Responsables de l’atelier
Anne BESNAULT (Université de Rouen Normandie)
Naomi TOTH (Université Paris Nanterre)
Besnault, Anne, Université de Rouen – Normandie, anne.besnault@univ-rouen.fr
Virginia Woolf’s literary and cultural “theory” of “influence”: from negotiation to emancipation
Much attention has been paid to the figures who influenced Woolf and to those she later inspired. Yet Woolf’s own articulation of what “influence” means has been given less attention. One of the key terms in her critical vocabulary, “influence” is deployed frequently in her essays and with a range of complex, often ambivalent implications. The influences Woolf observes and examines are cultural, political, national, ideological, and material; they are, as she writes, “infinitely numerous” (“The Leaning Tower”, 1940). In her critical essays, factors such as memory and tradition, money, facts, religion, education, experience, “peace and prosperity”, “change and the threat of war”, and the “formation of independent opinions” may all “affect” – a verb that frequently operates with the semantic field of influence – human character and relationships, creative practices, the reading and writing of books, as well as literary and cultural history. These influences may operate “consciously” or “unconsciously”: “Writers are heard to complain that influences – education, heredity, theory – are given weight of which they themselves are unconscious in the act of creation” (“Phases of Fiction”, 1927); they may be “interested” or “disinterested”. Above all, Woolf distinguishes between influences that sustain forms of oppression and those that enable forms of emancipation: “the right to vote, in itself by no means negligible, was mysteriously connected with another right of such immense value to the daughters of educated men that almost every word in the dictionary has been changed by it, including the word ‘influence’” (Three Guineas, 1938).
This paper pursues three related objectives. It first analyses Woolf’s uses of the term “influence” as a semantic network that underpins her feminist literary and cultural histories. It then explores how Woolf’s conception of “influence” is informed by, departs from, and anticipates those of both her forebears and successors. Finally, the paper contends that Woolf’s gendered notion of “influence” articulates emancipation as a process of negotiation and action.
Eldridge, Nina, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, nina.melanie.eldridge@gmail.com
Joyce’s Embodied Perceptions as an Emancipation from the Dominance of the Visual
Focusing mainly on Ulysses, this paper explores how the embodied perceptions portrayed in James Joyce’s work propose an emancipation from the dominance of the visual in conceptions of the subject’s sensory relationship to their environment. In the essay “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Martin Jay defines Cartesian perspectivalism as, “what is normally claimed to be the dominant, even totally hegemonic, visual mode of the modem era, that which we can identify with […] Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy.”1 Within this Cartesian paradigm, the subject is positioned as an abstracted observer, disembodied and situated in an immaterial notional point of observation. Joyce’s literary explorations of embodied perception challenge this model, presenting forms of experience that surpass the “ineluctable modality of the visual.”2 Narratives of polysensorial immersion expand and enrich the spatial experience of the subject beyond the visual realm, offering a more dynamic and holistic understanding of perception. This paper draws from studies of the senses in human geography (particularly regarding ecological perception) and also follows several phenomenological approaches to Joyce’s work that have underscored its divergence from a Cartesian paradigm (supported most notably by Cleo Hanaway-Oakley’s work) and also engages with Emma-Louise Silva’s recent work on Joyce and the 4E model of cognition.
Frigo, Emma, Université Grenoble Alpes, Université Paris Nanterre, emma.frigo10@gmail.com
Each one individually must revolt: Henry Miller’s emancipatory individualism.
“I see that at no matter what stage of evolution or devolution, no matter what the conditions, the climate, the weather, no matter whether there be peace or war, ignorance or culture, idolatry or spirituality,” writes Henry Miller in his 1940 essay The World of Sex, “there is only and always the struggle of the individual, his triumph or defeat, his emancipation or enslavement, his liberation or liquidation.” (96-97) The author here distinctly emphasizes one’s individuality, and in doing so purposefully disregards the conditions or circumstances surrounding said individual; this process extends to discussions of the individual’s “emancipation or enslavement,” in wording that interestingly omits any mention of a dialectical other whom the individual must emancipate from. This rhetorical device is characteristic of Miller’s outlook, as his works proceed to articulate emancipation as the act of freeing oneself not from an other, but rather from a system —more specifically the rationalized and capitalistic system of modern America in which his protagonist feels dehumanized and stifled. One’s search for freedom is thus envisioned via attempts to subvert, evade or oppose such a system – attempts that are necessarily, according to the writer’s paradigm, solitary: for change to come, his narrator expresses, “Each one individually must revolt against a way of life which is not his own” (The Colossus of Maroussi, 68). These attempts are, however, met with many obstacles related to their inherent anchoring within that very system, be they the protagonist’s effective dependency on other individuals or communities, or literary constraints pertaining to the writer’s characteristically modern(ist) aesthetics. This presentation, through analyses of both Miller’s fictional and non-fictional writings, thus sets out to delineate the intricate relationship of emancipation and individualism as well as its social and formal environments within the writer’s works.
