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Archive for the ‘25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf’ Category

Day-long CUNY event honors feminist scholar Jane Marcus

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, in memoriam, tagged , , , on Sunday 11 September 2016| 2 Comments »

The late Jane Marcus, a revered feminist scholar whose seminal work established Virginia Woolf as a major canonical writer, was honored Sept. 9 with a day-long event organized by her former students and dubbed Jane Marcus Feminist University.

The day included breakout workshops, plenary roundtables and a reception in Marcus’s honor with time for sharing reminiscences and memories. It was held at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Topics included:

Jane Marcus memorial at the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

  • Modernist Women Writers and Activists
  • The Spanish Civil War
  • Feminist Digital Pedagogy
  • Jane’s Scholarly Legacy
  • Jane’s Reading List

Speakers included:

  • Amanda Golden
  • Margaret Carson
  • Conor Tomás Reed
  • Cori L. Gabbard
  • J. Ashley Foster
  • Blanche Wiesen Cook
  • Jean Mills
  • Meena Alexander
  • Mary Ann Caws

For the full program and list of speakers, visit the event website.

According to Vara Neverow, who attended: “I felt very privileged to be able attend. Of the 50 or so people who came to the event, most were Jane Marcus’s former students or her long-term colleagues and friends in the world of scholarship and of them, many were Woolfians (and many of the Woolfians were members of the IVWS). Also attending the event were Michael Marcus, Jane’s husband, and Ben Marcus, her son. Her daughter, Lisa Marcus, was able to participate via a live feed. I wish that everyone who had known Jane, had met Jane even once or had been inspired by her work could have been able to attend.

“I was very glad to discover that Jean Mills is working directly with Michael Marcus on organizing and reviewing Jane’s unpublished work. Thus, we can hope that some of Jane’s scholarly endeavors will be published posthumously. Jane’s contributions to Woolf studies brought into focus the Virginia Woolf we know as a feminist, a pacifist, and a socialist. Jane’s scholarly impact was both immeasurable and invaluable,” Neverow added. 

She also provided these links:

Marcus, distinguished professor emerita at CUNY and author of so much ground-breaking scholarship on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, feminism, modernism and other topics, died May 28, 2015, at the age of 76. At the time of her death and at the 2015 Woolf conference in Bloomsburg, Pa., scholars and students paid tribute to Marcus for her scholarship, her feminist integrity and the relationships she nurtured with students and colleagues.

Here’s an update posted today by organizer Ashley Foster:

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2016-09-09-19-28-07

Conference organizers J. Ashley Foster, Cori Gabbard, and Conor Tomás Reed . Photo by Vara Neverow.

 

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The Woolf Conference comes to public TV

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, films, Virginia Woolf, tagged , on Tuesday 1 December 2015| Leave a Comment »

The 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 7.51.18 PMBloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, June 4-7, was featured this fall on WVIA, the public television station serving northeastern Pennsylvania and the central Susquehanna Valley.

Watch the nine-minute video, “Connecting with Virginia Woolf,” at this link or at the link below:

http://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/2365611641

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Latest issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany now online

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, tagged , on Sunday 18 October 2015| Leave a Comment »

The electronic version of Spring/Summer 2015 Virginia Woolf Miscellany is now available to view online or download and vw miscellany summer 15print, says Editor Vara Neverow.

Edited and with an introduction by Erica Delsandro, the issue includes fascinating essays on Woolf in the context of the 1930s, diverse articles and a review of the performance of Septimus and Clarissa from the Twenty Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. A section of the issue is also devoted to heartfelt remembrances of Shari Benstock and Jane Marcus.

The issue also includes seven book reviews, important information about upcoming Woolf conferences, and information about various Woolf societies. The issue, as always, concludes with the Society Column, written this time by the International Virginia Woolf Society’s President, Kristin Czarnecki.

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Isabel Bolton – Woolf’s little-known female contemporary

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , , on Thursday 2 July 2015| Leave a Comment »

On a long travel day home from the Woolf conference in Pennsylvania and a side-trip to Maine, I was fortunate to be able to passgornick the time with Vivian Gornick’s new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a gift from my friend in Maine.

