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Feb. 10 is new deadline for @vwoolf2020 call for papers

Tuesday 4 February 2020 by Paula Maggio

The program committee for the 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance has extended its submission deadline for the call for papers and will accept proposals until Feb. 10. The conference will be held June 11-14 at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

Below is information provided by email from conference organizers.

Top four plenary events

Conference organizers have lined up four plenary events.

The conference will include a plenary performance. Ellen McLaughlin and Kathleen Chalfant have collaborated and will present THE PARTY—a one-woman play written by McLaughlin that weaves together three stories Woolf wrote while working on Mrs. Dalloway – “The New Dress,” “Together and Apart,” and “A Summing Up.”  All three stories take place at Mrs. Dalloway’s party.  All the words are Woolf’s, and all the characters are played by Chalfant. Organizers say they are also hatching an additional performance piece.

Mary Gordon, Rachel Dickstein and Ellen Mclaughlin at a performance of “Septimus and Clarissa” in New York City in October 2011.

Carrie Rohman of Lafayette College will deliver a plenary lecture. Check out her recent Print Plus article on Isadora Duncan’s “Creatural Aesthetics”. Rohman is also the author of two brilliant studies: Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009) and Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (2018).

Mark Hussey of Pace University; Urmila Seshagiri of U of Tennessee, Knoxville; Drew Shannon of Mount St. Joseph U; and Jean Moorcroft Wilson of U of London will join us for a plenary panel. The panel will cover a range of issues that will thread through the topics of “Archive, Edition, Life.” See more about them and their work.

The fourth event is a plenary dialogue between Aarthi Vadde and Melanie Micir—co-authors of the award-winning essay, “Obliterature: Toward an Amateur Criticism” (2018). Their individual research projects include Vadde’s prize-winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2017) and Micir’s book, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (2019).

We’re also organizing some pre- and post-conference workshops, so if you wish to come early and/or stay late, you’ll definitely want to participate in these. 

Vermilion, South Dakota and USD welcome you

Conference organizers wrote, “And one more thing: We want to be clear. We are not our legislature. The University of South Dakota and Vermillion will provide a safe, cozy, welcoming place to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. We’re going to have a lot of fun, take care of, and learn so much from each other.”

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Listen to 7 Virginia Woolf novels as broadcast by the BBC

Saturday 1 February 2020 by Paula Maggio

From the BBC Radio Drama Collection come adaptations of seven of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering modernist novels, available on CD and as a digital download.

Out since last April, each is a full-cast dramatization by such notable actors as Vanessa Redgrave and Kristin Scott-Thomas. Each includes sound effects — background chatter and the pouring of tea in Night and Day; horses’ hoofs pounding the road and trumpets sounding in Orlando; the gramophone playing, the cows mooing, and the audience clapping in Between the Acts.

The original radio broadcasts took place between October 1980 and May 2012.

The audio versions of Woolf’s novels are available in the UK and the U.S. The cost of the 14-disk CD set in the U.S. is around $30. Playing time is 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Novels included

  • The Voyage Out (1915)
  • Night and Day (1919)
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (1927)
  • Orlando (1928)
  • The Waves (1931)
  • Between the Acts (1941)

Posted in audiobooks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Conversations and a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day as it turns 100

Wednesday 29 January 2020 by Paula Maggio

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. It also marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in the U.S.

Fittingly enough, both deal with women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote.

While Woolf’s novel has often been overlooked, it is currently receiving the recognition it deserves. Nowadays it is described as “a remarkable story of two women navigating the possibilities opened up by the struggle for women’s suffrage.”

Reading and discussing Night and Day

In September of last year, Anne Fernald, professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, led a reading group on Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn that featured novelists Julie Orringer and Michael Cunningham discussing Night and Day.

Read Lauren Groff’s Introduction to Night and Day, which is included in the 100th anniversary edition of the novel, available from Restless Books.

