日韓ヴァージニア・ウルフ学会2013プログラム

Japan-Korea Virginia Woolf Conference 2013
"Reading Woolf in the 21st Century"

March 23rd, 2013

Doshisha University(Conference Room, Neisei-kan 5F, Imadegawa Campus)

9:30-9:55 Registration  
9:55-10:00 Opening Address Tae YAMAMOTO (Doshisha University)
10:00-12:00 SessionⅠ  

<Narrative/Writing>

Chair: Hogara MATSUMOTO
(Sophia University)

Kanako ASAKA (Osaka Ohtani University)

Subjective Point of View in Free Indirect Discourse--The Use of Third-Person Pronouns and Past Tense Verbs in Mrs. Dalloway

Soonku LEE (Pyeongtaek University)

Comparison of the Art Theories of Wilde and Woolf through Analysis of Their Essays

<Woolf and the 21st Century>

Chair: Erika ASO
(Aoyama Gakuin University)

Ken HATAKEYAMA (Tohoku Gakuin University)

Gunpowder and the Great War in To the Lighthouse

Heon-Joo SOHN (Seoul National University)

Virginia Woolf in the Waves of Multimedia Culture

13:45-16:00 SessionⅡ Chair:Yuko ITO(Chubu University)

<Symposium: Woolf Meets Others>

Youngjoo KIM (Sogang University)

The figure of the Jew: Virginia Woolf and Ethnographic Imagination

Yukiko KINOSHITA (Kobe Women's University)

Virginia Woolf's Far-Eastern Aesthetics: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and Kakuzo Okakura

Youngjoo SON (Seoul National University)

Idleness and Counter-moods in Virginia Woolf

Yuko ITO (Chubu University)

Russian Ballet and Body Movement in The Waves

16:15-17:00 Special Lecture Chair: Megumi KATO
(Tokyo Gakugei University)

Professor Hee-jin PARK(Seoul National University)

"Between 'Internal Monologue' and 'Sous-conversation’: the Worlds of Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute"

17:00 Closing Address Setsu ITO (Tokyo Kasei University)

Japan-Korea Virginia Woolf Conference 2013<Synopses>

(1) Subjective Point of View in Free Indirect Discourse——The Use of Third-Person Pronouns and Past Tense Verbs in Mrs. Dalloway

Kanako ASAKA (Osaka Otani University)

 It has been pointed out that the "stream of consciousness" technique is mainly composed of free indirect discourse. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is one of Woolf’s consciousness describing novel and most of the sentences are in free indirect discourse. It is also pointed out that free indirect discourse in Mrs. Dalloway tends to diminish the boundary between the narrator and the character. However, for the novel is actually in the third-person narrative form, the indirect point of view is observed from the use of third-person pronouns and past-tense verbs.
 In fact, the uses of third-person pronouns and past-tense verbs are employed in order to represent the direct point of view in this novel. The use of she and he, for example, indicates that the character refers to the third person from his/her point of view, while the use of past-tense verbs refers simply to the past in the character’s reminiscence. What I would like to emphasise in this paper is that this overlap of the pronoun and verb tense in both direct and free indirect discourse is one of Woolf’s technique to diminish the boundary between the narrator and the character.
 I will examine third-person pronouns in the first part and past-tense verbs in the second part. Each part will discuss those elements in direct discourse and how they are set in the third-person narrative. These examinations will show how Woolf intends to describe thoughts as if they were in first-person narrative, although the novel is actually in third-person narrative. In the third part, I will discuss how such effect is achieved.

(2) Comparison of the Art Theories of Wilde and Woolf through Analysis of Their Essays

Soonku LEE (Pyeongtaek University)

 Both Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, though at different junctures in literary history, opposed the 19th century's realism in literature. While the former was a prominent playwright at the turn of the century, and the latter was one of the best-known novelists in the early 20th century, they both had an exceptionally great sense of identity about their act of writing, strongly resisted the realistic literature of the likes of Zola that copied reality like photography, and through numerous essays, presented a direction in which 20th century modernism literature should move forward by setting forth new modernist art theories. Human history evolves, and so do all activities of human beings. The two writers viewed literary productions of the past diachronically and pondered about the conditions great works were generated, what relationship the current literary works had with their predecessors, and which direction literature should take in the future by attempting to provide that direction. Although Henry James lamented the absence of criticism in the British literary circle, Wilde had already embraced the theories of impressionist aesthetics of Walter Pater, and tried to liberate literature from all sorts of moral, ethical and political bondages by departing from realistic literary theories represented by Matthew Arnold. His artistic rebel culminated with Lewis, Pound and T.E. Hume between the years 1910 and 1915. Woolf, who was an active member of the Bloomsbury Group, also saw that society changing dramatically starting from the year 1910, and thought that the trend of realism represented by the Edwardians was unable to convey the realities of new human experiences. Consequently, Woolf suggested theories of modernist literature, thereby opening a new horizon which the 20th century literature should move towards. Both authors considered literature as something above a genre that simply told stories, and regarded literary works as an artistic form similar to fine arts and music. They abandoned the interest in how realistically an external object was recorded, and instead focused on the inner side of an artist, who was the main agent that perceived the outside world. Like this, they attempted to experiment with literary devices and techniques designed to convey a new reality effectively, which had been overlooked until then.

