L’équipe 19-21 de l’université de la Sorbonne organise une conférence, animée par Elizabeth Abel (UC Berkeley), le vendredi 13 décembre de 13h à 15h au campus Nation de l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle (8 avenue de Saint-Mandé, Paris 12e), en salle A609.
Pour les personnes intéressé∙e∙s qui ne sont pas affilié∙e∙s à l’université, veuillez communiquer en amont vos nom et prénom (claire.davison@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr).
The Smashed Mosaic: Woolf’s Traces in Baldwin’s Oeuvre
In an early draft of Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin characterizes the body of an anonymous young woman who has fallen mysteriously to her death as a “smashed mosaic.” This talk takes Baldwin’s metaphor as a figure of Woolf’s cryptic and fractured presence in his early work. Focusing on the two writers’ strategies for negotiating a marked subject position with the formalist commitments that draw Jacob’s Room, Giovanni’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway into an intertextual knot, the talk maps the oddest of the “odd affinities” that constitute a long modernist genealogy initiated by Woolf’s silent and shifting presence.