De la correspondance à The Voyage Out : Portrait de Virginia Woolf en jeune femme de lettres

La correspondance woolfienne des années 1904-1915 offre une occasion unique d'analyser les relations entre épistolarité et création romanesque car elle s'écrit en même temps que la première fiction The Voyage Out. Seul exutoire aux sentiments de la jeune écrivaine, la correspondance se fait l'écho à la fois de son désir de faire œuvre de romancier et de ses premières intuitions modernistes. Elle est le lieu de croisement du journalistique, de l'auto/biographique et de la fiction et permet d'entrevoir le lien entre genèse de soi en tant que femme et genèse auctoriale. La lettre est un espace parfois ludique parfois dramatique, propédeutique à l'écriture romanesque qui entretient avec elle une rivalité mimétique des plus fertile. La lecture croisée des lettres et de The Voyage Out révèle les affinités entre les deux textes où esthétique du fragment et éthique sociale de la conversation dominent : la correspondance n'est pas seulement le laboratoire de l'œuvre romanesque, elle anticipe et annonce les fulgurances modernistes des années 1920

From mood to movement: English nationalism, the European Union and taking back control

This article considers whether the 2016 EU referendum can be perceived as an English nationalist movement. Specifically, attention is given to examining how memories of the former British Empire were nostalgically enveloped in anxieties regarding England’s location within the devolved UK state. The comments and work of Enoch Powell and George Orwell are used to help explore the link between nostalgia and anxiety in accounts of English nationalism. Despite their opposing political orientations, when considered together, it is argued that both men provide a unique cross-political perspective on Englishness, empire and nostalgia. By way of exploring these themes in relation to the EU referendum, Aughey’s assertion that English nationalism can be perceived as both a ‘mood’ and ‘movement’ is used to highlight how a sense of English anxiety regarding its lack of national sovereignty (mood), as well as a desire to reclaim this sovereignty by renegotiating trade relations with the ‘Anglo-sphere’ (movement), were conjoined in the popular referendum slogan, ‘take back control’. In conclusion, it is argued that the contextualization of the referendum can be predicated upon an orientation to empire that steers away from glorifying pro-imperial images of England/Britain, towards a more positive and progressive appropriation of the EU referendum as a statement of national change and belonging

Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan ou le récit de voyage comme autoportrait d’une aventurière engagée

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan est bien plus que le simple récit par Isabella Bird de sa découverte du Japon : c’est aussi celui de son envie de sortir des sentiers battus, de la vie toute tracée à laquelle la société la prédestinait en Angleterre. Avec ce récit, Bird s’engage sur des voies inédites à la fois littérairement parlant (esthétique) et politiquement parlant (éthique). La forme épistolaire est le vecteur idéal de sa quête de l’autre, qui prend le lecteur à témoin et la lie à lui par un pacte sans cesse renouvelé au fil des pages. Le récit pose également la question de l’identité du scripteur, femme exceptionnelle qui se veut exemplaire et prétend à l’universalité, n’hésitant pas à remettre en question les conventions sociales et littéraires de son temps. Le voyage et son récit sont tout entiers tendus vers la rencontre avec le peuple aïnou, opprimé par les Japonais. L’ouverture à l’autre n’exclut pas une dramatisation de soi et s’accompagne d’une porosité entre espace public et espace privé et d’une oscillation permanente entre acceptation et rejet de la différence, des peuples rencontrés et de l’idéologie impérialiste patriarcale et colonialiste.Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is much more than just Isabella Bird’s account of her discovery of Japan; it is also the story of a woman who wanted to break free from the constraints imposed upon her at home by a stifling, patriarchal society. Bird chose to explore unbeaten tracks both literally speaking and figuratively speaking as her travel account plays with the conventions of the genre. The epistolary form of her narrative proved an ideal medium to engage her readers’ attention, sustained throughout the book by the author’s pledge to deliver novelty and adventure. Although committed to describing the “real Japan”, Bird sometimes gives in to the temptation to romanticize and most often it is her own self she fictionalizes. The narrative does not just narrate her encounter with the Other (either the Japanese people or the Aino people), it is also a kind of autofiction whereby Bird ponders over her role as a woman, as an adventurer and as a writer. The initial pretext of the expedition gives way to an ethnographic account of Bird’s encounter with the Aino people, native to the Northern Island of Yezo and oppressed by the Japanese forces. The text hovers between two different kinds of rhetoric, that of identification and similarity and that of differentiation and difference

Jean Rhys’s Smile Please: Re/De constructing identity through autobiography and photography

Smile Please is puzzling in many regards: because it was unfinished, partly dictated and because it presents an odd assemblage of fragments barely revised and of a photo album which stands as a kind of hinge between the revised part and the unfinished fragments. The purpose of this article is to consider the generic indeterminacy of the text and to ponder over the function of photographs in autobiography as we try to make sense of the link (or absence of link) between text and image. We shall see whether the lack of construction is not perhaps the best means to fully grasp the genius of and the identity of the nascent writer. This autobiographical triptych therefore seems to flaunt its lack of construction the better to hint at the constructedness of any identity and of Rhys’s in particular: the photographs mentioned in her texts as ekphrasis, or contained in the album help us reach an understanding of Rhys’ own stance about autobiographical and photographic representation

Joanny Moulin, Yannick Gouchan et Nguyen Phuong Ngoc (dir.), Études biographiques : la biographie au carrefour des humanités

Les études biographiques connaissent depuis quelques années un regain d’intérêt, en France comme à l’étranger, et le dynamisme de ce champ d’étude se mesure à l’aune des très nombreuses publications qui lui sont consacrées, ouvrages collectifs ou analyses in extenso, phénomène que François Dosse qualifiait récemment d’ « explosion biographique ». L’ouvrage de 247 pages dont il est question ici, participe de cette vitalité incontestable et ajoute une pierre fondamentale à l’édifice déjà conséq..