(3) Gunpowder and the Great War in To the Lighthouse

Ken HATAKEYAMA (Tohoku Gakuin University)

 In spite of its scientific vulnerability Darwinian theory of evolution has exercised far-reaching influence on our society, and among its key concepts 'the survival of the fittest' seems most deep-seated; its influence must continue reappearing in our competitive society in the 21st century, taking various forms. The aim of the present paper is to shed fresh light on some problems seen in the society of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
 Critics have overlooked the significance of a Darwinian scheme in a minor character like Charles Tansley, who has to educate himself in poverty. While the Ramsays inherit their mother's 'very noble' blood, the young man reveals his inferior family line: 'My father is a chemist'; 'his grandfather was a fisherman'; 'One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast'. Towards the end of the 19th century when biological concepts of Darwinism were applied to political sciences, a working-class man Tansley could be seen as unsuitable for gentlemanly scientific education. During the Ramsays’ dinner, however, he imagined that 'these mild cultivated people . . . would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by gunpowder that was in him' and indicates a class conflict among them. Moreover, 'gunpowder' implies the impending the Great War. By analyzing these scenes, I would like to discuss the connections between nature and nurture, class struggle, and Imperialism as a course of wars, which are inseparable from the 21st world.

(4) Virginia Woolf in the Waves of Multimedia Culture

Heon-Joo SOHN (Seoul National University)

 In this proposed paper I would like to explore the way Virginia Woolf is presented, viewed, reproduced and consumed in our Internet culture. In her essay, "On not Knowing Greek," Woolf points out the cultural and geographical gaps between the ancient Greek and the modern British which cause difficulties in understanding those classics. Although we are doubly alienated from Woolf both in tongue and time, we are still be impressed and touched by the depth of humanity and insights we encounter in her works.
 Woolf is widely appreciated in the 21st century not only in print but in more diverse forms of medium. Both her novels and life have become sources of films, documentaries, and music. We may surf the internet and easily find how much information about Virginia Woolf are accumulated and consumed at the moment: about ten million entries on Google and more than two thousand ones on YouTube. Such richness of information helps us to overcome the difficulties in understanding her works, bridging the discrepancy between languages, cultures, and times. We may visit Monks House, view her family photos, and even listen to her own voice recorded almost a century ago. Even the satellite photos of London streets with minute details are available through the Google Earth. Those are great sources to enrich our reading and teaching Woolf. To investigate the way Woolf is valued and appreciated in this multimedia culture, it is necessary to expand our view beyond the boundary of literary studies to media studies.

(5) The figure of the Jew: Virginia Woolf and Ethnographic Imagination

Youngjoo KIM (Sogang University)

 This paper aims to explore the aesthetic and political roles performed by and through Jewish characters in Virginia Woolf's writing of the 1930s. Woolf's 1938 short story "The Duchess and the Jeweller" presents a portrait of a Jewish jeweler that hinges on the anti-Semantic stereotypes of Jews in modern English culture. The "Present Day," the last section of The Years(1937), offers an enigmatic scene that barely suppresses antipathy to a Jewish working class neighbor and his male body. These figures of Jews in Woolf's writing are quite puzzling for the readers and the critics who acknowledge Woolf's marriage to Leonard, a "penniless Jew," and find in her writing of the 1930s strong political protests against fascism, the unjust system of which victimizes Jews. This paper intends to contextualize Woolf's problematic portrayals of Jews in the formation of English ethnographic discourses in the early twentieth century and to investigate them in relation to Woolf's aesthetic and political concerns in the 1930s. By analyzing the figures of Jews in Woolf, this paper will examine that while her desire to "give the whole of the present society" in her 1930's writing parallels the cultural turn in English national imagination at the time toward the presentation and the perception of everyday life at home, an ethnographic vision of Jewishness contributes to shaping the aesthetics and politics of Woolf's modernism.

