Recherche sur Virginia Woolf

La Société d'Etudes Woolfienne (SEW) organise un colloque à l'Université Paris-Diderot - Paris 7, UFR d'Etudes anglophones, les 27-28 juin 2008 : « Woolf as reader / Woolf as critic ». Je vous transmets l'argumentaire :

Numerous studies have explored Woolf's intertextual imagination, the way she taps into the vast literary memory that is hers in order to reinvent literature. Far rarer have so far been the studies focusing on the way her writing was obliquely inspired by her intense reading as well as her activity as a literary critic. Her articles for the TLS, her critical essays, her diary, even her letters all testify however to the fact that a similar energy runs through her reading and her writing, an energy crucial to her task as « thinker / writer ». In order to understand Woolf's praxis of reading / writing one will try to explore how she invents an art of reading, an art that is from the start critical and that anticipates on the poetics she will refine throughout her essays and her fiction. One will also try to understand how such a poetics of reading opens more widely onto a definition of reading caught in the « here and now » of experience, but also caught in history, the history for instance of those « outsiders » Woolf observed in the public libraries and whom she appeals to in Three Guineas.
At the heart of such a poetics of reading it is in fact a politics of reading that may also be traced. It roots itself in an intensely private experience of literature, as her diary testifies, but also in the cultural history of England. Reading thus proves both a private and a collective experience that ultimately defines a « common ground » and the utopian figure of a reader who is both modern and ancient, singular and universal.
A first conference, organized by the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in June 2006 was the occasion for a first exploration of Woolf's praxis of reading. During this second conference, we will open the corpus of analysis even further by turning to her diairy, her letters or her reading notes, as well as carrying on with the exploration of her essays whether it be her literary criticism or her more theoretical essays. For this second conference, the papers will be given in English.