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 last 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.

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

Each keynote at the 2024 Woolf conference offered powerfully insightful reflections on modernity and technology in Woolf studies. Our most heartfelt thanks again to Sonita Sarker, Jane Goldman, Paul Saint-Amour, and Emelia Raczkowska for sharing their wisdom with us across the four days of the conference.

This last post in our four-part series is an attempt to immortalize the keynote speeches that have inspired us immensely. It is also a record of our responses to the keynotes with which we hope to substantiate the interactive nature of such sharing.

Keynotes

Keynote with Sonita Sarker: “Teks, Technê, Technology: Woolf as Modernist Icon”

By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow

In approaching Sonita Sarker’s keynote presentation, “Teks, Technê, Technology: Woolf as Modernist Icon,” my review of her talk is essentially a response to one of the deliberations that frame her inquiry on Woolf as a cypher in the 21st century:

I wonder how our young ones read Woolf; in what forms and associations does modernism appear to them in relation to Woolf?

As a self-proclaimed “young one” – indeed, young in terms of both age and career stage in the world of academia – I position myself thus in the conditions that would have shaped my understanding of Woolf, modernity, and modernism.

Peering into the intangibles

This include peering into the “invisible parentheses,” as Sarker has dubbed those intangible elements that should infuse across one’s contemplations about these topics, which would have informed my positionality. For even if we are able to step outside the artificial notion of “modernism” for a moment and read Woolf as an early twentieth century writer, we are unable to step outside of her author persona as a (white Englishwoman).

And the word (modernism), moreover, although unnamed in this year’s conference title, “Woolf, Modernity, Technology,” still seems to emerge as a contingent category to its discussions. In my thinking about the narratives that have directed Woolfians to use modernism as a categorizing idea, I must hence confront Woolf, the (white Englishwoman), from my perspective as a (yellow Chinese woman). The terms in these parentheses are considered less as racializing qualities and more as vocabularies that encapsulate the political dynamics underlying such racial positions.

In any case, Sarker has been careful to note that the current age in which we read Woolf from is an aggravated version of colonial modernity produced through globalization; a continuing consequence of the process that with its own technologies has exacerbated historically entrenched inequities.

Triptych style

Sarker’s pre-recorded keynote was formatted in a triptych structure that mirrored and reflected the multidirectional negotiations of the three words in this year’s conference title. Making the most of modern technology, Sarker recorded herself giving the keynote in three positions – standing at a desk, sitting in a chair, and sitting on the ground. These positions also became the themes to the three distinct but connecting sections of her speech. Sarker’s anthropocentric interest in literary discourses, which forms part of her research as Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Macalester College, shines through in her interpretation of the conference’s titular topic.

The three positions

Position One, “Standing at a Desk,” explores Woolf’s writing as a method for the author to stand among her ancestors and peers. It recognizes the human body and technologies as co-constructed; establishing the technology of words as a technology of knowing the self, Sarker then determined that Woolf’s words, inevitably, are intertwined with the imperial civilization that marks her modernity.

Position Two, “Sitting in a Chair,” continues the previous discussion on the co-constructed concepts of civilization and savagery into Sarker’s reading of Woolf’s essay “The Cinema” (1926). The chair in which the body sits, whether in the cinema or on the throne, is identified as an artifact of elevated status across eras of modernities. Following the logic of Woolf’s claims in the essay, which paints the cinema-goers of her time as “the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures,” this section investigated the ways in which the body’s experiences of time and sensations are revolutionized by technological innovations.

Position Three, “Sitting on the Ground,” served in this final section a line of connection extending from the other postures. It returned to the interlocking relationship between the inorganic and organic, with an emphasis on the human body as one’s central medium of understanding the world. Sarker expounded on the argument with an excerpt in Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” (1926): “Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know the sound of Antony and Cleopatra better than we do.”

As Woolf attempts to translate here the technology of words into sensations of the body, she offers a possible experience in which meaning does not overwhelm sound, and sound remains in all its magic felt sense. New technologies, such as the cinema, hence emerge as primeval, sensing creatures in the technique of Woolf’s writing and in the texture of her text.