(6) "Virginia Woolf's Far-Eastern Aesthetics: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Kakuzo Okakura"

Yukiko KINOSHITA (Kobe Women's University)

  Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway defines her party as "an offering" or a disinterested act of realizing her idealistic vision of the world; and it, in return, offers her the moment of "being," and is the occasion for her self-realization. The same roles are given to Mrs Ramsay's last dinner party in To the Lighthouse. It is, for her, a ritual through which she materializes her vision of truth and beauty: Lily Briscoe perceives that Mrs Ramsay is an artist on her own merits and that her party is a perfect "work of art."
 My thesis is that Mrs Dalloway's and Mrs Ramsay's shared aestheticism attributed to and expressed through their parties is what Kakuzo Okakura calls "Teaism" in The Book of Tea (1906). This correspondence between Woolf's and Okakura's aesthetics may seem to be a mere coincidence; but it is not. The connector between the two literary figures was Roger Fry, who met Okakura whose aesthetics, as critics have already pointed out, affected his. The social and cultural contexts which surrounded Woolf and other Modernists must not be missed: the second wave of British japonaiserie washed the early twentieth-century Britain.
 My presentation is an attempt to clarify the Far-Eastern elements of Virginia Woolf's aesthetics which led her to establish her Modernist themes and methods. I would further expand this thesis: the influence of the Far East on Woolf was one aspect of Japonisme which contributed as a catalyst to the formation of Modernist literature and art.

(7) Idleness and Counter-moods in Virginia Woolf

Youngjoo SON (Seoul National University)

 In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf writes, "it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." Of course, Woolf is not the first one who considers day-dreaming as a condition for creativity. Sigmund Freud, borrowing Friedrich Schiller's words, explains how "involuntary ideas" are induced when reason stops policing the imagination. What is notable though is that unlike Freud, who relates idleness to female weakness on the one hand, and day-dreaming to (male) creativity, on the other, Woolf does not distinguish these two.
 My paper examines the ways in which Woolf responds to the discourses of idleness. By reading Woolf's essays and novels side by side with the writings of Michel de Montaigne, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Morris, and Bertrand Russell (and possibly Winston Churchill) on idleness and its related term, labor/work, I will demonstrate how Woolf exposes and challenges the assumptions about class and gender revolving around the concept of idleness. Woolf transforms the idea of idleness as a sign of leisure-class femininity or a political inactivity into a precursor of what Jonathan Flatley calls, "counter-moods." As an act of refusal to perform culturally imposed duties, idleness in Woolf is also rebellious ways of feeling differently. When Winston Churchill made a famous appeal to the nation, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" on the day the Germans began their attack, Woolf finds herself feel "the odd incongruity of feeling intensely," a feeling that was considered to be odd and incongruous, or simply, wrong. Focusing on and the "submerged truth" that emerges out of idleness and the moments of odd feelings I will argue that for Woolf idleness plays a crucial role in her critique of patriarchal, capitalist society as it grows into the collective affect. Woolf states, "thinking is my fighting." I would add, feeling differently was her fighting too.

(8) Russian Ballet and Body Movement in The Waves

Yuko ITO (Chubu University)

 The Waves is one of the most psychic novels among Woolf's works describing the internal thought of six characters. However, at the same time, the reader finds the characters' own way to recognize the external world as well as their own body from their inner most viewpoints. In this sense, this novel represents some interesting aspects of early-twentieth-century English body consciousness.
 This paper particularly focuses on Rhoda's image of her body movement and two incompatible dance scenes in The Waves: Jinny's dance and the dancing of naked men with assegais and investigates whether their body consciousness and movement have actuality in today’s context when they are compared with the body images of early twentieth-century Russian Ballet. The choice of the word, "pirouette," when Jinny dances is connected with such image of body movement as in ballet dance. The naked men’s dance can also be related with some primordial scenes in Diaghilev's Russian Ballet which were presented in 1910s to 30s in London.
 Diaghilev's Russian Ballet has highly international character with its de-centred performance style and theme. Russian Ballet's scene and dancers in performance costume which were often reproduced in newspaper and magazine with a connotation of primitive and exotic Russian tradition are considered to have influenced modernist representation of body. The Waves proves the inter-relation between the modernism in England and Russian primitivism. This novel tries to dislocate cultural and civilized body into a primordial scene and present post-modern and globalised space.