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S’abonner à ce flux- > Mina Loy’s Surrealist Strategies of Renewal
In her essay “Modern Poetry,” published in the little magazine Charm in 1925, the British artist Mina Loy identified the source of the renewal of the English language in the streets of New York, famously claiming: “It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born.” The cosmopolitan avant-garde artist celebrates the “composite language” of the United States, and the ability of “the true American” to “ingeniously ...
- > May Sinclair’s Romantic Corpus
This paper explores May Sinclair’s Modernist appropriation of Romantic tropes and experimentations. As a literary critic, Sinclair (1863-1946) wrote influential papers on Modernist poetry, but barely mentions Romantic poets in her many essays. By contrast, her own narrative poem, The Dark Night (1924), articulates Eliotian references with Romantic themes (Dowson 2006). This influence is even more remarkable in her fiction. Her characters’ poetic references have little to do with contemporary ...
- > Virginia Woolf’s “Modernist Renaissance” in “Anon”: A Singular Counter-History
Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her early-modern predecessors is now a well-established field of study. As Juliet Dusinberre argues, with the Renaissance Woolf “connected herself with a life which included her own rebirth as writer and reader through the recovery of female forebears”; the period was also a laboratory of her revolt against Victorian patriarchy. It is this very notion of rebirth that Woolf rewrites in her drafted essay “Anon,” the unfinished chapter of her “Common History Bo...
- > Virginia Woolf’s “New School of Biographies” and Eighteenth-century Life-Writing: a Sense of Kinship
Virginia Woolf était généralement très critique des biographies qui paraissaient à son époque. Cependant, dans les années 1920, elle observe ce qu’elle considère être une évolution heureuse dans la méthode biographique. Ce constat est à l’origine de son essai de 1927, « The New Biography », dans lequel elle salue en Harold Nicolson et Lytton Strachey des précurseurs d’une révolution dans l’art de la biographie. Woolf les réunit dans ce qu’elle appelle la « nouvelle école de biographies » (« T...
- > Making the Past Audible: The Childlike Element and Renewal of Existence in Benjamin and Woolf
This paper reads Virginia Woolf’s writing through Walter Benjamin’s thinking of “the childlike element” as a paradigm of renewal, whereby, through the prism of memory, the recall of a remainder sealed in the old world will reignite the promise of hope crystallized in childhood. For in Benjamin’s thinking, traces of the past, including residues of previous generations, demand from the future, in the figure of the child, their promise of redemption. In this context, against the background of Th...