Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Issue 89, Spring 2016 and Issue 90, Fall 2017
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NUMBERS 89 and 90 SPRING 2016 AND FALL 2016 ISSUE 89, SPRING 2016 Read the VWM online on Wordpress! ISSUE 90, FALL 2016 TRULY MISCELLANEOUS <https://virginiawoolfmiscellany.wordpress. VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ILLNESS EDITOR: DIANA L. SWANSON com/> GUEST EDITOR: CHERYL HINDRICHS To the Readers: – TABLE of CONTENTS – To the Readers: I hope that, like me, you—dear reader—will See page 12 On Being Ill. “Is that a user’s guide?” This question, find these essays and reviews interesting and International Virginia Woolf or a clever variation on it, became a familiar refrain worthwhile confirmations of the continuing Society Column when the elegant Paris Press edition’s cover, vitality of Woolf’s writings and of Woolf studies. See page 68 conspicuously abandoned on my bed table, caught Having spent much of my scholarly career reading (continues on page 67) the eye of one of the many nurses or phlebotomists and writing about Woolf, I find myself from IVWS Officers and Members-at-Large who rotated through my ward over four weeks— time to time returning to Woolf’s warning about See page 67 weeks coinciding with what should have been my participating in the kind of scholarship which –EVENTS, INFO and CFPs– rereading of Woolf’s 1926 On Being Ill (OBI) as produces “the seventieth study of Keats and his MLA 2017 in Philadelphia well as the impressive range of essays which you use of Miltonic inversion” (A Room of One’s Own See page 3 may now also read at your leisure in the second 118). Beginning in the 1970s, feminist scholars Louisville Conference section of this double issue of the Miscellany, have turned Woolf from a minor modernist See page 3 whether “in the army of the upright” or “lying into a canonical one. A simple search of the 27th Annual Conference on recumbent” (OBI 12-13), and certainly with the MLA International Bibliography using “Woolf, Virginia Woolf: reassurance that pants provide. The truth was Virginia” as the search term comes up with 6,337 and the World of Books (and “illness is the great confessional” [OBI 11]), hits (as of December 21, 2016). The same type of see page 4 although that was my intent, and its presence on 28th Annual Conference on search using “Joyce, James” brings 11,837 hits, the valuable real estate of the bed table certainly Virginia Woolf so it seems that we Woolfians have not overdone was an incentive, I didn’t quite get around to Woolf, Europe and Peace our author as much as the Joyceans! Nevertheless, see page 4 rereading Woolf’s essay while in hospital that first one would “need to be a herd of elephants […] month. With the hubris of the ill and without “the and a wilderness of spiders […] to cope with all About the Virginia Woolf Miscellany cautious respectability [that] health conceals” (OBI [the Woolf-related items]” (AROO 34) pulled up Editorial note: 11), I felt at that point I could sing the thing. I had by an MLA search. Woolf’s own words caution us While previously published work may the unfortunate habit of quoting it at visitors and to avoid using our intellectual energy and talents be submitted for consideration, both the rare hospitalist calls—sometimes drawing on simply to repeat and maintain an elitist cultural the original publication and any other Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to consider the hierarchy.Virginia To join the “procession of educated Woolfversions of it must be acknowledged Miscellany and metaphor of citizenship that both authors explore— cited in the text at the time of submission. men” (Three Guineas passim) without replicating “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in see page 6 for Editorial Policies their ways has been my ambition since I quoted the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the Three Guineas in my graduate school application Upcoming Issues, sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good essays. So are we saying something new and Special Topics & CFPs passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at worthwhile when we indite, edit, and publish new For detailed CFPs for Issues #92-94, least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of studies of Virginia Woolf? see page 11 that other place” (Sontag 3). The essays published in VWM 89 do, I Issue #92--Fall 2017: Although both Woolf and Sontag see illness as a believe, contribute worthwhile insights into our Virginia Woolf and Indigenous Literatures change in citizenship, Sontag’s essay seems at odds Editor: Kristin Czarnecki understanding of Woolf and our understanding of with Woolf’s (and Sontag’s own) opening gambit, the value of literary study in the age of electronic <kristin_czarnecki@georgetowncollege. edu> which goes on to claim to describe “not physical communication, “big data,” STEM-focused illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure education, globalization, and (dare I say it) the Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2017 or