Auto/biographies familiales Introduction à la Revue

International audienc

« "Souriez, s’il vous plaît" de Jean Rhys : l’originalité du texte des origines ou le récit d’enfance en question. »

International audienceSmile, Please is a very atypical text, in more ways than one: the fact that it was written in collaboration, its eminently fragmentary nature and the apparent lack of consistency between its different parts seem to preclude the emergence of a truly Rhysian identity. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely the gaps, the inconsistencies and the omissions in the text that help authenticate it. The aim of this article is to show how the cross-fertilization between text, photography and ekphrasis helps turn the childhood narrative into the privileged site of the expression of Rhys’s complex identity as a woman, as a writer and especially as an autobiographer.Souriez, s’il vous plaît est une autobiographie atypique à bien des égards : par sa rédaction collaborative problématique, par sa forme éminemment fragmentaire, et en raison du manque de cohérence apparent entre ses différentes parties. Il s’agit de tenter de voir en quoi les spécificités de ce texte permettent ou non de voir émerger une identité rhysienne originale et authentique et de voir en quoi la fertilisation croisée du texte, des photographies ou de l’ekphrasis font, notamment du récit d’enfance, le site d’une exploration identitaire complexe de Rhys en tant que femme, écrivaine et autobiographe en particulier

COSTE Bénédicte, Catherine DELYFER and Christine REYNIER, eds., Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism. Continuities, Revisions, Speculations

The purpose of this volume, as clearly stated in the title, is to bridge the theoretical gap existing between aestheticism and modernism. The three editors themselves are specialists of both movements and this volume may be read as an effort to transcend categories and stereotypes and see the transition between the nineteenth century and the twentieth as a cross-fertilizing move rather than as a divide, in the literary, artistic, philosophical and economic spheres. The introduction to the vol..

Eminent Victorians: Outrageous Strachey? The Indecent Exposure of Victorian Characters and Mores

There was a consensus at the time Eminent Victorians was published (1918) to welcome it as a groundbreaking study of Victorian character and mores. The book was as much the result of personal outrage on Strachey’s part as it was the result of the spirit of the times. But Strachey’s attitude towards the Victorians was perhaps not as straightforward and simple as it seemed. Indeed he was very much torn between outrage at their earnestness, hypocrisy and attitude to life in general and a kind of sympathetic deference for some of their representatives. This article explores this fertile paradox: far from condemning his biographees to the limbo of oblivion, his four biographical essays granted them eternal life and fame. Eminent Victorians launched a new biographical hero, between caricature, stereotypes and a surprisingly new psychological insight into the human psyche. This article also assesses to what extent his vision revolutionized not just the ethos of the times but also the genre of biography An experiment in style written from a slightly cynical point of view it ended up revolutionizing the art of biography thanks to its inspirational preface and to its rhetorics. A blend of satire, irony and iconoclasm, it is teeming with metaphors and hyperboles, which have become the hallmark of the author’s wit. Strachey was a man caught between his sympathies and dislikes, torn between classicism and romanticism, but in the end a forerunner of modernist theories and art and Eminent Victorians is an apt reminder that outrage is an essential component of art

Virginia Woolf’s ‘raids across boundaries’: Biography vs Photography

On pourrait dire de la biographie et de la photographie qu’elles furent les deux mamelles de Virginia Woolf, née dans un milieu artistique et intellectuel ou la pratique de l’une et de l’autre furent fondamentales. Ses deux essais sur la biographie témoignent de son intérêt et de sa fascination pour la photographie, champ nouveau de la représentation de la vie que Woolf cherchait à révolutionner. Il s’agira ici de voir à quel point la révolution biographique se nourrit des réflexions de Woolf sur la photographie, et en quoi ses essais théoriques informèrent sa pratique de la biographie et de la photographie. Orlando et Flush, les deux biographies subversives, font un usage fantaisiste et ludique de portraits et de photographies, en accord avec la théorie de la « Nouvelle Biographie » rédigée par Woolf en 1927. Roger Fry (1940) en revanche, revient à une vision plus traditionnelle et moins créative de la biographie et de la photographie, exprimée conjointement dans le dernier essai de Woolf sur ‘L’Art de la biographie’.Virginia Woolf’s legacy was both photographic and biographical, she inherited her father’s interest in biography and her great-aunt’s fascination for photography and welded those interests all along her career as a novelist, biographer and theoretician. ‘The New Biography’, the 1927 article by she meant to revolutionize biography, expresses the advent of the new genre in terms which are laden with visual metaphors and seems to equate the task of the new biographer with the task of the photographer. In 1938 however, with ‘The Art of Biography’, Woolf reverted to a more pessimistic vision of photography, one that confined it to the realm of inaccurate and fallacious representation. In short, the great biographer had the genius of the painter, the bad biographer merely conveyed a photographic likeness, a semblance of personality. I shall argue that this change in attitude towards photography was in fact linked to the biographical practice of Woolf at the time she wrote her essays. Orlando and Flush illustrate the fascination felt by Woolf for photography whose representative potential she playfully experimented with in her subversive texts, whereas Roger Fry and her use of photographs as illustrations probably derived from a more derogatory conception of photography as mimetic and superficial representation