiques pédagogiques en danse. Mars 2017. Hélène Duval est officiellement invitée par l’Université Bordeaux Montaigne et par le Pôle Enseignement Supérieur Musique et Danse d’Aquitaine.

*

The 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

Date: 21-24 June, 2018
Venue: Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury

*

Nous espérons vous voir nombreux à cette journée qui permettra également à certains doctorants de présenter leurs travaux.

Virginia Woolf: the sense of community

The first round table of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society will take place on

Tuesday 13 June at 6 pm

in the garden of the Casa Internazionale delle Donne.

Speakers: Nadia Fusini, Liliana Rampello, Elisa Bolchi and Iolanda Plescia

Free entry.

http://www.itvws.it/English/events/woolf-and-community/

Virginia Woolf and History

Round Table & Workshop,  Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes

4 July 2017, 14h-17h

La Maison de la Recherche (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3),

4 rue des Irlandais, Paris 75005.

.

Participants : Catherine Bernard, Anne Besnault-Lévita, Marie Laniel, Catherine Lanone, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, Angeliki Spiropoulou, Christine Reynier

Programme here

*

Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist,

Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

272 pages, 5 b&w illustrations.

Now in paperback.

Clara Jones re-reads Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction in light of her examination of the details of Woolf’s involvement with Morley College, the People’s Suffrage Federation, the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. Drawing on extensive archival research into these organisations, Jones also positions Woolf’s activism with regard to the institutional contexts in which she worked. Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist demonstrates the degree to which Woolf was sensitive to the internal politics and conflicts of the bodies she was associated with and the ways in which she interrogated her ambivalent attitudes towards her activism throughout her literary career.

Find out more here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-virginia-woolf-13762.html

*

Journée doctorale de la SEW LERMA/DEMA,  université d’Aix-Marseille, le 23 septembre 2017

Feminist Woolf: New Perspectives on Woolf’s Resistance to Feminism

.

‘What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word “feminist” is the word indicated’.  So speaks Virginia Woolf as she gradually brings her anti-Fascist, anti-patriarchal polemic, Three Guineas, to its rallying closing pages. And yet, although Woolf supposedly consigned ‘feminism’ to the bonfire, critics since the 1970s have been engaging specifically, even devotedly, with the feminine and feminist significance of Woolf’s work. The question proved a critical minefield. For Showalter, Woolf was a ‘saint’ in women’s literary historiography who fled from the political arena of feminism; for Toril Moi, on the contrary, Woolf was the figurehead of sexual/textual politics. Resistance from within schools of Women’s Studies, together with the opening up of Gender Studies shed light on the necessity to reconsider any unqualified judgement regarding Woolf’s relation to “feminism”, or “feminisms.” Debates thus shifted from feminine poetics or female empowerment to larger concerns with gender, sexuality and the cultural constructions of sexual relations – to the extent of proclaiming her a feminist ‘icon’ (Silver) or ‘a lightning rod for reactions to feminism’ (Snaith).  In France, meanwhile, the enduring influence of ‘écriture féminine’, psychoanalytical theory and close textual reading meant the more powerfully political or gender-rethinking  perspectives on Woolf’s writing, and indeed on Modernist writing in general, remained on the sidelines. Some French critics did address Woolf’s feminism (Regard, Manonni, Doizelet, etc.), but her work has never been addressed specifically in terms of its problematic relation to feminism by the French Society for Woolf’s Studies at their annual events (SEW, http://etudes-woolfiennes.org/?cat=4).

Fifty years after the call for ‘Women’s Lib’, therefore, and nearly seventy years since Simone de Beauvoir famously omitted to mention Woolf in her iconic Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) the time seems ripe to reconsider Woolf’s feminism, in all its contradictoriness, slipperiness, and enduring – but perhaps misleading – relevance.

The Société des etudes woolfiennes together with the Horizon project (https://womenandthefword.wordpress.com/) are therefore joining forces for a day-long symposium organised and piloted by Nicolas Pierre Boileau (LERMA, AMU) and Claire Davison (Paris III). They invite PhD students to reflect on any aspect of Woolf’s feminist thinking/ stance, her resistance to feminism, and her complex understanding of the categories of woman, femininity and gender in relation to their own research.

Proposals for short papers, along with a brief biographical note, are to reach Nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr by 30 April 2017.

Confirmed speakers for the event are Jane Goldman (Glasgow, UK) and Derek Ryan (Kent, UK).

*