Woolf as modernist icon

Returning to the question on which Sarker builds her observations, the keynote was therefore centrally concerned with Woolf’s significance as a modernist icon to her 21st century readers. To rephrase from Sarker’s discussion, although the human Woolf is referred to in the conversational everyday, she has in fact long existed as a cipher for our technologies of subjective capture.

Sarker’s project is one that meditates on our reconstituting of Woolf in post-modern, post-human, neoliberal capitalist conditions. It is thus in another new era of modernity – in which technologies of teaching and translation have made the sound of Antony and Cleopatra less strange to Chinese ears – that I proceed to consider my relationship with Woolf and her modernity. Sarker’s keynote is a witness to this era. The modern-day scholar can receive her brilliant sharing through a screen from any part of the world.

And so as I muse on the wonders of technology in stretching communication, I also ponder this context that my practice has been born into. Sarker is right to foreground the self in her contemplation on Woolf, technology, modernity (and modernism). Our thinking is inevitably constrained by the place and time that we exist in, as well as the body that in part shapes our identity.

Our creating of Woolf as a “modernist” icon, then, is always reflective of a desire to find relevance in the author’s experiences with that of ours. In an era where technologies have made possible the spreading of Woolf’s works to audiences far beyond her intention, the (yellow Chinese woman), among others, is hence tasked with extra barriers in her own meaning-making of Woolf and Woolf’s modernity.

Nevertheless, such practices continue because Woolf’s discourse on the human experience remains relevant even in today’s changed conditions. With technologies that make richer and more extensive the communication of Woolf studies, perhaps it is when we pinpoint the commonalities of our being that we can better embrace the diversifying positions engaged with the practice.

Keynote with Jane Goldman: “‘To the Tool House:’ Woolf and the Ancient Technology of Poetry”

By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow

“Woolf’s only known mention of California” begins Jane Goldman to a hushed audience, “occurs in her most well known and most rare venture into poetry with line breaks: ‘Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville’ (composed October 1934, published posthumously).”

Goldman’s keynote, in itself a poetic performance, took as a point of departure Woolf’s poetic prose that includes the lines “the long waves lies iridescent on the shores of California.” On the night of 7 June 2024 in Fresno, California, then, within the walls of the Resnick Student Union, Woolfians gathered to mull over the ancient technology of poetry in which “words give out their scent.”

As a reader in Avant-garde Poetics & Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, Goldman’s many research interests include the poetry and poetics that emerge from Woolf’s writing. Her keynote presentation, “‘To the Toolhouse:” Virginia Woolf and the Ancient Technology of Poetry,’” was a creative display of her expertise in three parts.

A poetic lecture in three parts

Part One begs Woolf’s crucial question in ‘Cutbush’ – ‘florist/or butcher’ – the scent of flowers or the smell of blood, or both? Woolf’s inquiry applies politically to the ode’s composition date in October 1934 as it does now (to kiss or cut?).

Part Two dedicates itself to Woolf’s ‘tool house’, the converted garden shed at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in which she reads and writes. Goldman’s delivery in this section is accompanied by the (digital) presence of a brick that her friend salvaged from the Woolfs’ pathway between the house and the tool house. Continuing the inspection into Woolf’s use of prose and poetic forms in Part One, the brick becomes in Goldman’s part prose and part poetic lecture a gesture to the writing tools in Woolf’s ‘tool house sentences.’

Part Three wrapped up the keynote with three original pieces by Goldman that echo  Ane Thon Knutsen’s installation of “Kew Gardens” at the conference and pays tribute to Woolf’s short fiction. Goldman’s collaborative approach to her pieces of poetry – by employing the diastic method of Jackson Mac Low; by mimicking the Fibonacci sequence identified in organic spiral forms by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, with a nod to the works of Kabe Wilson, Judith Allen, and Elisa Kay Sparks; and by constructing with a digital dada robot from the mixed words of “Kew Gardens” and the Fresno Woolf conference program – closed her reading with a bow back to the community that forms the foundational support to her practice.

