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Archive for March, 2020

On Being Ill: printing 1 sentence on 1 sheet a day throughout Norway’s coronavirus quarantine

Posted in art, coronavirus, essays, in memoriam, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Saturday 28 March 2020| Leave a Comment »

Ane Thon Knutsen in her home printshop

Editor’s Note: Today marks the 79th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death, and as this post shows, she and her work continue to inspire artists and writers across the globe.

Virginia Woolf’s numerous experiences with illness led her to write the essay On Being Ill, published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. Inspired by this work and the current coronavirus, Norwegian typesetter Ane Thon Knutsen, who has two projects focused on Woolf under her belt — A Printing Press of One’s Own and The Mark on the Wall — has now begun a third.

Woolf’s exploration of the consequences of illness

“Due to Covid-19 I have cast my eyes upon On Being Ill,” Knutsen explained. “This felt like something to get me through.

“The essay is about the consequence of illness; loneliness, isolation and vulnerability. But when we are forced to stop and slow down, we may notice the beauty in the small details of the world around us, and that our everyday, ordinary life is what we miss the most,” she said.

Working from home under quarantine in a printshop of her own

Ane Thon Knutsen’s letterpress

Knutsen, mother of a four-year-old, says her project allows her to combine motherhood with work under Norway’s self-imposed quarantine. The country made the move, which is in place at least until Easter, to stop the rapid spread of the coronavirus.

“I like being alone working, and I am blessed with a workshop at home. So I contemplated a Quarantine project that works with the circumstances,” she said.

Her project: using her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from On Being Ill “until we can go back to normal. I hope I will not make it through, as we’re counting about 140 sentences, and the paper is restricted to leftovers from my stock,” Knutsen explained.

Published on Instagram

Five days ago, she began posting a photo of each page on her Instagram account, @anethonknutsen. As of today, she is on sentence number six. The project, she says, “will present a very slow reading of the story.

“In the end (when that will be, who knows), I will make a box with all the sheets — like a calendar of sorts. Hopefully I will exhibit it as a wall piece in the future,” she said.

The project is set in 10-point Goudy Old Style. For the ink, Knutsen has “mixed a rich gray ink… inspired by the dust jacket by Vanessa Bell, and the colour of the lead type. It softens the appearance of the words on the page,” she explained on Instagram.

She hopes to print 20 copies, in a 208 mm x 135 mm format, the same as Woolf’s 1930 edition.

Sentence two from Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

Sentence one from Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

A tray filled with type set for Ane Thon Knutsen’s letterpress

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How Virginia Woolf survived a pandemic and lived to write about it

Posted in books, coronavirus, essays, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Wednesday 25 March 2020| 7 Comments »

Today, no matter where we live in the world, we are feeling the effects of the coronavirus Viral Modernismpandemic. Events are cancelled or postponed and travel is curtailed. We are told to stay home and only go out when necessary, maintaining physical distancing when we venture outside to buy groceries or medicine or get some much-needed exercise.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived through the pandemic of their time, the Spanish flu, which raged worldwide from 1918-1919, while the couple were living in Richmond.

Estimated to have killed 100 million people around the globe and more than 250,000 in Britain alone, the Spanish flu also affected people close to the Woolfs. In July 1918 diary entries, Virginia notes that their London neighbor has influenza, later reporting that she has succumbed to the disease.

Virginia and influenza

Virginia herself contracted influenza at the end of 1919, confining her to her bed, and that episode is thought to be part of the pandemic strain. It was not her first bout with the flu; nor would it be her last. She suffered from it in 1916, in the early months of 1918 before the Spanish flu had reached Britain, and again in 1922, 1923, and 1925.

On Oct. 20 of 1918, Woolf’s diary entry includes this report:

Pain is abhorrent to all Stracheys, but making all allowances for the exaggerations and terrors of the poor creature, Lytton has had a sufficient dose of horror, I imagine, and the doctor privately warns Carrington that shingles may last months. However, Lytton, is probably… avoiding London, because of the influenza (we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since The Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe & thus precipitate us into peace.)

Illness in the essay

Virginia’s experiences with illness led her to write the essay On Being Ill, published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. And now that our own pandemic has taken center stage worldwide, some scholars are writing about how past epidemics have been described in literature, film, and the arts.

One such piece by Laura Cernat centers on Woolf’s essay. And Ane Thon Knutsen, a Norwegian typesetter and Woolf scholar, is in the midst of an art project focused on the work. But more on that later.

Illness in the novel

The 1918 pandemic also made its way into one of Virginia’s most famous novels — Mrs. Dalloway (1925) — but that fact often attracts minimal notice. When it comes to debilitating health conditions in that novel, the shell shock of Septimus Smith gets most of the attention from critics and readers. However, in Viral Modernism, the Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, Elizabeth Outka argues that Woolf has centered the novel on influenza and presents Clarissa Dalloway as a pandemic survivor.

A post on the British Library website takes a similar tack and includes a quote from the novel.

