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Archive for September, 2013

Woolf conference call for papers: Writing the World

Posted in events, tagged , on Monday 30 September 2013| 2 Comments »

The 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, co-sponsored by Loyola University Chicago and Northern Illinois University, will take place in Chicago, Ill. in the U.S.A.,  June 5-8, 2014.

24th annual conference poster

Most conference activities will take will take place in Mundelein Center on Loyola University’s lakeshore campus.

Call for papers

“Virginia Woolf: Writing the World” aims to address such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and myriad other topics.

Conference organizers invite proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops on any aspect of the conference theme from literary and interdisciplinary scholars, creative and performing artists, common readers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and teachers of Woolf at all levels. Possible themes include but are not limited to:

  • Woolf as a world writer, including reception and/or influence of her work
  • Writing as world creation
  • Globalization of Woolf studies
  • Feminist re-envisionings of the world Lesbian, gay, and/or queer worlds Living worlds
  • Natural worlds
  • Cosmology, physics, different kinds of worlds Geography(y)(ies) and/or mapping the world “First” and “Third” worlds
  • Postcolonialism
  • The centenary of World War I
  • The World Wars
  • Peace, justice, war, and violence
  • Feminist writers of 1914 and/or suffragettes and WWI Pacifist and conscientious objector movements
  • Class and/in Woolf’s world(s) Writing the working class Socialists “righting” the world Expatriate worlds
  • artistic worlds
  • Inter-arts influences, including painting, cinema, music, and journalism
  • The publishing world
  • Transnational modernisms and postmodernisms
  • Woolf and/on international relations
  • Imperialism and anti-imperialism
  • Teaching Woolf in global contexts
  • Teaching Woolf outside of the traditional 4-year college classroom
  • Woolf and the new global media
  • Woolf and Chicago connections/reception

Download the Call for Papers as a PDF.

Submission Guidelines

For individual papers, send a 250-word proposal. For panels (three or four papers, please), send a proposed title for the panel and 250-word proposals for EACH paper. For roundtables and workshops, send a 250- to 500-word proposal and a brief biographical description of each participant.

Because organizers will be using a blind submission process, please do not include your name(s) on your proposal. Instead, in your covering e-mail, please include your name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), paper and/or session title(s), and contact information. If you would like to chair a panel instead of proposing a paper or panel, please let organizers know.

Deadline for proposals

January 25, 2014. Email proposals as a Word attachment to Woolf2014@niu.edu.

Get more information

For more information about the conference, including the keynote speakers, go to http://www.niu.edu/woolfwritingtheworld/.

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Woolf on the wall and the significance of color

Posted in commodification, tagged , , on Wednesday 25 September 2013| 5 Comments »

Here’s an easy way to surround yourself with books — wallpaper that features the covers of classicScreen Shot 2013-09-24 at 5.19.42 PM Penguin paperbacks, including Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

It’s called Penguin Library, and it’s from Osborne & Little.

Then watch this little video about Penguin cover colors, which indicate their genre. The purple cover of Room indicates that it is classified as an essay.

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Tale of a teenage Woolfophile

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , on Tuesday 24 September 2013| Leave a Comment »

15776309Starting with the epigraph—a passage from The Waves—and throughout the novel, haunting words from Woolf mark the days and moods of Amelia Baron in Kimberly McCreight’s riveting first novel, Restructuring Amelia.

The story is about a tragic teenage suicide, or so it’s believed until her mother, who finds the idea inconceivable, starts delving into it. Amelia is a model student at her upscale Brooklyn private school, shining most brightly in her English classes. Amelia knows Woolf’s work intimately, so when her paper about To the Lighthouse is found to be plagiarized, suspicions are aroused.

The novel recaps the period leading up to her death with chapters in Amelia’s voice, prefaced by her Facebook posts, many of them quotes from Woolf novels.

[Amelia] … picked up To the Lighthouse. It wasn’t like I needed to read it again to write my English paper. I practically knew the whole thing by heart. Virginia Woolf was kind of my hero. Not because she walked into a river with rocks in her pockets—though as far as ways to kill yourself went, that did have a certain style—but because she was crazy talented and had been who she’d wanted to be, despite the world telling her to be someone different.

Alternating chapters are from Amelia’s mother, Kate, who sleuths for the truth after receiving an anonymous text saying that “Amelia didn’t jump.”

Kate forced herself off the windowsill and over to the bookshelves. She ran her hand down the well-worn spines—The Odyssey, The Sound and the Fury, Lolita, and, of course, all those books by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf—suicide committer extraordinaire—was her daughter’s favorite author. The coincidence hadn’t been lost on Kate. But Amelia would have found copying her literary hero in that way to be a pathetic cliché, of that Kate felt sure.

I was able to contact Kim McCreight and ask her, “Why Virginia Woolf?” She responded: “Because I love her work, first and foremost. She’s one of my own personal literary heroes and so it felt natural to make her one of Amelia’s. There is, of course, her own suicide, too, which hangs over Amelia death with a kind of foreboding. Also, my sense of Woolf as something of an outsider, but a defiant one. Woolf rejected female stereotypes and forged her own road. It is that kind of independence that Amelia tragically never managed to achieve before she died, but that I believe was always there, deep in her heart.”

Kim professes not to be a Woolf scholar, but it’s clear that she did a tremendous amount of reading and intuiting to find the right passages to reflect Amelia’s thoughts and temperament over the course of her story.

 

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A Woolf twist to an Internet meme

Posted in Woolf and social media, tagged , , on Friday 20 September 2013| 16 Comments »

It’s International Book Week. Or so the Internet meme goes. According to this meme, readers are askedVirginia Woolf to grab the closest book to them, turn to page 52 and post the fifth sentence as their status.

Trouble is that there is no such thing as International Book Week.

Let’s play along anyway, but with a Woolfian twist.

The rules: Grab the closest book by Virginia Woolf. Turn to page 52 and post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title.

Add your sentence in the Comments section below this post. And see if you can guess which work of Woolf the quotes are from.

I’ll start:

The point broke.

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Virginia Woolf Signed Limited Edition Book Orlando

Posted in Virginia Woolf on Thursday 19 September 2013| 2 Comments »

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