metaphor” (3). Woolf’s essay both describes recent electoral successes around the world of Issue #93--Spring 2018: what Sontag rejects—“what it is really like to populist demagogues like Trump. In this regard, emigrate to the kingdom of the ill” (Sontag 3)—and I should mention Madelyn Detloff’s important Woolf, Bloomsbury, and biofiction Guest Editors: encourages both writers and readers to reconsider new book The Value of Woolf (Cambridge UP, Michael Lackey & Todd Avery illness’s conventional narrative paradigms. For 2016); you can watch a video of Professor <[email protected]> and Woolf the experience of illness is always mediated Detloff explaining the kernel of her book, that <[email protected]> by discourse and metaphor—there is no “illness Woolf offers rich resources for exploring the big Deadline for submissions: itself” apart from language, and it is an experience questions of how to live well and creatively in our July 15, 2017 that exposes the limitations of existing discourse troubled world, at this link: <https://www.youtube. Issue #94--Fall 2018: and invites new figurations: in other words, to com/watch?v=PKBlV3Zcu2Q&feature=youtu. Almost a Century: Reading Jacob’s Room make and to see it new. A close reading, like Lynne be>. In ways that affirm Detloff’s perspective on Alexandra DeLuise <[email protected]> Mijangos’s in this issue, reveals that Woolf’s essay Woolf, the essays in this issue develop themes of Deadline for submissions: August 31, 2017 calls for a reexamination of On Being Ill in the identity, power, oppression, creativity, cultural same spirit that we’ve returned so productively difference, aesthetics, history, and the body and Queries? Contact Vara Neverow underscore Woolf’s theory and practice of the <[email protected]> Cheryl Hindrichs’ Introduction to Woolf and creative word. Illness continues on page 44, column 2. 1 Several of the essays in this issue explicitly discuss the value of writing and reading as creative activities in our daily lives. In “Where Are the zzz Diarists Who Look Like Me?,” Angela Hooks writes of how her diary is “a place of healing, refuge, memory keeping, reaching, creating”; she finds both connection with and distance from Woolf and searches for her black foremothers in diary writing. Janine Utell focuses on how Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, used writing, reading, and mountaineering as Many thanks to the International Virginia Woolf manly consolations while mourning the deaths of his wives. Kaylee Society for its generous and continuing support Baucom brings the discussion back to the United States and across class of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. to discuss the value of teaching Woolf in community college classrooms. = In “The Title of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” Joel Hawkes emphasizes the multiple meanings of the title and how it underlines the invitation—or perhaps even the demand—Woolf’s novel makes to/of the reader’s own creativity. These four essays touch on significant themes of identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and class in Woolf’s writing. Jessica S. Y. Yeung writes about class, cultural legacies, and the cultural work of Hyde VIRGINIA WOOLF MISCELLANY Park Gate News and The Charleston Bulletin, the home “newspapers” EDITORIAL BOARD that Woolf created with her siblings and her nephew respectively. Yeung CURRENT EDITORS suggests that through these private writing endeavors Woolf assimilated Kristin Czarnecki, Georgetown College important lessons about aesthetics and “literary production, reproduction, <[email protected]> and consumption” while growing up in her upper-middle-class Jeanne Dubino, Appalachian State University household, and both repeated and revised those lessons in her middle age <[email protected]> through her collaboration with her young nephew, Quentin Bell. Mark Hussey, Pace University <[email protected]> In turn, Molly Hoff shows us that we have more to learn about Woolf’s use of allusions to the Western cultural mainstream in which she came Vara Neverow, Southern Connecticut State University <[email protected]> of age (in this case, allusions to Shakespeare and classical mythology in Mrs. Dalloway), while Victor Vargas points us beyond the Aegean Merry Pawlowski, California State University-Bakersfield to the south and east—to Africa and India—to understand Woolf’s <[email protected]> ongoing development of an aesthetic that might free her creativity to Diana L. Swanson, Northern Illinois University move beyond the patriarchal and imperialist nature of Western culture. <[email protected]> Mark Hussey takes us beyond the Aegean in another way in his “Report BOOK REVIEW EDITOR from the Third Korean Conference on Virginia Woolf.” He reports on Karen Levenback exciting work being done by scholars in Korea, China, and Japan and on <[email protected]> the vibrant atmosphere at the conference, a sign of the development of “planetary culture.” Derek Ryan’s essay concerns the significance of a place closer to home for Woolf: Canterbury, where the 2018 Woolf conference will convene.