Experts without borders

This chapter presents liberal varieties of technocratic internationalism from the interwar years. The first section sketches the tumultuous situation at the end of the First World War to set the stage for this discussion. Wartime cooperation among the Western allies became a point of reference for internationalism of the executive top-down type. The work of two British internationalists, James Arthur Salter and H. R. G. Greaves, illustrates this type of internationalism, and is the focus of the second section. These authors envisaged the economic and technical branches of the League as a continuation of the wartime ‘executives’ among the Western allies. The American Pitman B. Potter linked his vision of international expert administration to otherwise Wilsonian ideas about an international rule of law and the primacy of security. The third section is devoted to the more utopian kinds of technocratic internationalism of the interwar years. They are represented here by Leonard Woolf and G. D. H. Cole who applied ideas of functional government to the domestic and international level alike. The final section of the chapter turns to David Mitrany who developed the functional approach to international organization more systematically. It shows how Mitrany combined the pragmatic and utopian elements of technocratic internationalism into a new synthesis.

Family and Place

How can we understand Virginia Woolf’s life and art through the idea of ‘home’? This chapter answers the question by tracing the multiple places Woolf called home over the course of her life. From a Kensington childhood to final years spent with Leonard Woolf in Richmond, from her famously defiant young adulthood in Bloomsbury to her sister Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat in Sussex, Woolf’s movements between homes shaped her maturing aesthetic philosophies. As the daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, Woolf experienced Englishness itself through a sense of simultaneous belonging and exile. She consistently framed citizenship and national identity as feminist problems because ‘if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical’ (ARO 96). My essay illuminates the vitality of ‘home’ – physical as well as conceptual – in Woolf’s literature, feminism, and politics.

Literary London

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

“A Different Ideal”

This chapter discusses Beginning Again in 1963, where Leonard Woolf describes how in his first year of marriage he was induced to join a Care Committee of the Charity Organization Society (COS) branch in Hoxton. It recounts how Marny Vaughan and Stella Duckworth carried on the mission of their mothers' generation through her ongoing participation in the COS. It also highlights Virginia Woolf's refined ideas about philanthropy in relation to her husband's emerging political interests and her developing sense of women's political activism. The chapter refers to Ray Strachey's biography of Frances Willard in November 1912, which accompanied Leonard on a fortnight's research trip to factories and cooperative stores. It talks about the maternal–imperialist strain of women's political work that continued to exasperate Woolf.

Reason, Ridicule, and Indifference

This essay provides suggestions for integrating the interdisciplinary field of peace studies and literary analysis by attending to rhetorical strategies in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction. The field of peace studies often relies on the social sciences and data-driven analytics, borrowing from the humanities only for vague ideas like “inspiration” and “creativity.” Andrews argues that the Woolfs’ rhetorical form offers additional resources to peace-activist writers. With a nod to the “political formalist” turn of scholars such as Caroline Levine and Joseph North, Andrews examines the ways that the formal features of the Woolfs’ writing enact their antiwar politics. Leonard Woolf insisted that his strategies for antiwar internationalism were based in reason rather than utopianism, and his prose style displays that “reasonableness” by using the tropes of western, academic argumentation. By contrast, Virginia Woolf’s circular, elliptical, and repetitive style in Three Guineas resists the combative, western academic models in which opposing views are demolished through rhetorical assaults and stockpiles of evidence. The Woolfs were united in their use of ridicule, a device that sometimes seems antithetical to nonviolent speech. Ridicule, however, holds the potential to be the art of “making ridiculous,” of pointing out the absurdity and foolishness of over-inflated, self-serious political views or actors. In this capacity it is a rhetorical form that deflates and redirects political extremity without rising to the level of its violence. As Andrews shows, the Woolfs’ writing suggests a range of options for peace-activist writing today and their rhetorical sophistication extends our capacities for a pacifist imagination.

