This essay brings Rosi Braidotti’s recent writing on the Anthropocene into dialogue with Woolf’s writing on climate in her novel Orlando (1928). As critics are beginning to notice, Woolf’s novel presents the reader with vicissitudes in ‘the English climate’ that parallel Orlando’s own personal transformations, presenting itself as an early outlier of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’). Less remarked upon is the radical understanding of materialism that informs Woolf’s presentation of the interrelation between human life and broader nonhuman entities and systems. This article reads Woolf’s material ontology, in which humans, weather systems and environments are irreversibly entangled, alongside Braidotti’s ‘monistic approach to subjectivity’, arguing that in both we find a similar attempt to articulate a non-anthropocentric worldview which nonetheless remains alert to political and ethical issues within human society. Showing how Woolf actively historicizes the Anthropocene in Orlando, I contend that not only can Braidotti’s work help to articulate Woolf’s materialism, but that Woolf’s attention to the sexual politics of climate change provides depth to Braidotti’s posthuman feminism.
{"title":"The Climate of Orlando: Woolf, Braidotti and the Anthropocene","authors":"Peter Adkins","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0444","url":null,"abstract":"This essay brings Rosi Braidotti’s recent writing on the Anthropocene into dialogue with Woolf’s writing on climate in her novel Orlando (1928). As critics are beginning to notice, Woolf’s novel presents the reader with vicissitudes in ‘the English climate’ that parallel Orlando’s own personal transformations, presenting itself as an early outlier of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’). Less remarked upon is the radical understanding of materialism that informs Woolf’s presentation of the interrelation between human life and broader nonhuman entities and systems. This article reads Woolf’s material ontology, in which humans, weather systems and environments are irreversibly entangled, alongside Braidotti’s ‘monistic approach to subjectivity’, arguing that in both we find a similar attempt to articulate a non-anthropocentric worldview which nonetheless remains alert to political and ethical issues within human society. Showing how Woolf actively historicizes the Anthropocene in Orlando, I contend that not only can Braidotti’s work help to articulate Woolf’s materialism, but that Woolf’s attention to the sexual politics of climate change provides depth to Braidotti’s posthuman feminism.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41528416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In these times of pandemics, increasing social inequalities, civic unrest and the rise of illiberalism, populism, anti-European Union politics and the ‘fake news’ ideology, it is important to revisit Woolf’s pacifism and anti-war and anti-fascist activism. Woolf’s writing offers a mode of understanding emotional economies of despair at this moment of the posthuman convergence and reworking these negative passions into the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative future. Approaching Woolf from a feminist neo-vitalist position as a thinker of immanence, sexed matter, and affirmative ethics, she shows us how to embody the cracks or wounds of existence in ways accountable to our times.
{"title":"Virginia Woolf, Immanence and Ontological Pacifism","authors":"R. Braidotti","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0439","url":null,"abstract":"In these times of pandemics, increasing social inequalities, civic unrest and the rise of illiberalism, populism, anti-European Union politics and the ‘fake news’ ideology, it is important to revisit Woolf’s pacifism and anti-war and anti-fascist activism. Woolf’s writing offers a mode of understanding emotional economies of despair at this moment of the posthuman convergence and reworking these negative passions into the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative future. Approaching Woolf from a feminist neo-vitalist position as a thinker of immanence, sexed matter, and affirmative ethics, she shows us how to embody the cracks or wounds of existence in ways accountable to our times.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47195123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Waves and water, the lens of a lighthouse, a lady’s looking-glass: reflecting surfaces abound in the writings of Virginia Woolf. These figurations, in turn, are repeated as a formative image, a reflective motif, in the theory of Rosi Braidotti. This article explores the material implications of both authors’ mirrors, arguing that they distort repronormative depictions of women as maternal figures. Particularly, I view the autopoietic theorization of desire in Braidotti’s oeuvre through the lens of Woolf’s major fiction and non-fiction from 1927 to 1941. With references to works including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and particularly Between the Acts (1941), I argue that Woolf’s monstrous images inform Braidotti’s own writing, especially her 2002 monograph Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Yet it is vital to stress that these feminist-materialist echoes exceed binarized understandings of reflections. Alternating between reverence for motherhood, suspicion of procreation, and criticism of reproductive services/technologies, both writers suggest that women’s reproductive health cannot be neatly determined by one overarching narrative. They advance an emerging concept of reproductive agency where abortive desires are dangerous and dynamic, steeped both in histories of gestational violence and feminist potential.