According to Restless Books, the new edition of Woolf’s novel is part of a “series of beautifully packaged, newly introduced and illustrated great books from the past that still speak to our time, our place, and, especially, our restlessness. In addition to their original artwork and fresh introductions, Restless Classics brings the classroom experience to the reader with linked online teaching videos.”

Night and Day in conversation

You can also sit in on last year’s discussion of the novel held at the Brooklyn Center for Fiction by watching the video below.

In addition, “Night and Day at 100” was the topic of the International Virginia Woolf Society‘s guaranteed panel at the Modern Language Association Convention 2019. It addressed the question: What is the twenty-first century legacy of Woolf’s “nineteenth-century” novel?

Posted in Anne Fernald, books, Night and Day | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Virginia Woolf gets birthday tribute from “Writer’s Almanac”

Saturday 25 January 2020 by Paula Maggio

Today would be Virginia Woolf’s 138th birthday. Garrison Keillor features her in today’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” a nice tribute.

But the most high profile tribute on the occasion of her birthday was in 2018, when she was honored by a Google Doodle. Created by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy, it generated a lot of publicity for Woolf, prompting a variety of birthday greetings from around the globe.

Links to a few from that year and others are below, along with Keillor’s 2020 tribute.

Jan. 25, 2018 Google Doodle in commemoration of Woolf’s 136th birthday

 

  • In 2017, the Royal Opera House asked for reader reactions to Woolf’s work in conjunction with Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works.
  • In 2018, the LA Times memorialized Woolf in a long article that included this sentence: “A pioneer of stream-of-conciousness writing, Woolf left behind an endlessly influential body of work,” the LA Times in 2018.
  • That same year, The Independent published Woolf quotes that pertained to various aspects of life.
  • Book Trib celebrated with previews of her 10 greatest works.
  • Last year, CR Fashion Book asked us to “Remember when Virginia Woolf Taught Us How to Get the Girl?”
  • Also in 2018, Time magazine uploaded a brief video on Woolf titled, “Today Is Virginia Woolf’s 136th Birthday: Here’s What You Should Know About Her.”

Birthday wishes from the past on Blogging Woolf

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Virginia Woolf is trending as a fashion muse

Thursday 23 January 2020 by Paula Maggio

The New York Times is calling Virginia Woolf a fashion muse. Why? Three reasons.

Reason 1: She inspired the Met’s Costume Institute exhibit

She is the inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s coming Costume Institute blockbuster and gala, “About Time: Fashion and Duration.” The May 7 – Sept. 7 exhibit explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future, with Woolf serving as the “ghost narrator” of the exhibition, according to the Met’s website. It will feature 160 pieces of women’s fashion from the last 150 years, and beyond.

Reason 2: She inspired an opera

Her novel Orlando is the basis of a new production at the Vienna State Opera that premiered Dec. 8, 2019, with costumes by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Fittingly, its the first opera commissioned by a woman composer in the 150-year history of the company. As Kawakubo said in The New York Times, “And also I have always been interested in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle and “Orlando” in particular because of its central concept of ignoring time and gender.”

Reason 3: She inspired a Givenchy couture show

Her garden at Monk’s House, her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando were the inspiration for Clare Waight Keller’s Givenchy couture show this week in Paris.

Woolf and contemporary fashion

Woolf’s connection to the fashion world is nothing new. Over the years she has inspired designers on both sides of the pond. Here are a few worth noting:

Woolf’s relationship to fashion

Woolf herself had a complicated relationship with clothing and fashion, one that has been much discussed in academic settings and online.

Catherine Gregg explores this theme in her Bloomsbury Heritage monograph Virginia Woolf and ‘Dress Mania’: ‘the eternal & insoluble question of clothes’ (2010). In it, she discusses Woolf’s “delight in clothes and interest in conceptions of fashion and femininity” as well as her sense of being an outsider when it came to fashion, as well as her loathing for its artifice (7).

More on Woolf and fashion

Since we started looking, we have noticed numerous references that connect to the topic of Woolf and fashion. Some are documented in the following posts:

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