Editor’s Note: As an introduction to the upcoming 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: “Woolf and Dissidence,” set for July 4-8 at King’s College London and the University of Sussex, England, we offer the third in a series of four posts in which Leanne Oden and Serena Wong reflect on their encounters with Virginia Woolf and with Woolf scholars — dubbed Woolfians — that they met at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf, Modernity, Technology, held June 6-9, 2024, at Fresno State University.
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. ”—Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne”, The Common Reader (1925)
The 2024 Woolf conference hosted a total of 29 panels across its four-day program. These panels, all brilliant, demonstrate in various methods a review of Woolf studies under the theme of technological innovation.
The two panels discussed in this post were respectively attended by the authors who also presented in them. Leanne reports on the panel “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf’,” which is interested in the contextualizing and de-contextualizing of Woolf on public platforms in processes of reading.
Serena writes on the panel “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism,” which engages with the relationship between crafting and reading in aesthetic approaches to Woolf’s work. Both accounts find solace – and new ideas – in their own clusters of research.
Panels
“Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf”
By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island
L-R: panelists of “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf” include Adriana Varga, Lisa Tyler, Judith Allen, Leanne Oden, and panel chair, Anne MacMaster. Photo courtesy of Amanda Golden.
The panel that I was selected to present in, alongside Lisa Tyler (Sinclair Community College), Judith Allen (Kelly Writers House), and Adriana Varga (Nevada State University), moderated by our panel chair, Anne MacMaster (Millsaps College), engaged with Woolf by rethinking the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her work.
From memes to politics
Lisa Tyler’s presentation, “‘Very Beautiful and Very Frightening:’ Interpreting Virginia Woolf-Related Memes,” investigates the circulation of Virginia Woolf’s images and quotations from her public and private writings on social media. She defines memes in her research as “cultural units—ideas, tunes, catchphrases, or images—that arise and propagate themselves through imitation.”
In her presentation, “Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and ‘the Manufacture of Consent,’” Judith Allen examines the political insights of Virginia Woolf alongside that of Walter Lippmann, who coined the term “manufacturing consent” in 1922.
Allen’s research leads her to question agents of power and their relationship to censorship, urging the audience to consider “which person, corporation, or government official controls the narrative — or at times, ‘purchases’ the narrative — and what might happen if we take risks, opposing the ‘official story’, the acceptable opinion.” In her concluding thoughts, Allen left the audience with a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “And so, difficult as it may be: ‘We must speak out!’ In Martin Luther King’s words: ‘Silence is betrayal.’”
Culture, audience and responses to AROO
The presentation that I gave centers on the dynamic relationship between culture and audience as explored in Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941), as a shared experience between the characters within and the readers outside of the text. In this research, I examine the culture-audience relationship as a striking historically specific example of human-agent interaction (HAI), particularly through the literary representations of artifacts like the paintings and the newspaper.
My paper investigates the ways in which Woolf models a kind of cultural engagement that reflects new subjective modalities made possible through technology and modernity. Many thanks to Alice Wood, as well as my mentor and dear friend, Stephen Barber, for their brilliant research which has so inspired me and pushed my thinking.
Our final panelist, Adriana Varga, delivered her presentation, “‘A Room of One’s Own:’ Reevaluations,” in which she examines several 20th and 21st century responses to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, in order to understand how different authors have interpreted and responded to it and why it continues to be a source of inspiration.
The Q&A session asked our panel of presenters to consider “where does Woolf go when decontextualized?” This sophisticated question inspired us to think across all of our presentations and the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her life and works.
A heartfelt thank you to my fellow panelists for their insightful research. Additional thanks to the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities and the International Virginia Woolf Society’s Suzanne Bellamy travel fund for their contributions to my trip to Fresno, making it possible for me to present my research. It has been a great honor to be among Woolfians and to see Woolf through their eyes.
“An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism”
By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow
I presented on the third day of the conference with fellow panelists Brenna Barks (Fresno State University) and Melissa Johnson (Illinois State University), in a panel with the theme of the interlocking connections between reading, aesthetics, and craft.
Clothing, Orlando, and the intersections of craft and art
L-R: Panelists of “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism” include Melissa Johnson, Brenna Barks, Serena Wong, and panel Chair, Marcia James. Photo courtesy of Jane Goldman.
Barks’ paper explored how clothing is used in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, and its film and play adaptions in 1992 and 2022/23 respectively.
As a fashion and art historian and material culturist, Barks is eager to define and simultaneously question gender, history, and the self in her study of these renditions regarding the making and theorizing of costumes.
Johnson, who hosted the aforementioned craft workshop, is a professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Illinois State University.
With a research focus on the histories of craft and its intersections with modern and contemporary art, Johnson examined the resonances of text and textile between Woolf’s writing and the work of artist Ann Hamilton.
In a panel that foregrounds the value of creative practice to interpretations of literature, I gladly noticed that the scholars’ discussions, as did my own, emphasized sensory experiences as a crucial tool of artistic exploration. Moreover, from our individual presentations rose an implied agreement that crafting is a political act.
Pottery as resistance
My paper, entitled “Strange Stories on a Willow Pattern Plate: Virginia Woolf, P’ou Song-Lin, and the Chinaware of Bloomsbury,” puts forward the aesthetic and orientalist tensions in Woolf’s 1913 review of Pu Songling’s short story collection Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure.
My creative practice with pottery painting had led me to create with artist friend Joanne Ning a chinoiserie-style plate, which found its inspiration in the depictions of this review. The plate not only serves as a visualization of the review but is more importantly offered as a project of resistance against the orientalist narratives that surround its form.
I extend my thanks to Barks and Johnson for brilliant conversions on our panel papers, and to the audience who during the Q&A impressed on my mind the blurred boundaries between aesthetic seduction and sedation.
Read past posts in this four-part series
- Many Paths of Crossing: Newcomers share their Woolf encounters at conference #33
- Many Paths of Crossing: Workshops at Woolf Conference #33
About the authors
Leanne Oden
Leanne Oden is a first-year Ph.D. student and an Instructor of Record in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. In her forthcoming research, Leanne is interested in questioning the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary as challenged through Woolf’s writing among other modernists. In her role as an educator for the University of Rhode Island, she regularly teaches ENG 110: Introduction to Literature and WRT 106: Introduction to Research Writing.
Serena Wong
Serena Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral study situates itself at the crossroads of British modernisms and Chinese modernity, with a focus on the orientalism in Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and formal representations of China. Her research also looks at theoretical and creative studies of ornamentation, which she positions as an important dimension of orientalist thought.