Between Aesthetic and Political Theory

This chapter interrogates the utopian troping of Virginia Woolf's pacifism through a theoretical, historical, and rhetorical perspective. At a time when peace projects were condemned as utopian, Woolf’s choice to mobilize utopian tropes was not ideologically neutral. The chapter will first map out the utopia/reality divide that structured the interwar fields of international relations, focusing on the theoretical debate opposing Leonard Woolf to E. H. Carr. A similar unease around utopias became manifest in the interwar literary field, as the upsurge in peace utopias coincided with a growing critique of utopian fiction. This chapter argues that this aesthetic and political polemic between fact and fiction was at the core of Woolf’s writings on peace. Close readings of Three Guineas and "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" will show how Virginia Woolf deconstructed the duality between "utopia and reality" that polarized pacifist discourses of the time. In a mock-utopian tone quite distinct from serious fictional peace projects, Woolf critiqued planned utopias of world peace, such as those devised by H. G. Wells, but also moved away from Leonard Woolf's political idealism. Beyond any fixed oppositions between idealism and realism, between "fact" and "dream," she renegotiated the materiality of hope by repurposing press cuttings and other "fragmentary notes" into archives of the future.

O CONTO DE VIRGINIA WOOLF – OU FICÇÃO, UMA CASA ASSOMBRADA

O presente artigo se debruça sobre o conto “Casa Assombrada”, coletado no único volume de contos que Virginia Woolf publicou em vida, Monday or Tuesday (1921), para investigar de que maneira seus contos intensificam a crise dos gêneros literários que seus romances encenam, por um lado; e para entender como tal crise é análoga à questão política que assombra toda sua obra, por outro lado: o gênero enquanto questão identitária. Em diálogo com a filosofia e com a crítica woolfiana, este estudo articula essa “crise dos gêneros” (gender x genre) e, ao mesmo tempo, produz uma contextualização histórico-cultural dos contos de Virginia Woolf. Palavras-chave: Virginia Woolf. Conto. Gênero literário. Questões de gênero. Referências AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Elogio da profanação. In: AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Profanações. Tradução Selvino Assman. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2007. p. 65-81 BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre a linguagem em geral e sobre a linguagem humana. In: Linguagem, tradução, literatura. Tradução João Barrento. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2018 [1916]. p. 9-27. BENZEL, Kathryn N.; HOBERMAN, Ruth. Trespassing boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. BRAIDOTTI, Rosi. Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University, 2011. BRIGGS, Julia. Virginia Woolf, an Inner Life. Londres: Harcourt Brace, 2005. CIXOUS, Hélène. First names of no one. In: SELLERS, Susan (org.). The Hélène Cixous Reader. Londres: Routledge, 1994 [1974]. p. 25-35. DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. 28 de novembro de 1947 – Como criar para si um corpo sem órgãos?. Tradução Aurélio Guerra Neto. In: DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs. São Paulo: 34, 1996 [1980]. v. 3. p. 11-34. FOUCAULT, Michel. Docile bodies. In: FOUCAULT, Michel; RABINOW, Paul (ed.). The Foucault reader. Toronto: Penguin, 1984a. p. 179-187. FOUCAULT, Michel. The body of the condemned. In: FOUCAULT, Michel; RABINOW, Paul (ed.). The Foucault reader. Toronto: Penguin, 1984b. p. 170-178. GOLDMAN, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945, Image to apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. GOLDMAN, Jane. The Cambridge introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006. HARRIS, Wendell. Vision and form: the English novel and the emergence of the story. In: MAY, Charles (ed.). The new short story theories. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, 1994. p. 181-191. KRISTEVA, Julia. Stabat mater. Tradução A. Goldhammer. In: MOI, Toril (ed.). The Kristeva reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 [1977]. p. 160-187. MATTHEWS, Brander. The philosophy of the short-story. Londres: Forgotten, 2015. [1901]. PEREIRA, Lucia Miguel. Dualidade de Virginia Woolf. In: ______. Escritos da maturidade. Rio de Janeiro: Graphia, 2005. [1944] p. 106-110. SELLERS, Susan (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. 2. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010. WOOLF, Leonard. Beginning again: an autobiography of the years 1911 to 1918. 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