I have long been a fan of Goldman’s work. Truth be told, Goldman is one of my two supervisors at Glasgow, and I heard her excitedly talk about the keynote materials even before the conference. Her attention to the formal structures of Woolf’s writing, as well as her poetic approach to the investigation, have in fact inspired my own methods of reading Woolf as I mature in my research career.

For example, Goldman’s mapping of the oeuvre around word clusters, which her poem “To the Toolhouse” demonstrates, has led to my development of the method in studying Woolf’s discourse on Chineseness. Her keynote was therefore one of my most anticipated events at the conference.

A performance in prose and poetry

Her read-aloud performance in prose and poetry proved to be a different experience than those I had when reading her work on paper. I found myself contemplating the value of public creative practices while relaxing at the sound of her voice, a response that I later recognize as connected to my recent crafting exercises, which the previous posts have laid out.

And it is clear that most of the audience ultimately interacted with Goldman’s keynote in their own personal ways. Many attendees had pointed afterwards to words in Goldman’s final poem that would have been extracted from their presentation titles. I had chimed in these discussions by gesturing, too, to her use of the word ‘chinaware’ in stanza two.

It is with fond memories of the event as I write up my review that I hope we – the audience – made Goldman’s night special, as she did for us. Her keynote took place on the night of her birthday. This information, which she only made known during the Q&A session, added an extra layer to the celebration of Woolf and life that her keynote effected.

Goldman’s keynote’s presentation ended with the song “Happy Birthday” ringing around the lecture hall. Our singing to her is another expression of the community’s bond that finds joy in words and poetry, lyrics and song.

Keynote with Paul Saint-Amour: “Techniques of the Interwar Land Observer: Maltwood, Crawford, Watkins, and Woolf”

By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island

Paul Saint-Amour works on 19th and 20th century British literature with a special interest in the novel, law, trauma, visual culture, sound studios, and the environmental humanities.

His academic credentials are many. He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford. Saint-Amour has been a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Center for the Humanities at Cornell, The Guggenheim Foundation, The Howard Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.

His book, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2003), won the MLA prize for First Book and his most recent book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), won the Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize.

Rural areas and the interwar years

Saint-Amour’s keynote presentation, “Techniques of the Interwar Land Observer: Maltwood, Crawford, Watkins, and Woolf,” aimed to “place Virginia Woolf in a generative new constellation of interwar land observers.” This research leads Saint-Amour to investigate rural life in the country. In doing so, Saint-Amour presented that the interwar years in Britain saw “such an energetic rediscovery and retheorization of its rural lands and landscapes.”

Some factors that led to this growing interest in the countryside during the interwar years include an “emphasis on rural santoria for recuperating war veterans” and a burgeoning fascination for “open air recreation.”

The focus of his presentation involved forms of interwar land observation that “aimed to look back in time—often to prehistory—seeking the past in present landforms, as Woolf’s writings sometimes do.” The land observers in his discussion, Maltwood, Crawford, and Watkins, “read land as a text on which the deep past had written” with the assistance of technologies such as the ruler, the theodolite, the map, the airplane, and the camera.

The variability and volatility of prehistory claims

Woven into his presentation was a discussion on rhetorical technologies and the “aesthetic and political ends that they serve” in which he sought to emphasize how “variable and volatile” prehistory claims can be. Specifically, Saint-Amour opened the questions of “how claims about the same phenomena and even the same claims about the same phenomena may bend variously toward dead serious aestheticism and ludic mysticism, aesthetic free play, a a cult doctrine, xenophobic nativism, and a stabilizing attachment to an adoptive home.”

He named the “topos of epiphany” as one such rhetorical technology central to the interwar land observers, including Woolf, noting that “the prehistoric past becomes legible in the land, not through years of grinding calculation or the accumulation of slow study, but in a moment of radiant clarity.” Saint-Amour suggests that this “narrative of a truth suddenly revealed is powerfully, perilously, self-consecrating in any context,” noting that it “comes trailing a massive complex of religious and cultural associations.”

Keynote with Emilia Raczkowska: “The Whirlpool and the Undertow – On Reading Virginia Woolf and Karin Stephen”

By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island

Emilia Raczkowska leads the Freud Museum London’s education and outreach department. She is experienced in teaching psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychology at the museum and online.