“Clarissa is almost certainly a victim of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20, but she is also to be one of the novel’s lingering wraiths: ‘Since her illness she had turned almost white’ (31).

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London in Bloom launches today, introduces a breath of spring in a troubled time

Posted in books, coronavirus, gardens, London, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 17 March 2020| Leave a Comment »

The temperature was 34 degrees and a light dusting of snow covered the ground when my copy of London in Bloom by Georgianna Lane arrived in my Ohio mailbox several weeks ago.

With its cover photo depicting pale pink roses draping a doorway, arching over a window, and filling the basket of a matching pink bicycle parked out front, the book introduced a welcome breath of spring into my life that day. We need that even more now.

Turning from fear to beauty

The coronavirus has infected our globe, and many of us are sheltering at home, attempting to stave off the ugliness of anxiety. So there is no better time to open a book full of the floral beauty of London, Virginia Woolf’s favorite city.

London in Bloom is the third and final book in Lane’s Cities in Bloom series, published by Abrams. To capture the images that fill it, she spent many early morning hours photographing the floral beauty and architectural detail of England’s capitol before residents and tourists clogged the streets, sidewalks, and parks. I daresay she would find that task easier now.

On “Tea and Tattle”

I first heard of the book on episode 27 of Francesca Wade’s “Tea and Tattle” podcast. Wade describes it as “most beautiful guide to the city’s parks, gardens, florists and hotels and should be on any London-lover’s shelf!”

Much like Woolf, a lover of gardens who incorporated them into her life and into her work, the author shares her affection for London’s gardens in her Introduction to the book:

Perhaps not surprisingly, my most memorable London experiences have been inextricably interwoven with gardens… the open spaces of London have seeped into my consciousness, awakened my imagination, and become part of me” (7).

From parks and gardens to floral displays

London in Bloom is divided into four sections:

  • parks and gardens
  • floral boutiques
  • market flowers and
  • floral displays.

Each is introduced by a page or two of text that shares Lane’s thoughts and experiences, then filled with gorgeous photos of flowers and architectural details — brickwork, tile-work, doorways — that enhance them.

Whimsical touches are also introduced in the form of light cotton floral print dresses in a shop window, teacups and cake on a tea table, and London’s trademark red phone booth and double decker buses.

Beauty and practicality

Despite some touches of red, the theme throughout is pastel — from flowers to buildings to cover pages. But the book includes the practical, as well as the beautiful.

The back section gives us instructions on creating our own London-style bouquet, a field guide to London’s spring blooming trees and shrubs, and an introductory guide to springtime blooms throughout the city.

London in Bloom provides delectable refreshment for the eye and the soul in our troubled times, whether you are a lover of flowers, a fan of London, or just in need of a bit of balm.

 

 

 

 

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COVID-19 postpones this year’s Virginia Woolf conference until 2021 #vwoolf2020

Posted in 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, coronavirus, events, tagged , on Monday 16 March 2020| 1 Comment »

Dear all,

After conferring with Amy Smith (the 2021 Woolf Conference organizer) and the ACVW Steering Committee, the Program Committee for #vwoolf2020 has decided to postpone this summer’s conference until next summer. Profession and Performance will now take place June 2021 (specific dates TBD). After conferring with her administration, Amy Smith has confirmed that she will now organize the 2022 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

We are so grateful to Amy (the best) as well as to the Steering Committee for their support during this strange, troubling time.

Anyone who had a proposal accepted for Profession and Performance will be automatically accepted next year. We’re still working out new dates, so you may have to wait a bit to know whether or not you will be able to attend. Please refrain from letting us know whether you’ll be attending (or not) until we get firm 2021 dates settled. Of course, if you have any questions for us, we’re happy to hear from you, and we’ll answer them as best we can!

Know that we will be reopening the CFP later this year, so if you would like to submit a differentproposal than the one you originally submitted, you will be free to do so at that time. We realize that your projects may look very different in a year’s time.

This is not an easy email to write or to share, but please know that we feel this is, absolutely, the right decision. Whether or not the spread of COVID-19 has been mitigated by June (we’ll see), it seems unthinkable to ask people to pay for registration or book travel now when so many travel bans, curfews, and other policies limiting social interaction are in place. Stay safe, practice social distance, and flatten that curve. We hope to see many (if not all of you!) in Vermillion, SD in June 2021.

Sending love,

Ben (and the rest of the South Dakota Woolf Pack)

—

Benjamin D. Hagen, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

Assistant Professor | 20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature

University of South Dakota | Department of English

Dakota Hall, Room 212 | 414 E. Clark St.

Vermillion, SD 57069 | United States

 

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Howling for Woolf: perspective from a cultural studies student

Posted in 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, global series, The Waves, Woolf and gender/lesbian/gay/queer studies/sex, tagged , , , on Wednesday 11 March 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is the fifth in a new series of posts that will offer a global perspective on Woolf studies, as proposed by Stefano Rozzoni at the 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. If you would like to contribute to this series, please contact Blogging Woolf at bloggingwoolf@yahoo.com.

