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Posts Tagged ‘Verita Sriratana’

Woolf scholars are a playful bunch, as the doctored graphic immediately below shows. It substitutes Verita Sriratana’s face for the face of Gwen John that appears on the box for the Penguin audiobook of A Room of One’s Own. (See second graphic.)

When I saw Verita post this doctored photo on her Facebook page, I couldn’t resist downloading it to share on Blogging Woolf.

I met Verita in 2010 at the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, “Woolf and the Natural World,” in Georgetown, Ky, where we sat on a panel about Woolf and weather. Originally from Bangkok, she did her doctoral work at the University of St. Andrews and is now a post-doctoral student in Slovakia.

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Virginia Woolf and the Natural Worldcollected papers from the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, is now available.

This compilation of 31 essays presented at the 2010 conference explores Woolf’s complex engagement with the natural world, an engagement that was as political as it was aesthetic. Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman are the editors.

The essays in the collection cover diverse topics including:

  • ecofeminism,
  • the nature of time,
  • the nature of the self,
  • nature and sporting,
  • botany,
  • climate,
  • landscape and more.

Contributors include Verita Sriratana, Patrizia Muscogiuri, Katherine Hollis, Bonnie Kime Scott, Carrie Rohman, Diana Swanson, Elisa Kay Sparks, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Jane Goldman, and Diane Gillespie, among many others from the international community of Woolf scholars.

You can order a hard copy or download a PDF of the book. The price of the trade paperback is $24.95. You will also find links to other volumes of Woolf Conference proceedings on the Clemson University Digital Press website.

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Alexandra Harris. Her name is on my lips for good reason.

Romantic Moderns, which just won the Guardian First Book Award, arrived on my doorstep last week. I am itching to read it, but things keep getting in the way. Things like grading fall semester essays. The holidays. Prepping for spring semester. And the overwhelming desire to read something light that won’t strain my incredibly tired brain.

And now I read that Harris has been signed by Thames and Hudson to produce two more books. The first, a short biography of Woolf titled Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf, will be published in spring 2011. Yeah for that.

The second, titled The Weather Glass, will discuss the British preoccupation with weather. That made me gasp right out loud. And I am not exaggerating.

Reading of her plan to write about the British interest in weather made me realize that Verita Sriratana and I are not the only ones  interested in reading the skies — as they relate to Woolf and other writers.

For her doctoral thesis, Verita is writing about weather in The Years. In Reading the Skies, I discuss Woolf’s use of weather in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. And Harris plans to begin her study with Beowulf and work her way up — hopefully to Woolf. 

Meanwhile, here’s another fun weather read — especially at this time of year in places where snow is likely. It’s called The Wrong Kind of Snow: The Complete Daily Companion to the British Weather.

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Diana Swanson of Northern Illinois University presents the closing keynote, “The Real World: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism.”

Going to a Virginia Woolf conference is like long-distance swimming in deep water. It is both exhilarating and exhausting.

That’s how I felt after this year’s 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky., and organized by Kristin Czarnecki, a member of the English faculty there.

The sensation of swimming in deep water also goes along with the theme for the conference, which was “Virginia Woolf and the Natural World.” That means we heard much about Woolf and flowers, Woolf and fauna, Woolf and birds, Woolf and water and even Woolf and weather, one of my favorite topics. In fact, Gill Lowe, of University Campus Suffolk presented a paper on “Wild Swimming” as part of the first panel of the conference.

Woolf’s depth and stamina were illustrated by the variety of papers, panels, presentations and keynote speeches given at the conference. Here are some sparse notes on just a few.

Elisa Kay Sparks actually counted Woolf’s references to individual varieties of flowers for her presentation, “Virginia Woolf’s Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach,” which included a spectacular slide show.

Ecofeminism — and Woolf’s connection to it — were the topics of Bonnie Kime Scott, whose keynote opened the conference, and Diana Swanson, who closed it. Scott made the point that Woolf fuses her natural images with the manmade world, and Swanson said Woolf inspires us to protect our fragile environment, an especially poignant message as oil from BP’s exploded well continues to pollute the Gulf of Mexico.

Valentina Mazzei and her Woolf bust

An opening night reception at the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery on campus featured glorious artwork from numerous artists around the world. Valentina Mazzei of Rome exhibited her delicately beautiful bronze bust of Woolf, which attracted much attention.

A fantastic panel on nature in both urban and rural environments — and the conflict between the two — featured papers by Teresa Boyer, Tonya Krouse and Mark Hussey. Discussion ranged from the street singer in Mrs. Dalloway to the way weather interrupts the narrative in The Years to the reflection of the public discussion of concerns surrounding the demise of the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s in Between the Acts.

War as the ultimate anti-pastoral was Kimberly Coates‘ theme, while Austin Riede discussed the debilitating effect of shell shock on its victims.

Beth Rigel Daugherty’s rapid-fire delivery of Woolf quotes about horses and “taking her fences” energized and entertained the audience, while Emily Bingham‘s surprising talk about Henrietta Bingham’s connection to the Bloomsbury Group set everyone buzzing.

Patrizia Muscogiuri, who presented a paper about Woolf’s thalassic aesthetics, and Cecil Woolf, publisher

Keiko Okaya Tanaka, Vanessa Underwood and Drew Patrick Shannon were part of an illuminating panel about St. Ives, the Isle of Skye and To the Lighthouse. And after Shannon explained the obvious but heretofore unrecognized connections between Woolf’s novel and Jill Paton Walsh’s children’s books, Goldengrove and Unleaving, many listeners probably added them to their Woolf-related reading lists.

During a panel that included Diane Gillespie and Jane Goldman, Leslie Kathleen Hankins shared slides of two drawings she discovered while leafing through Woolf’s original reading notebooks.

Verita Sriratana, Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland

And I was thrilled to discover another Woolf reader and scholar who is exploring Woolf’s use of weather in her novels. Verita Sriratana presented a well-researched paper on weather in The Years, and she plans to include her work as a chapter in her Ph.D. thesis, “`Making Room’: Virginia Woolf and Technology of Place.” As part of our “Weather and Woolf” panel, I discussed Woolf’s use of weather in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando.

These are just a few highlights of a wonderful conference that left me refreshed, exhilarated, exhausted, and dizzy with ideas. For more, read Vara Neverow’s post-conference blog post and listen to Kristen Czarnecki’s pre-conference interview with NPR affiliate WUKY-FM.

Special thanks to Valentina Mazzei; Patrizia Muscogiuri; Verita Sriratana; and Catherine Hollis,  author of Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer: ‘Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I begin?’, for the photos that appear on Blogging Woolf and Flickr.

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