W O O L F IN THE REAL WORLD

Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts June 5-8, 2003

CALL FOR PAPERS

With a nod to Alex Zwerdling for the conference theme, the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf will draw attention to the ways Woolf engaged the "real world" of her time and the ways her legacy continues to engage "real world" issues now. Presentations may focus on the public dimensions of Woolf's career as a writer, journalist, publisher, teacher, and on her relationship to activism, the environment, society, politics, institutions, nation, and the world. We invite proposals for individual papers, 3-person (70-minute) panels, performances, readings, and multi-media presentations. Particularly welcome is work addressing:

FICTION AND WRITING THE REAL WORLD

• The sensual Woolf and writing: food, fashion, music, gardens, walking, "moments of being"
  
• Fiction and fact: impact of scientific theory on the world of fiction
  
• Space: travel and writing; writing the land; Woolf as spectator
  
• Time: narrative, historical, anthropological; notions of reality: impact of dreams on Woolf's fiction
  
• Interiority: as path to history; rethinking biographies by and about Woolf
  
• "Priming the Pump": letters, diaries, conversations, and the creation of fiction
  

BOOK AND BODY

• Woolf's body/mind connections: creativity and illness; creative places, spaces, relationships, activities
  
• Woolf's afterlife: working with manuscripts; Woolf's influence on later writers and small publishers
  
• Hogarth Press: books as bodies, objects, commodities; interplay of text and image; author-publishers; Woolf's revisions and self-censorship; Leonard's role as Virginia's editor and literary executor
  
• Woolf as tradeswoman: typesetting, binding, the physical labor of publishing; marketing modernism

WOOLF AND THE LIVES OF WOMEN

• Domestic arrangements; representations of working women in Woolf's work
  
• Women and education: Woolf as reader/theorist of reading; role of libraries; study of languages
  
• Women and professions: financial independence; Woolf as teacher, reviewer, essayist, editor, translator
  
• Woolf and activism: feminism, pacifism, anti-colonialism; Woolf and the law: marriage and inheritance; Woolf and social conventions: family expectations, female friendships
  
• Woolf's ongoing influence on everyday life: sexual and political liberation; women's studies programs; popular culture
  
• Woolf's strategies for negotiating patriarchal notions of women: humor, satire, confrontation
  
• Autobiography: writing a woman's life; the many faces and facets of Woolf; role of memory in memoirs
  

ECONOMY AND EMPIRE

• Bloomsbury and race/ethnicity; class dialectics
  
• Influence of Woolf's family, husband, and friends on her writing and philosophy
  
• Bloomsbury and imperialism: representations of others
  
• Economies of the body/bodies as commodities; Woolf and economists and economies
  
• Woolf in war and in peace
  

Deadline for 250-word proposals was January 15, 2003. Acceptances will be sent at the end of February. 

Format: Cover sheet with title of paper, name(s) and affiliation(s) of participant(s) and email and surface mail address; accompanied by 12 copies of proposal with title but no name(s). Panel proposals need a 250-word description of EACH participant's contribution. Send 3 copies of proposals for creative work. Please state audio-visual and computer needs. Send to: Virginia Woolf Conference, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063 U.S.A.

For information contact: Stephanie Cooper Schoen, conference co-chair (sschoen@smith.edu), (413) 585-2680.

Conference website: www.smith.edu/woolfconference/