{"title":"The Mirrored Monster and Becoming-Wolf: Reflections on Desire in Woolf and Braidotti","authors":"Caitlin E. Stobie","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0443","url":null,"abstract":"Waves and water, the lens of a lighthouse, a lady’s looking-glass: reflecting surfaces abound in the writings of Virginia Woolf. These figurations, in turn, are repeated as a formative image, a reflective motif, in the theory of Rosi Braidotti. This article explores the material implications of both authors’ mirrors, arguing that they distort repronormative depictions of women as maternal figures. Particularly, I view the autopoietic theorization of desire in Braidotti’s oeuvre through the lens of Woolf’s major fiction and non-fiction from 1927 to 1941. With references to works including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and particularly Between the Acts (1941), I argue that Woolf’s monstrous images inform Braidotti’s own writing, especially her 2002 monograph Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Yet it is vital to stress that these feminist-materialist echoes exceed binarized understandings of reflections. Alternating between reverence for motherhood, suspicion of procreation, and criticism of reproductive services/technologies, both writers suggest that women’s reproductive health cannot be neatly determined by one overarching narrative. They advance an emerging concept of reproductive agency where abortive desires are dangerous and dynamic, steeped both in histories of gestational violence and feminist potential.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44376905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Reading the 1933 biography Flush alongside Woolf’s translation theory and Braidotti’s nomadic ‘multilinguism’, this paper argues that Woolf’s modernist dislocation of English both informs and is informed by her relationship with non-English languages. Using the Deleuzean idea of the ‘incompossible’ as a way of considering a world made up of multiple co-existing yet contradictory relations, I trace the presence of a ‘linguistic incompossibility’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre. As a writer, publisher and translator, Woolf articulates a mode of being in and relating to the world that is positively constituted through the multilingual, and which in turn often constitutes the monolingual as static, ineffective, and even impossible. From the contradictory etymologies of ‘Spaniel’ offered in Flush, to the process-orientated relationship with languages in Woolf's non-fiction writing, the old idea of a closed, objective and monolithic language is inadequate for communicating the nomadic movements of modernist subjectivity. Linguistic incompossibility becomes a way of figuring the affirmatory possibilities of difference across, between and within languages to reveal the fluidity and multiplicity of language itself.
{"title":"‘Languages are so like their boots’: Linguistic Incompossibility in Flush","authors":"Ruth Alison Clemens","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0445","url":null,"abstract":"Reading the 1933 biography Flush alongside Woolf’s translation theory and Braidotti’s nomadic ‘multilinguism’, this paper argues that Woolf’s modernist dislocation of English both informs and is informed by her relationship with non-English languages. Using the Deleuzean idea of the ‘incompossible’ as a way of considering a world made up of multiple co-existing yet contradictory relations, I trace the presence of a ‘linguistic incompossibility’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre. As a writer, publisher and translator, Woolf articulates a mode of being in and relating to the world that is positively constituted through the multilingual, and which in turn often constitutes the monolingual as static, ineffective, and even impossible. From the contradictory etymologies of ‘Spaniel’ offered in Flush, to the process-orientated relationship with languages in Woolf's non-fiction writing, the old idea of a closed, objective and monolithic language is inadequate for communicating the nomadic movements of modernist subjectivity. Linguistic incompossibility becomes a way of figuring the affirmatory possibilities of difference across, between and within languages to reveal the fluidity and multiplicity of language itself.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44772869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Applying Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s insights into the contingency of value to the contingency of theory’s value, this essay situates Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) in relation to three critical frameworks. It argues that Woolf’s complication of love in the novel responds to three amorous ‘needs’ articulated, respectively, in the work of Rosi Braidotti, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed. In bringing Woolf’s novel to the needs voiced by these theorists, the essay neither synthesizes Braidotti, Sedgwick and Ahmed nor privileges one of them above the others. It shows, rather, that Night and Day keeps love unmastered by any single critical paradigm and that its literary/conceptual work is best read in aggregate – read and reread, that is, according to three often antagonistic frameworks between which the essay makes a temporary peace. The posthuman and queer frames bring to life Katharine Hilbery’s powerful attachment to and preference for the study of mathematics and astronomy, her distaste for human beings (and literary studies), and her careful stagecraft in managing the people she loves. The feminist frame links the promises of love to the patriarchal/misogynistic division between the education of men and the training of women.
{"title":"Woolfian Love in Aggregate: Posthuman – Queer – Feminist","authors":"Benjamin D. Hagen","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0441","url":null,"abstract":"Applying Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s insights into the contingency of value to the contingency of theory’s value, this essay situates Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) in relation to three critical frameworks. It argues that Woolf’s complication of love in the novel responds to three amorous ‘needs’ articulated, respectively, in the work of Rosi Braidotti, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed. In bringing Woolf’s novel to the needs voiced by these theorists, the essay neither synthesizes Braidotti, Sedgwick and Ahmed nor privileges one of them above the others. It shows, rather, that Night and Day keeps love unmastered by any single critical paradigm and that its literary/conceptual work is best read in aggregate – read and reread, that is, according to three often antagonistic frameworks between which the essay makes a temporary peace. The posthuman and queer frames bring to life Katharine Hilbery’s powerful attachment to and preference for the study of mathematics and astronomy, her distaste for human beings (and literary studies), and her careful stagecraft in managing the people she loves. The feminist frame links the promises of love to the patriarchal/misogynistic division between the education of men and the training of women.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42459951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Requiem by Alpheratz, translated from the French by Rosie Eyre","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0427","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43375110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alessia Ricciardi, Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature","authors":"Luciano Parisi","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0434","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43463829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：