IVWS Column, January 25, 2008

Members of the IVWS must first of all express our admiration of Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff, and the fine staff of administrators, coordinators and volunteers who brought together the 17^th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, “Art, Education and Internationalism,” June 7-10, 2007. We were treated to a lively, accessible, and far-reaching set of plenary sessions, including Susan Gubar, “Rooms: A Cover Story,” Anne Fernald with a workshop on “The Joys and Challenges of Difficult Texts.” In a dual plenary suited to the internationalism and art of the theme, Susan Stanford Friedman spoke on “Cosmofeminism, Women, and War from Three Guineas to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Urmila Seshagiri on “Atoning for Modernism: Virginia Woolf, Ian McEwan, and the Limits of Art.” Nothing could have been more special than having the inexhaustible Cecil Woolf, address us preliminary to the Banquet. In celebrating his 80^th birthday with him, we were reminded that he remains a fresh resource regarding Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as well as an important editor and a thoroughly enjoyable speaker. Film screenings, including Kay Sloan’s Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema and the latest finds of Leslie Hankins, such as A Flordida Enchantment (1914) provided fun that could also be regarded as recontextualization in the popular arts of Woolf’s period. Combining her art with spur of the moment performances, rich in gesture, by Woolfians was Suzanne Bellamy’s “A Sketch of the Past.” Formats allowed for conversation and informal sharing, the very essence of our getting together.

Saluted in their passage at the meeting were Joanne Trautman and J.B. Kirkpatrick. We note with sorrow the death in August of Julia Briggs, who is commemorated in this issue by Jane Marcus. I had the honor of having Julia serve as a keynote at the 1999 Woolf Conference at the University of Delaware, where she spoke of “Finding New Virginias,” a paper that whetted our appetites for her fine text-centered biography, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. I am further blessed to have her edition and commentary for Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris” as an invaluable item in the new critical anthology, Gender in Modernism: New Contexts, Complex Intersections.

There was a great deal of society for Woolfians at the Chicago MLA Convention. Great thanks go to Pamela Caughie for organizing a highly convivial party at her festively decorated home in Rogers Park on December 28. She in turn wants to thank Betty Miller, her mom and the chief baker for the occasion, her husband, Doug Petcher, who along with grad student Steven Nasser served as chauffeurs operating a highly effective van service, and three additional graduate students who were our servers, Julia Barrett, Faith Bennett and Erin Holliday-Karre. Though people came and went in various shifts, there were close to 40 in attendance, according to Betty’s tally. Fine wines, a delicious selection of finger foods, pizza and home-made desserts, and a house that encouraged clustering in various rooms for conversations made for a very fine evening. The weather was restrained, delivering a small sprinkling of snow that morning that did not pose challenges to travelers by party time. The same could not be said for airlines on the following days! Both of our panels were well attended.

The first of two IVWS sponsored panels at the 2007 MLA was "New Modernist Studies and Virginia Woolf," scheduled for the first time-slot on the first day. Chaired by Mark Hussey (Pace U, NY), the well-attended panel featured Sanja Bahun (U of Essex, UK) who spoke about the benefits of teaching Woolf in conjunction with other writers and about the transnational emphasis of recent modernist studies in a paper titled “Virginia Woolf Studies in the Era of World Literature”; Madelyn Detloff (Miami U, OH), VP of the IVWS, who in “Is Modernist Studies Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” challenged the "new" modernist studies for its decidedly old-fashioned emphasis on male writers of the high modernist canon; and Joanna Grant (Auburn U, AL) whose paper, “Speak to Me of Abduction’: Woolf and Sackville-West’s Wild Ride.” discussed how the concept of the Middle East operates in selected works by Woolf and by Vita Sackville-West.

The next morning, Andrea E. Adolph (Kent State U) presided over “Gastronomical Woolf.” The papers were nicely distributed over a range of culinary sites and times in Woolf’s life. L. Gill Lamberton of the (U Michigan Ann Arbor) took us into the actual dining situation of young Cambridge intellectual women in the era of A Room of One’s Own with a paper that attended to the synergy of eating and thinking, “‘The Lamp in the Spine Does Not Light on Beef and Prunes’: Virginia Woolf on Privileged Dining and Intellectual Work.” Leslie Kathleen Hankins (Cornell College) used the pages of British Vogue contemporaneous with To the Lighthouse to offer another source for the famous “Boeuf en Daube” in a generously illustrated paper, “Virginia Woolf, X. Marcel Boulestin, and the Vogue for French Cooking in To the Lighthouse,” and Andrea herself drew us toward the wartime constraints Woolf experienced at the outset of World War II in “Nostalgic Appetites: Tracing Wartime Rationing in Woolf’s Between the Acts,” suggesting that Woolf’s final novel offers a reminder of the sweeter, more varied menu of peace. Thanks to all who participated, attended, and asked such great questions.

Most of our transactions planning for next year’s panels at MLA in San Francisco were handled by e-mail, despite some challenges coming up with current membership e-lists, without neglecting those (like the President) who were behind on their dues. Thanks go to all who submitted 9 enticing panel proposals for our 2 slots. When all the ballots were counted, we came up with the following 2 panels. Both chairs request 400 word abstracts by March 15.

“Troping the Light Fantastic: Woolf's Use of Desire and Pleasure." Discussions of the use of desire, pleasure, and intimacy to treat topics rarely associated with sex and sexuality: creativity, inspiration, epistemology, politics, spirituality. email to Brenda Helt, helt0010@umn.edu. "Orlando 's 'house was no longer hers entirely': Property in Virginia Woolf." This panel seeks new theoretical or socio-historical approaches to representations of real, personal, and intellectual property in Woolf's fiction, non-fiction, and biographical materials. email to Jamie McDaniel, jlm25@case.edu.

MLA is changing some things about the annual convention. Last year there was a decision to change the date of the convention to begin on the first Thursday of the year after January 2. This switch will take place in 2010-11. There will be no December 2010 convention; it will occur in January 2011. The site of the 2009 convention has not yet been set. This year’s proposals presented to the Delegate Assembly (of which I am a member) included recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Annual Convention, aimed at relieving gridlock in the program and accommodating new formats. Allied Organizations would no longer have 2 guaranteed sessions, though the one remaining session would be scheduled “equally” (second sessions are now given disadvantageous slots early and late on the schedule, as in the case of our first panel this year) . Allied organizations would have the possibility of up to two additional sessions; at least one of this must be a collaborative session with another entity (e.g. get in league with another Allied Organization or discussion group). Additional formats included electronic “poster sessions” and workshops with an interactive, goal-oriented format. There will no longer be papers during evening sessions; that would become a good time for social events and organizational meetings. I suggest that we begin our own exchanges about how to work with these proposed changes immediately. The new proposals would call for a more complex and strategic set of exchanges among members of the IVWS, but I look forward to the challenge.

Other things to think about include a design invitation for a IVWS logo (we don’t want to call it a competition) forthcoming in the IVWS Newsletter, and further discussion of what sorts of publications and online features the Society can subsidize. We are also monitoring the debates over intellectual property as they intersect with Woolf scholarship, and looking into more convenient modes of collecting $20 annual dues ($10 for students, retired, less than full time employed), which I now have sent to our tireless treasurer, Thaine Stearns, Dept. of English, Sonoma State Univ. Rohnert Park, CA 94928-3609. Membership forms are accessible at: http://www.utoronto.ca/IVWS/

This is January 25, 2008, so happy birthday, Virginia Woolf and the best returns of the day to all of you!

Bonnie Kime Scott
IVWS President (with thanks to Mark Hussey on MLA)

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