Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

In a short essay titled “Why,” Virginia Woolf daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. She subversively suggested, “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care”. In this article, we suggest that the “post” scholarship moment is the moment to ask new questions about the ways Woolfian inspired life-writing as a performance of self and social worlds might be engaged to trouble and open up what the “product” and performance of academic work, words, and worlds might come to be.

Materialism, autonomy, intersectionality: revisiting Virginia Woolf through the Wages for Housework perspective

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

O que há em um nome? Ressonâncias entre Ana Cristina Cesar e James Joyce / What’s in a name? Resonances between Ana Cristina Cesar and James Joyce

Resumo: Ana Cristina Cesar, em Luvas de Pelica (1980)1, mostra-nos um tipo singular de dicção íntima em que a finalidade do segredo é desativada, e uma mistura de diário de viagem, cartas e anotações pessoais é transformada em um espaço de deriva poética, no qual a posição do sujeito torna-se matéria de literatura. Há neste texto uma outra possibilidade de entendimento do que poderíamos chamar de “âmbito íntimo”, já que aqui, a intimidade acaba ganhando um estatuto diferente daquele da clausura, característico de décadas anteriores. Sabemos que nesta obra, Katherine Mansfield e Virginia Woolf são referenciadas, mas, em que medida a obra de um outro autor moderno, James Joyce, poderia dar uma nova luz à escritura de Ana Cristina? Joyce abordou de maneira intensa a temática da intimidade em seu livro Ulysses (1922), não somente através de cartas, mas também de um fluxo de consciência, em que a matéria corporal corre “junto” ao que nos é apresentado textualmente. Levando em conta o trabalho de problematização da instância íntima realizado por Ana C., haveria em Luvas de Pelica uma espécie de tonalidade joyceana refletida em seu corpus textual? Este trabalho pretende desbravar este tema, apontando para possíveis relações entre as estratégias de escrita de Ulysses e de Luvas de Pelica, a fim de descobrir pontos em comum que possam iluminar ainda mais a poética da escritora carioca.Palavras-chave: Ana Cristina Cesar; James Joyce; Intimidade; Feminino.Abstract: Ana Cristina Cesar, in Luvas de Pelica (1980), shows us a singular type of intimate diction in which the purpose of the secret is deactivated, and a mixture of travel diary, letters and personal notes is transformed into a space of poetic drift, in which the subject’s position becomes a matter of literature. There is in this text another possibility of understanding what we could call “intimate sphere”, since here, intimacy ends up gaining a different status from that of enclosure, characteristic of previous decades. We know that in this work Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are referenced, but to what extent could the work of another modern author, James Joyce, shed new light on Ana Cristina’s writing? Joyce intensely addressed the theme of intimacy in his book Ulysses (2012), not only through letters, but also through a stream of consciousness, in which the body matter of the character runs “along” with what is presented to us textually. Taking into account Ana C.’s problematization of the intimate instance, would there be in Luvas de Pelica a kind of Joycean tone reflected in her textual corpus? This paper intends to explore this theme, pointing to possible relationships between the writing strategies of Ulysses and Luvas de Pelica, in order to discover common points that can further illuminate the poetics of the writer from Rio de Janeiro.Keywords: Ana Cristina Cesar; James Joyce; Intimacy; Feminine.

How Should One Read “The Reader”?

In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf worked on two projects. One was the posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941). The other was a literary-historical project, which she provisionally titled “Turning the Page” or “Reading at Random”, but which is now known by the dual titles “Anon” and “The Reader”. Although published in a 1979 eclectic edition, these documents have received little critical attention. This article proposes three novel approaches to this archive of documents. The first takes up the methodology proposed by Woolf’s original titles and reads a single folio of this project at random, paying close material attention to what is on both sides of Woolf’s typescript page. The second approach expands on the materialist slant of the first approach and offers an anatomy of this archive, while the third approach expands on my previous discussion of cataloging and classification, in order to sketch out a historiography of Woolf’s late archive.

Autofiction and Photography: “The Split of the Mirror”

This chapter explores the relationships between life writing, memory, and photography and suggests that the incidence of photographs (actual or described) in life-writing texts is most prominent in autofictional works which possess generic hybridity and often represent identity itself in hybrid terms. The chapter explores images of seeing and mirroring in autobiographical texts, focusing first on transsexual life-writings (including works by Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris, Jay Prosser, and Susan Faludi), in which photographs play a complex role in negotiating continuity and change within the life-course, old and new identities. The second part of the essay turns to recent life-writing texts, including the work of Annie Ernaux (who, like many other French writers, makes substantial use of photographs) and the film and cultural theorist Annette Kuhn.