By Sanita Fejzić

The 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the first formal gathering of Woolf scholars I attended.

Virginia Woolf portrait by Mathieu Laca hanging above writer Sanita Fejzić

I am not a traditional ‘Woolf scholar’ because my speciality is broader and outside English Literature: I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Canada with a focus on the relationship between environmental ethics and cultural production (with an emphasis on the written word). Yet, Virginia Woolf permeates so much of my thinking. A Room of One’s Own (1929) was an initiation, a provocation, an intellectual opening into thinking-as-woman in the university setting, a site of intellectual and creative production denied to a young Woolf.

Turning to Woolf to understand queer identity

In a period of generalized homophobia and literary censorship (think of Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) Virginia Woolf penned Orlando (1928) in honour of her lover, the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. Vita’s son Nigel called it, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

As a lesbian, it is impossible for me not to turn to Woolf for her depth of understanding of what it means to assert a queer identity in heteronormative societies. Her exquisite play-poem, The Waves, accurately portrays the seeming impossibility of establishing lesbian desire and sense of self precisely because identity is relational and constituted by power.

Critics are quick to point out that Rhoda is the most abstract character of The Waves (1931). Yet Rhoda’s extreme social timidity coupled with her sense of alienation, her very literary way of processing events and people, her inability to express herself and her eventual suicide are not mere abstractions. These are the material symptoms of a profound social sickness.

In The Waves the self is constituted by others, specifically six other petals of the flower that make up a group of friends (or in childhood, a nuclear family). There is a palpable sense of how characters co-create one another throughout the text. The self is also shaped by social institutions like the school, and other state apparatuses.

Rhoda, whose sexual attraction for Miss Lambert is stunted and repressed, never fully blossoms into lived experience. How can lesbian desire and sexuality emerge in public and intimate spaces that deny the very possibility of romantic and sexual love between women? That is why, as I have argued elsewhere, Rhoda’s suicide was a co-creative act, one that was precipitated by homophobic and sexist social circumstances.

Virginia Woolf’s understanding of the ways in which power subjugates women and in particular queer women was a scaffolding in the limitations (and stubborn necessity) of my will to invent what I desire. My MA thesis focused on Virginia Woolf even though its subject was transcorporeality (a posthumanist term coined by Stacey Alaimo to signify fluidity between bodies, human and nonhuman bodies as well as theoretical bodies) and more-than-human intersubjectivity.

The Waves and our place in the world

Because if many have pointed out that Woolf was a protofeminist, I would suggest she was also a proto-posthumanist. It is impossible to read To the Lighthouse (1927) or The Waves, for example, without contending with the entanglement between humans and what we call ‘nature,’ an umbrella term for animals (which includes us), plants, water, landscapes, climate and geography and all the other vibrant materialities we coexist with.

The Waves reminds us of our place in the world. Our lives are, on the grand scale of geological time, but a single note in the grand cosmic symphony we come in and out of, like a wave emerging, peaking and disappearing in a vast ocean of movement. Today, we know today that humans are a geological force responsible for climate change, mass species extinction, ocean acidification, unhealthy levels of toxicity in our bodies and nonhuman bodies, threatening our very own survival. Woolf never fully let us forget our entanglements with our organic and inorganic (yet lively) co-existents.

If Virginia Woolf wanted to see a modern fiction concerned with the soul, with our inner lives, abandoning old pillars including linear plot, marriage, comedy and the rest, her work was nonetheless deeply attuned to the impact of seemingly impersonal historical hands on private lives. Between the Acts (1941) is a testament to the ways in which humanity (an abstract concept we never experience outside of cognition) and its past continues to affect and shape our present and future.

This, I think, is the most pressing philosophical issue in our ecologically compromised times: how to contend with a humanist and Enlightened past in times when the very concept of ‘human as separate and autonomous from nature’ is under great tension.

Woolf a good starting point

It is my view that Virginia Woolf is as good a starting point to begin thinking about posthumanism as the work of Nietzsche, Foucault or Haraway. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reminds us, who we think with matters, and Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction are so rich in breadth and depth that her work is, as the French say, inconturbable. I often imagine that had Woolf been permitted into a university, she would have instinctively gravitated toward research-creation as her methodology, writing fiction starred with theory and theory taken by poetic will.

To continue to read her and to gather in her honour as we do at Woolf Conferences is to utter a loud, prolonged, mournful yet exalted howl—for everything she has given us and for all we have lost when she took her life.

Editor’s Note: From the age of 15 to 19, Woolf took classes in continental and English history, beginning and advanced Greek, intermediate Latin and German grammar at the King’s College Ladies’ Department. She also had private tutors in German, Greek and Latin. One of them was Clara Pater, sister of critic and essayist Walter Pater. Read more.

Read more in the series:

Sanita Fejzić (at left in pink top) among the Woolf scholars at Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library during a reception at the 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

Woolf scholars at the Saturday night banquet for the 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati in June 2019.

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