Hentea, Marius, Université de Poitiers, marius.mihai.hentea@univ-poitiers.fr
Eminent Emancipators: Lytton Strachey and the Form of Royal Biography
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921) redefined the contours of life-writing (Altick 1995). This paper seeks to position Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria as a pointed political tract issued at a time of great uncertainty regarding the future of monarchy as a viable political regime. Steeped in tradition and inherently conservative as a regime type, monarchy sits uneasily with the experimental thrust of modernist experimentation. While Strachey follows in a long line of polemical and satirical critics of monarchy (Paine, Twain), his work also rehabilitates the British royal family and seeks to create a different kind of emancipation for its readers: not so much political release from the grips of monarchy but rather a philosophical and aesthetic delight in the vagaries and strangeness of that venerable form.
This paper examines Queen Victoria not only as a statement piece to emancipate public morals from stuffy Victorianism but also as a work documenting the pressures on the British monarchy in the inter-war period. Strachey’s biography lifts the lid on the Bagehotian ‘magic’ of royalty, with the misfit biographer publicizing what others felt pressured to conceal, namely, ‘this washing of dirty linen in Buckingham Palace’ (67). Yet for all its delight in scandal and eccentricity, the true subject of Strachey’s book is not Victoria but rather the series of men who stamped their character upon the impressionable queen, from Albert to Lord Melbourne to Disraeli. Strachey is at pains to understand how Victoria came to such revered prominence for her subjects given her many faults and shortcomings. But in that way, Strachey also points to what Bagehot called the true function of monarchy: to serve as a symbol uniting the nation, sanctified by tradition, sacred associations, venerable antiquity and spectacular show. For all his literary and stylistic innovations in life-writing, Strachey is unable to break the spell of the monarch’s majesty – and thus shows to his contemporaries that emancipation in political terms is no straightforward manner. The paper thus seeks to understand how the literary representation of monarchy in the modernist period was both critical and dismissive of such an outdated regime form but also retained a kind of undiminished enthusiasm for what monarchy meant in British life.
Janus, Adrienne, Université de Tours, adrienne.janus@univ-tours.fr
Laughtears: Enstatic Emancipation in Modernist Literature and Theatre
This paper investigates scenes of unsettling laughter and tears performed in modernist literature and theatre, examining how these embodied responses mark moments of radical transition when language fails, as well as of possible emancipation from what Joyce called the “nets of language and nationality,” and what Beckett might have called “semantic slavery.” Building on the works of Helmuth Plessner and Peter Sloterdijk, this analysis shifts the focus of analysis, and the site of emancipation, from language (and its inadequacy) to the body and its performative response. I argue that laughter and weeping constitute an opening and liberation from discursive, conceptual or physical situations of confinement, functioning as the body’s response to “limit conditions” where the mind can no longer act or express, and when the body responds in its place, “no longer as an instrument for gesture or action, but merely as a body.” Drawing on Plessner’s philosophy—which characterizes laughter by openness and weeping by closure—the paper reorients the study of these affective states toward a spatial ontology of the body suitable for Joyce’s radical experimentation with the performative, embodied materialities of writing, and Beckett’s experimentation on the theatrical stage. Through close readings in particular of female laughter and tears in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and in Beckett’s theatre (Endgame, Happy Days, and Not I), I demonstrate how laughter produces the body’s presence and capacity for opening and liberation amidst extreme enclosure, an enstatic, rather than ecstatic, modernist emancipation.
