INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History
8-10 November 2018 (to be confirmed)
University of Rouen ERIAC (http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr)
Dr. Anne
Besnault-Levita, Dr. Marie Laniel, Dr. Anne-Marie Smith-di Biasio HDR
With the collaboration of the University of
Picardie - Jules Verne
https://www.u-picardie.fr/unites-de-recherche/corpus/presentation/
And the Socit dEtudes Woolfiennes
http://etudes-woolfiennes.org
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Anna Snaith (Kings College, London)
Dr. Seamus OMalley (Yeshiva University, New York)
Proposal submission deadline: January 30th, 2018
Call for papers
Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History
We propose to
examine Virginia Woolfs relationship to history by reflecting on her reading
and writing of history,1 be that the history of her own
time, of the past, womens 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.2 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,3 or examining how she reinvents
the historiographical, biographical and literary traditions. Woolfs 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
Woolfs hermeneutics of history might lead us to define the different forms of
her engagement in womens 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 survivance4 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.
We invite papers
which address these questions among others from a variety of theoretical,
literary and cultural approaches.
Possible topics may include:
Virginia Woolf as
a reader and interpreter of history
Virginia Woolf as
an apprentice historian
Virginia Woolfs
revisionist historiography
Virginia Woolfs
counter literary histories
Virginia Woolfs
complex relations to past and present historiographical traditions
Virginia Woolf,
Historicism and New Historicism
Virginia Woolf,
historicity and the new biography
Virginia Woolfs
feminist take on history and literary history
Virginia Woolf,
history and its effect upon mind and body (Three Guineas)
Virginia Woolfs
writing of history and pre-history
Memory, the
immemorial, oral tradition
History,
historiography and chronotopes in Virginia Woolfs works (libraries, museums, _monuments...)
Archeology,
material artifacts and the archive
Submission
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)
Organising Committee
Anne Besnault-Levita,
University of Rouen, annebenobloy@gmail.com Dr Anne Besnault-Levita is
Senior Lecturer at the University of Rouen. She is also the Vice-president of
the French Virginia Woolf Society. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield:
La Voix du Moment (Paris: Messne, 1997), and co-editor of Construire le
sujet. Textes runis et dits par Anne Besnault-Levita, Natalie Depraz
et Rolf Wintermeyer (Limoges : Lambert Lucas, 2014) and The Journal of
the Short Story in English 64 (Spring 2015), Part One: The Modernist
Short Story (Mathijs Duyck, Michael Basseler, Anne Besnault-Levita,
Christine Reynier and Bart Van Den Bossche, eds.). She has written several
articles on Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, feminist criticism, the
modernist short story and modernist criticism.
Anne-Marie Di Biasio, Institut
Catholique de Paris, amdibiasio@neuf.fr Dr Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (HDR) teaches
Modernist literature and Translation Studies at the Catholic University of
Paris and the Centre Europen de Traduction Littraire. Her research explores
the interface between Modernism and Modernity, Literature and Psychoanalysis,
especially in the context of European Modernisms. At present she is finishing a
book: Le Palimpseste mmoriel, based on the subject of her 2013 habilitation
research synthesis. President of the French Virginia Woolf Society, she is
the author of Virginia Woolf, la hantise de lՎcriture, editions Indigo
& Ct-femmes 2010, and co-editor with Claire Davison, of Trans-Woolf.
Thinking Across Borders, forthcoming Morlacchi Press, 2017; Contemporary Woolf/Woolf
contemporaine, Presses universitaires de la Mditerrane, 2014 and with
Catherine Bernard and Claire Davison of Crossing into otherness Outlanding
Woolf, in Etudes britanniques contemporaines, n 48, 2015. In 1998
she published Julia Kristeva; Speaking the Unspeakable in the Pluto
Press series Modern European Thinkers. The author of several recent articles on
intertextual memory and film semiotics, she has also written entries for the
dictionary of psychoanalysis, Imprcis de Psychanalyse, serialised in
CarnetPSY 2017-2019, a collaborative work by the Sminaire Babylone, Arts
Littrature, Psychanalyse.
Marie Laniel, University of
Picardie, marie.laniel@gmail.com Dr Marie Laniel is Senior
Lecturer at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (France). She is the
secretary of the French Virginia Woolf Society. Her research focuses on
Victorian subtexts in the works of Virginia Woolf. She is currently preparing a
book on this topic to be published by Presses Universitaires de Rennes. She is
the author of several articles on Virginia Woolf and Thomas Carlyle
(Revisiting a Great Mans House: Virginia Woolfs Carlylean Pilgrimages),
Alfred Tennyson (The name escapes me: Virginia Woolfs Dislocation of
Patrilineal Memory in A Room of Ones Own), John Ruskin (Reading the
Two Things at the Same Time: Victorian Modernism in To the Lighthouse),
Matthew Arnold (Virginia Woolf, lectrice de Matthew Arnold: la fortune littraire
du scholar-gipsy dans les essais et la fiction) and Leslie Stephen
(Gnalogies de lessai: de Leslie Stephen Virginia Woolf). She is a member
of the editorial board of LAtelier and the editor of Polysmes,
a journal of intertextual and intermedial studies (https://polysemes.revues.org).
