Virginia Woolf's Orlando: Affirming Liberty

Born a young aristocratic boy in Elizabethan England, undergoing a gender transformation when in Constantinople as an ambassador, and arriving 400 years later at the age of 36 in "present day" London as an accomplished poetess, Virginia Woolf's Orlando is a fantastic figure who continues to fascinate. This study day will explore Orlando (1928) from as many different angles as possible, from its queer approach to biography to its writing of history and the experience of time, from the politics and ethics of the way it thinks about empire, gender, race and identity, to its laughter, play, and reflections on love and solitude. The book Woolf planned "as an escapade" and dashed off faster than others marked an unexpected turning point in her career, bringing her commercial success and financial stability, but its soaring popularity in recent years would probably have surpassed all her expectations. If we return to it so often, it is perhaps because Orlando's constancy and metamorphoses make her story an extraordinary affirmation of liberty.

This study day is open to all Agrégation students and their teachers, as well as to anyone interested in Woolf's work. 

Any queries may be addressed to Naomi Toth (ntoth@parisnanterre.fr) and Charlotte Estrade (cestrade@parisnanterre.fr).

PROGRAMME

8:30 — Coffee, registration 
 
8:45 — Welcome address
 
Session 1: Strange biography
Chair: Marie Laniel (Picardie-Jules Verne)

9:00 — Jane Goldman (Glasgow)
‘The Queen herself can have seen only a head’. Gendered ways of seeing and reading in Orlando: A Biography.
 
9:30 — Xavier LeBrun (Angers)
Orlando and 'unrecorded biography'
 
10:00 — Olivier Hercend (Paris Nanterre)
The Rhetoric of Honesty: Realism, Biographical Conventions and the “Reader’s Part” in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
 
10:30 — Aude Haffen (Paul Valéry -Montpellier3)
‘[I]t has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination’: Sexual Truth and Queer Experiments in Orlando.
 
COFFEE BREAK 
 
Session 2: Playing with History
Chair: Charlotte Estrade (Paris Nanterre)
 
11:30 — Anne Besnault (Rouen)
Writing History and Literary History in Orlando: The Historian, the Critic and the ‘Oak Tree’
 
12:00 — Monica Latham (Lorraine)
Vampirism and Intertextuality: Virginia Woolf’s and Christine Orban’s Geneses of Orlando
 
12:30 — Marie Laniel (Picardie – Jules Verne)
Anemomorphosis: The Workings of the Wind in Chapter V of Orlando
 
LUNCH BREAK
 
Session 3: Politics and Ethics
Chair: Naomi Toth (Paris Nanterre)
 
2:00 – Mia Carter (University of Texas at Austin)
Virginia Woolf’s Dark Continents: Dead Ends and Imagined Inroads
 
2:30 — Valérie Favre (Panthéon Sorbonne)
From Androgyny to Performativity, Queerness and Transidentity: The Heuristics of Anachronistic Reading in Woolf's Orlando and its Reception
 
3:00 — Christine Reynier (Paul Valéry – Montpellier3)
Orlando’s Ethical and Aesthetic Principles: Virginia Woolf’s Response to G.E. Moore
 
COFFEE BREAK
 
Session 4: “the book I planned then as an escapade”
Chair: Xavier Giudicelli (Paris Nanterre)
 
4:00 — Juliana Lopoukhine (Sorbonne)
Time and the Urban Poetics of Woolf’s Orlando
 
4:30 — Anne-Marie Smith (Institut Catholique de Paris)
A voice answering a voice … the intercourse of lovers’ ; Trans-textual vocality or Orlando recalled through Woolf’s other texts
 
5:00 — Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Jean Monnet - Saint-Etienne)
Otherness in Orlando: Woolf’s exploration of sameness, identity and alterity
 
APERITIF