Sweet Spots: Writing the Connective Tissue of Relation

Sweet Spots thinks transversally across language and body, and between text and tissue. This assemblage of essays collectively proposes that words—that is, language that lands as written text—are more-than-human material. And, these materials, composed of forces and flows and tendencies, are capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the making. The practice of acupuncture—and its relational thinking—often makes its presence felt to twirl the text-tissue of the bodying essays. Ficto-critical thinking is threaded throughout to activate concepts from process philosophy and use the work of other thinkers (William James, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few) to forge imaginative connections. Entangled in the text-tissue are an assortment of entities, such as bickering body parts, quivering jellyfish, heart pacemaker cells, a narwhal tooth, Taoist parables, always with ubiquitous, stretchy connective tissue — from gooey interstitial fluid to thick planes of fascia — ever present to ensure that the essaying bodies become, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the one-which-includes-the-many-includes-the-one. The essaying bodies orient towards the sweetest sweet spot which is found, not in the center, but slightly askew, felt in the reverbing more-than that carries their potential. Crucially, this produces a shift in perspective away from self-enclosed bodies and experts toward a care for the connective tissue of relation.

Frida Kahlo e Virginia Woolf: Escrita e pintura como construção de uma persona

Frida Kahlo tornou-se um ícone, um mito, uma mania, assim como a sua obra passou a ser reconhecida e celebrada mundialmente. Sua arte revela sua sensibilidade e, também, o sofrimento de seu corpo tragicamente mutilado, após o acidente que determinou sua vida inteira. O principal questionamento nesse trabalho é como podemos compreender o processo de pintura/escrita/vida de Frida Kahlo e de Virginia Woolf, como um processo de construção de uma persona, que está intrinsicamente ligada à sua pintura e à ficcionalização de seu diário, de modo a determinar uma das facetas que gostaria de mostrar ao público. Ao longo do trabalho, a intenção é aproximar Frida Kahlo da escritora Virginia Woolf, percebendo de que modo elas convergem e se distanciam. Enquanto mulheres e artistas ambas estavam revolucionando a cena artística e literária de seu país e deixaram marcas profundas que hoje impactam muitas mulheres em todo mundo. Em relação à fortuna crítica sobre Frida Kahlo, o trabalho conta com os pressupostos de Herrera (1991), Lowe (2005), Stellweg (1992), Toro (2013), Franco (2007). Sobre a construção da imagem de Virginia Woolf, o trabalho está baseado nas concepções de Jane Marcus (1987), Brenda Silver (1999) em Virginia Woolf, an Icon.

QUESTÕES DE AUTORIA FEMININA NO CONTO “THE CROP”, DE FLANNERY O’CONNOR

O presente trabalho busca analisar “The Crop”(1947), ou “A colheita”(2008), um dos primeiros contos da carreira literária de Flannery O'Connor. Essa narrativa faz parte da dissertação de mestrado em escrita criativa de O’Connor e, curiosamente, desenvolve o tema da mulher escritora. Os esforços de Miss Willerton, a protagonista, em refletir sobre seu fazer literário são sempre interrompidos com preocupações cotidianas e mundanas. A função doméstica esperada da mulher sulista, mesmo no século XX, é sempre imposta e lembrada a Miss Willerton, e portanto, mesmo não sendo casada e não possuindo filhos, ela não consegue se libertar de seu papel de “anjo do lar” para se dedicar inteiramente à escrita. Outros empecilhos enfrentados pela protagonista são a falta de recursos financeiros (problema este comum a muitas escritoras e descrito por Virginia Woolf em Um teto todo seu) e sua falta de experiência de vida, já que até suas leituras são censuradas pela família. Desse modo, com base em Elaine Showalter (1986), Sarah Gordon (2003) e Virginia Woolf (2013), propomos analisar o conto em questão não apenas como uma narrativa irônica que debocha de uma aspirante a escritora que não consegue realmente produzir um texto, mas como uma representação dos principais problemas enfrentados pelas mulheres que almejavam a carreira literária em sociedades patriarcais e ocidentais.