Advisory Committee
Prof. Michael
Bentley, University of St Andrews
Dr. Anne
Besnault-Levita, University of Rouen
Prof. Catherine
Bernard, University of Paris 7
Dr. Nicolas Boileau, University of Aix-Marseille
Prof. Melba
Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Prof. Claire Davison, University of Paris
3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dr. Anne-Marie Di Biasio, Institut
Catholique de Paris
Prof. Camille
Fort, University of Picardie
Prof. Trevor
Harris, University of Picardie_Dr. Marie Laniel, University of Picardie
Prof. Scott
McCracken, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr. Caroline Pollentier, University of
Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dr. Floriane
Reviron-Pigay, University of St Etienne
Dr. Angeliki
Spiropoulou, University of the Peloponnese
Selected Bibliography
Beer, Gillian, Virginia Woolf and Prehistory, Virginia
Woolf: The Common Ground, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996,
6-28.
Bentley, Michael, Introduction: Approaches to
Modernity: Western Historiography since the Enlightenment, Companion to
Historiography, Michael Bentley (ed.), London and New York: Routledge,
1997, 395-506.
_____, The Evolution and Dissemination of
Historical Knowledge, TheOrganisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain,
Martin Daunton (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 173-198.
_____, Modernizing Englands Past: English
Historiography in the Age of Modernism: 1870-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
Blakeney-Williams, Louise, Modernism and the
Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Cuddy Keane, Melba, Virginia Woolf and the
Varieties of Historicist Experience, Virginia Woolf and the Essay, B.
C. Rosenberg and J. Dubino (eds.), New York: St. Martins press, 1997, 59-77.
_____, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and
the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
De Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History (1975),
trans. from the French Tom Conley, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
De Gay, Jane, Virginia Woolfs Novels and the
Literary Past, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
De Gay, Jane, Virginia Woolfs Feminist
Historiography in Orlando, Critical Survey 19.1 (2007): 62-72.
Foucault, Michel, Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History [1971], The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), New York:
Pantheon, 1984.
Gttens, Marie-Luise, Women Writers and
Fascism: Reconstructing History, Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1995.
Gualtieri, Elena, Virginia Woolfs Essays:
Sketching the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
_____, The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on
Modern Biography, Cambridge Quarterly 29.4 (2000): 349-361._
Hotho-Jackson, Sabine, Virginia Woolf on
History: Between Tradition and Modernity, Forum of Modern Language Studies
27.4 (1991): 293-313.
Kore Schrder, Leena, Whos Afraid of Rosamond
Merridew, Reading Medieval History I The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn, The
Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (Spring 2008): 103-119.
Lilenfeld, Jane, Lisa Low, and Jeffrey Oxford
(eds.), Virginia Woolf and Literary History, Woolf Studies Annual 9,
New York: Pace UP, 2003.
Longenbach, James, Modernist Poetics of
History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of Past, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1987.
Marcus, Jane, Thinking back through our
mothers, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, Jane Marcus (ed.),
London: Macmillan, 1-30.
McIntire, Gabrielle, Modernism, Memory, and
Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008.
OMalley, Seamus, Making History New:
Modernism and Historical Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Peach, Linden, Virginia Woolf and New
Historicism, London: Macmillan, 2000._Rosenberg, Beth Carole,
Virginia Woolfs Postmodern Literary History, MLN 115.5 (2000):
1112-130.
Snaith, Anna, "A View of One's Own: Women's History and Virginia
Woolf's Early Short Stories", Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf's
Short Fiction. Benzel, K. & Hoberman, R. (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, 2004,
p. 125 - 138.
Southgate, Beverley, A new Type of History:
Fictional Proposals for Dealing with the Past, Oxon: Routledge, 2015.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki, Virginia Woolf,
Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Westerman, Molly, Narrating Historians:
Crises of Historical Authority in Twentieth Century British Fiction, A
Dissertation submitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
2008.
Westman, Karin E., Virginia Woolf in Dialogue
with Historys Audience, Clio 28.1 (1998): 1-27.
Zemgulys, Andrea, Modernism and the Locations
of Literary Heritage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
1 The War from the
Street (1919), Essays III (1919-1924), 3-4._
2 Anon
(1940), Essays VI (1933-1941), 580-607._
3 Jacques
Derrida, Mal d'Archive, Paris : Galile, 1995._
4 Georges
Didi-Huberman, LImage survivante, Paris : Minuit, 2002. Abbeys and
Cathedrals (1932), Essays V (1929-1932), 301-306.