Podvin, Virginie, Université de Brest, virginiepodvin@yahoo.fr
Samuel Beckett, reviviscence, dépassement et émancipation de la querelle Anciens / Modernes Le rapport au sens dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett est complexe. La répétition, au cœur de Sans, du mot « sans » – soixante fois dans le texte –, est signe d’une œuvre qui bâtit, de manière aléatoire, un sens en ruines. Cette perte de sens est inhérente à l’époque depuis laquelle Beckett écrit, celle d’un siècle meurtri par la succession de deux guerres mondiales définies de la sorte par Blanchot, dans L’Écriture du désastre (1980) : « évènements absolus de l’histoire, historiquement datés, cette toute-brûlure où toute l’histoire s’est embrasée, où le mouvement du Sens s’est abîmé »1, celle d’un siècle dont l’horreur est signe d’une transcendance qui ne répond plus et que Beckett réfute au cœur de Godot : « Godot lui- même n’est pas d’une autre espèce que ceux qu’il ne peut ou ne veut pas aider » (Lettre à Carlheinz Caspari, Lettres, vol. II, 1941-1956). Pour autant, cette perte de sens ne signifie pas « échec » chez Samuel Beckett. Elle est, de manière paradoxale, la condition même de la liberté d’une écriture et d’une œuvre dont la critique, à l’instar de John Calder, saluera et la modernité et la singularité. Aux yeux de John Calder, en effet (The philosophy of Samuel Beckett, 2001), Beckett parachève, synthétise et appose le point final à la trajectoire de la modernité européenne – Proust – Joyce – Kafka. Cela étant dit, l’étude la correspondance révèle, de manière étonnante, que si l’acte créateur de Samuel Beckett rime avec un oubli certain des normes culturelles héritées – figure de chantre des Modernes oblige –, l’auteur s’en revendique pourtant dans un même mouvement. Samuel Beckett, reviviscence, dépassement et émancipation de la querelle Anciens / Modernes.
Tadié, Benoît, Université Paris Nanterre, btadie@parisnanterre.fr
Americanization as Emancipation in British Noir Fiction of the Interwar Period
In her 1938 essay “America Which I Have Never Seen Interests Me Most in This Cosmopolitan World of To-Day,” Virginia Woolf wrote: “But what, if you have never been to America, does America mean to you? What does it look like, and the Americans themselves – what are they like? These are questions that the English marooned on their island are always asking of Imagination.” As Genevieve Abravanel, who quotes these lines in Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire, points out, literary modernism in Britain “reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America” and was often characterized by a “backward gaze” which emerged “through the dramatic upheavals of the Anglo-American relationship and the pervasive fashion in which it changed the meaning of modernity.”
This paper will address the ways in which early British noir, considered as a form of lowbrow modernism, developed as a response to Woolf’s question about how authors “marooned on their island” imagined America and Americans in the inter-war period. It will argue that, as against the cultural establishment’s insular recoil and “backward gaze” when confronted with the sudden rise to power of American mass culture, crime writers such as Edgar Wallace, James Ronald, Gerald Butler and James Hadley Chase, and periodicals such as The Thriller (1929-1940), reinvented a modernist version of crime fiction that was very much
characterized by a transatlantic “forward gaze.” But, in adopting and adapting the outlook of
American pulp magazines, hardboiled novels and early gangster movies, these authors and
periodicals did not so much duplicate transatlantic models as use them dialogically, finding in
them an emancipatory language with which to counter traditional British literary norms and
the social values they embodied.
Toth, Naomi, Université Paris Nanterre, ntoth@parisnanterre.fr
The Paradox of the Outsider: on not organizing emancipation in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.
Woolf’s essays and fiction addressing patriarchy and tyranny highlight the capacities of the excluded, notably women, to perceive and analyze power structures within society and develop alternate social and aesthetic practices and values. This observation is the starting point for exploring Woolf’s ambivalence towards collective political organization. While she suggests the upturning of patriarchy might arise from considering women’s experience on a collective scale and encouraging their gatherings, organizing collective action is consistently treated with suspicion in her work. This ambivalence, incarnated in Three Guineas’ proposition of forming an Outsiders’ Society, may be read as a refusal to reproduce the structures of a society ridden by domination. This reticence to organize has been critiqued however, most famously by Susan Sontag, who interprets Woolf’s lack of explicit stance on the Spanish Civil War, whose images punctuate Three Guineas, as failure to grasp the stakes of the conflict. And indeed, practices of individual, private refusal may well seem inadequate when faced with rising patriarchal and fascist violence. I will argue that Woolf’s Outsider’s Society might productively be read in light of two intersecting tensions in Three Guineas, between utopia and pragmatism on the one hand, and between moral and material strategies on the other. What emerges is less a rejection of collective organization than a cautionary celebration of the epistemologically generative position of the outsider, in which dissidence becomes a foundational value for any emancipatory vision of society.