[Vwoolf] CFP: International Conference: Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

[Royer, Diana]

This CFP is from the Popular Culture Association listserv.
Diana Royer

Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History
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by Marie Laniel

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Type:
Call for Papers
Date:
February 20, 2018
Location:
France
Subject Fields:
British History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Humanities,
Literature, Women's & Gender History / Studies




*INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History 8-10
November 2018 University of Rouen (France) *

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

*Confirmed keynote speakers: *
Prof. Anna Snaith (King’s College, London)
Dr. Seamus O’Malley (Yeshiva University, New York)

*Proposal submission deadline: February 20th, 2018 *

*CALL FOR PAPERS:*
We propose to examine Virginia Woolf’s relationship to history by
reflecting on her reading and writing of history,[1] 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.[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. 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[4] 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 Woolf’s revisionist historiography
•    Virginia Woolf’s counter literary histories
•    Virginia Woolf’s complex relations to past and present
historiographical traditions
•    Virginia Woolf, Historicism and New Historicism
•    Virginia Woolf, historicity and the new biography
•    Virginia Woolf’s feminist take on history and literary history
•    Virginia Woolf, history and its “effect upon mind and body” (Three
Guineas)
•    Virginia Woolf’s writing of history and pre-history
•    Memory, the immemorial, oral tradition
•    History, historiography and chronotopes in Virginia Woolf’s works
(libraries, museums, monuments…)
•    Archeology, material artifacts and the archive

*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-Piégay, 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”, *The
Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain*, Martin Daunton (ed.),
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 173-198.
_____, *Modernizing England’s 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. Martin’s 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 Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past*, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
De Gay, Jane, “Virginia Woolf’s 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.
Gättens, Marie-Luise, *Women Writers and Fascism: Reconstructing History*,
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995
Gualtieri, Elena, *Virginia Woolf’s 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 Schröder, Leena, “Who’s 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.
O’Malley, 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 Woolf’s Postmodern Literary History”,
*MLN* 115.5 (2000): 1112-130.
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 History’s 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 : Galilée, 1995.
[4] Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante, Paris : Minuit, 2002.
‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ (1932), Essays V (1929-1932), 301-306.
Contact Info:

Paper proposals (a 300-word abstract with a title plus a separate
biographical statement) should be sent by February 20th 2018 to Anne
Besnault-Levita (anne.besnault at gmail.com), Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (
amdibiasio at neuf.fr) and Marie Laniel (marie.laniel at gmail.com)
Contact Email:
marie.laniel at gmail.com
URL:
http://etudes-woolfiennes.org/?p=1952
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