Raczkowska has lectured at leading universities and colleges around the world. Additionally, she has edited and reviewed papers, books, and dissertations which engage with psychoanalysis and regularly shares her expertise with researchers globally.

The angle through which Raczkowska related her research on psychoanalysis in this presentation came from her understanding of psychoanalysis as a “technology that entered brutally into the world of the Bloomsbury group at a certain point in their history.”

Woolf and psychoanalysis

The focus of her presentation aimed to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s resistance or early skepticism towards psychoanalysis. In order to closely examine this resistance, Raczkowska looked at Woolf’s relationship with her brother, Adrian Stephen, a distinguished psychoanalyst who contributed to the way that psychoanalysis has since been practiced by the British Psychoanalyst Society. Raczkowska investigated this relationship alongside that of Adrian Stephen’s relationship with Karin Stephen, his wife and the sister-in-law of Virginia Woolf.

Karin was a distinguished psychoanalyst whose publication, The Wish to Fall Ill (1933), has been of growing interest to scholars. According to Raczkowska, Karin embodied psychoanalysis on a theoretical level and on a political level “and she entered Virginia’s life at a very particular time.”

In her presentation, Raczkowska focused on the differences in how Virginia and Karin engaged with psychoanalysis—as a new technology—ultimately, as a way of practicing modernity or being “a modern woman at the time.”

Furthermore, Raczkowska proposed the “triangularity” of Virginia’s relationship to psychoanalysis: her relationship to her brother, and Karin’s relationship to her husband. In doing so, Raczkowska suggested that there is an evolution in Virginia’s attitude toward psychoanalysis. Specifically, she pointed to three moments in Virginia’s life to support this claim: the entry of Karin Stephen into her life and that of the Bloomsbury group, the publication of “On Being Ill” in 1926, and on her meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1939.

Closing Thoughts

In this conclusion of our collaborative project, we want to take an opportunity to voice our appreciation for all those individuals who have made our efforts to reflect on the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf possible. The unique perspective that we each bring to Woolf studies is a testament to the enduring and multifaceted nature of Woolf’s legacy.

Thank you to Paula Maggio for her unwavering encouragement and support of our vision for this series of posts and for her warm welcome of two early-career Woolf scholars into her esteemed blog.

Thank you to J. Ashley Foster and her team of graduate students for organizing the successful conference and for facilitating the high caliber exchange of knowledge on which the reputation of the international Woolf conferences rests.

Additional thanks to Cody Vela, the conference photographer, for so generously sharing the moments that he captured through his camera lens and for providing conference attendees and non-attendees alike with an opportunity to feel the magic of this experience.

Reflections from Leanne

As I conclude my contributions to our conference reflections, I find myself at a full-circle moment of clarity. In the not-so-distant past, Blogging Woolf was a lifeline to me and connected me with the events, news, and latest thinking on Woolf at a time when I felt like an outsider to academia.

Blogging Woolf continues to be a beacon of light and an essential resource for my research as I progress through my graduate school journey. It is, in part, this bridge between established scholars and “common readers” that makes the Woolf community such a rich environment with a robust readership.

As I organize my thoughts and record these words, I am struck with gratitude for the opportunity to share my voice on this platform and to connect with Woolfians from all walks of life. You are the heart of this community and there is a special place for you here.

Reflections from Serena

I remember first reading the posts on Blogging Woolf as a fresh postgraduate student; it was and still is a platform for me to keep up with the latest in the Woolf community. As I close this four-part reflection series as a contributor, therefore, I am all the more delighted to find myself giving back to the resource that has supported me for a large duration of my research program.

My deep gratitude, too, to all the people who have sustained spaces of communication and care for the nurturing of Woolf studies. The beauty of Blogging Woolf lies in its inclusive readership. It is thus my wish that the contribution will continue to encourage readers of Woolf as much as I have been.

Read past posts in this four-part series

1. Many Paths of Crossing: Newcomers share their Woolf encounters at conference #33
2. Many Paths of Crossing: Workshops at Woolf Conference #33
3. Many Paths of Crossing: Panels at Woolf Conference #33

About the authors

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 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.