I was taken by surprise when, about halfway through the book, Gornick diverts from her mostly personal musing with a lengthy passage that starts: “She was born Mary Britton Miller in New London, Connecticut, in 1883….” She goes on to state that Mary Miller lived in New York and wrote stories and poetry that went unnoticed. Then in 1946, at the age of 63, she published a novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, under the pen name Isabel Bolton. It was followed in 1949 and 1952 by The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions.

Her work was lauded by Diana Trilling in The Nation and Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker, who likened her modernist prose to Virginia Woolf’s. She nevertheless slipped into obscurity until the nineties, when the three novels were re-published as a trilogy, New York Mosaic. Yet she remains unknown today. She published two volumes of poetry, a memoir, and another novel before she died in 1975.

Gornick focuses on her own theme, the self and the city. In Do I Wake or Sleep, Millicent in New York — much like Clarissa Dalloway in London — observes: “What a strange, what a fantastic city … there was something here that one experienced nowhere else on earth.”

I was fascinated even before I learned about the comparison to Woolf. I found New York Mosaic at the public library and launched into it. Do I Wake or Sleep is Millicent’s interior voice over a 24-hour period — sound familiar?  The prose is stunning. Here’s a sentence from the first page:

There was, she thought, a magic, an enchantment — these myriad rainbow lights, now soft and low, now deeper, stronger — all the stops and chords and colors played like organ voluntaries, over the moon, the clouds, the grass.

I’m still reading, completely hooked. I’ve ordered the trilogy — I have to have it, a library copy just won’t do — along with her memoir. I’m off and running on what looks to be a fairly extensive research project and have had interest expressed in a profile I plan to write. Too bad I didn’t find her before the conference on Woolf’s Female Contemporaries!

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The Mark on the Wall exhibition: Interview with an artist

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, art, art exhibits, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 30 June 2015| 1 Comment »

Ozlem and her Work

Ozlem displaying her work at the “Mark on the Wall” exhibition

It has been almost one month since the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, but I am still thinking about all of the great events and presentations from the conference.

One of the highlights from this year’s conference was the “Mark on the Wall” exhibition, which presented art work that was inspired by Virginia Woolf and her female contemporaries. Artists from around the world were represented, and I had the lucky opportunity to interview one of the artists whose work was selected for this exhibition.

Ozlem Habibe Mutaf Buyukarman is an assistant professor of graphic design at Yeditepe University in Turkey. After seeing her piece, “Do Not Call Me Anything IV” displayed at the “Mark on the Wall” exhibition, I asked her a few questions about her work:

In what ways do you think this piece connects with Virginia Woolf and/or the Modernist movement?

Ozlem: In my artwork “Do Not Call Me Anything IV”, you can see knee high stockings worn with trousers by a woman (who probably has a room of her own). The knee-high women’s stockings are a metaphorical expression of stepping forward. This is what modernist women writers and artists do I believe. Along with the stockings I placed labels/tags which stand for the prejudice against women. Thus, the name of the series is “Do Not Call Me Anything.” Also, in terms of style, this is not a decorative piece or an oil on canvas; it is based on experimental, instantaneous involvements of objects and textures presenting the drama of modern life with its consuming, exhausting and unstable condition. This differentiates it and makes it modern, I suppose.

“Do Not Call Me Anything IV”

Much of your work, including “Do Not Call Me Anything IV,” seems to put a focus on women’s clothing. In what ways does your work speak to and for women?

Ozlem: The clothing items are somehow the witnesses of our lives, our passions, our emotional commitments, the violence we faced to both physical and psychological in a modern, demanding world. They may symbolise the abandoned self or the avant-gardist… I present the aesthetics of personal items while documenting them, a moment of confrontation.

As a female artist, what kinds of struggles do you think that women artists face today?

Ozlem: Still many… women have to wear many hats at a time. And women writers or artists around the world are facing many struggles such as censorship, visibility and representational issues. Virginia Woolf inspired many women all around the world.

You can view Ozlem’s work and all of the exhibition selections in the “Mark on the Wall Online Catalogue”.

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