The Presenters and Abstracts

In the introduction of The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg highlight the significance of fragmental narration in contemporary fiction. Ali Smith’s Autumn, which employs a fragmented, collage-like narrative to depict British society after the EU membership referendum, is a case in point.

This paper examines Virginia Woolf as a precursor of the fragmental literature and explores the connections between her literary narratives and the visual art technique of collage. Originally developed by French Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, collage is recognised as an integral part of the modernist art movement. While scholars have suggested connections between Woolf’s literary works and Cubist collage, there is room for further study.

To analyse Woolf’s texts in relation to the artistic technique of collage, this paper considers Vanessa Bell’s artistic experiments. After visiting Picasso in Paris, Bell created collage paintings in the 1910s. Although she later abandoned the technique, her approach appears to resonate with her sister’s literary innovations. A notable example is Still Life (Triple Alliance), Bell’s collage work with a provocative title. Juxtaposing painted depictions of everyday objects with fragmented materials such as newspaper clippings, the work is reminiscent of Wool’s literary style which interweaves quotidian experiences with socio-political issues in an experimental text. Drawing on Bell’s engagement with collage, this paper examines Woolf’s texts—‘The Mark on the Wall’, Mrs Dalloway, and The Waves among others—through the lens of collage.

     Imagining a future involves an act of remembering. Remembrance serves as a source of foresight through disentangling the tapestry of the past, examining its fragments, and weaving them into a new pattern. As many scholars have noted, the historical devastation of World War I encouraged Virginia Woolf to start a combined project of remembrance and reimagination. The longstanding psychoanalytic reading of Woolf’s response to the war has traced how memory falls short in the wake of traumatic experiences. Yet Woolf’s fiction also presents the excesses of remembering: an accumulation of associations which transforms a mere perception into remembrance. I argue that Woolf’s seamless transition between perception and remembrance establishes a network of the afterlife of lost subjects and objects, challenging the limit of national memory. In “The Mark on the Wall”, the narrator’s thinking transforms the featureless mark into a mnemonic object. An interplay of perception and remembering accidentally connects and confuses the narrator’s desire for tranquillity with the sense of ongoing wartime anxiety. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe’s remembrance resists the dominant commemorative culture surrounding the war dead, which sought to construct collective memory as a means of disguising the nation as a permanent consolation. Lily perceives the residues of the lost materiality of human and inhuman and revives them through her remembrance. In this paper, I explore the differences and overlaps between perception and remembrance in Woolf’s fiction and consider how the past resists the reduction of memory into inert elements of nationalistic ritual.

     At a climactic moment in her seminal work of modernism, Woolf’s artist Lily Briscoe contemplates the nature of beauty as she struggles to complete her abstract painting of Mrs Ramsay. In the midst of her reveries into the past and her ruminations on the human predicament of ‘to want and not to have’, Lily’s gaze trains upon the poet-scholar Mr. Carmichael as like an ‘unreal thing’. The description of Mr. Carmichael evokes a particularly Daoist conception of the true person, or zhen ren 真人.In a oneness with his environment and a simplicity and integrity of self that seeks neither the opinions nor the approbation of others, Mr. Carmichael teaches Mrs. Ramsay that true meaning is to be found in being not doing. In this he epitomizes the ‘true person’ of the fourth-century BCE Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, whose eponymous text had been translated into English by Herbert Giles in 1889, and whose spirit of naturalness and focus on the joy of living had been rapturously received and absorbed into the works of Oscar Wilde. We know that Woolf read the sinologist Arthur Waley's An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Paintings (1923) and that her preference for graphic, pictorial expressivism over literal description may owe something to her increasing appreciation of Chinese, and particularly Daoist aesthetics. This essay will offer a reading of Mr. Carmichael that turns toward Daoist philosophy and painterly aesthetics and opens up a key text of British modernism to new cross-temporal and cross-cultural connections. 

     I intend to analyze Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in light of mathematical concepts of calculus, particularly its concepts of limits, derivatives, and integrals, to explore her treatment of time, consciousness, and memory in the novel. Woolf’s narrative technique that employs stream of consciousness and fragmented time mirrors the mathematical process of approaching unattainable goals (limits), shifting mental states (derivatives), and the accumulation of experiences over time (integrals). I intend to show that the characters in the novel constantly strive toward ideals or goals that remain out of reach, much like the mathematical concept of limits. Mr. Ramsay’s intellectual pursuits, Lily Briscoe’s evolving artistic vision, and the passing of time all reflect this dynamic of continuous striving without full resolution. In terms of derivatives, I will examine how Woolf captures the fluid and changing nature of consciousness, with characters’ thoughts shifting rapidly in response to internal and external stimuli. I will explore the process of integrals through the accumulation of memory and experience, particularly as the Ramsay family’s shared history shapes their collective identity and understanding of the world. By synthesizing these mathematical concepts with Woolf’s literary techniques, I intend to highlight how the portrayal of time, consciousness, and memory in the novel mirrors the fundamental process of calculus, offering a unique framework for understanding the characters’ emotional and psychological landscapes.

     As Anna Feuerstein aptly observes, ‘[w]ithin the critical history of Flush, the canine protagonist lingers between a mere symbol, read as representative of Victorian women, or as an often failed attempt by Woolf to identify animal otherness’ (32). I argue that both lines of interpretive approaches overlook the cognitive perspective of the reader—specifically, the reader’s engagement with Woolf’s rhetorical communicative process. More concretely, because readers interact with the narrative through multimodal cognition, it is reductive to treat Flush merely as a symbol. Likewise, since the narrative functions not as a representation of Woolf’s artistic project but as an ongoing rhetorical act directed toward the reader, the view of Flush as a failed attempt to identify with otherness is equally problematic.

     Drawing on cognitive narratology, which underscores the inherently embodied nature of readerly cognition, I contend that the olfactory descriptions in Flush serve a rhetorical function by prompting the reader to oscillate between semiotic interpretation and embodied engagement. Cognitive science has shown that language related to olfaction can activate sensorimotor processes in readers or listeners, although this activation is generally weaker than that elicited by references to other senses, such as the visual or auditory. I propose that Woolf’s recurrent use of olfactory descriptions subtly activates the reader’s sensorimotor system; and because this activation remains understated compared to other sensorimotor activation, it affords a productive tension between identification with Flush and, simultaneously, an awareness of his otherness. 

Work Cited

Feuerstein, Anna. ‘What Does Power Smell Like? Canine Epistemology and the Politics of the Pet in Virginia Woolf’s Flush.’ Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 84, 2013, pp. 32-34. 

This paper examines how both literal and metaphorical “frames” in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts shape its exploration of the notion of failure. On one level, physical elements such as picture frames, stages, doors, windows, and mirrors divide and structure space. On the other, the novel’s self‐conscious narrative structure and the characters’ ‘thinking frames’ reveal how perspectives themselves can become constraining. While frames can serve as supportive boundaries, they also risk misleading those who rely on them, reinforcing a stubbornness that inhibits fuller experiences. In Between the Acts, this dynamic intensifies the mutual blame exchanged between the audience and the artist for the pageant’s perceived shortcomings, even as neither recognizes that their discontent springs from a shared sense of “failure.” The novel’s title underscores its preoccupation with liminal states, alluding to the literal breaks in the pageant, the historical interval between two World Wars, and the subtler gap between artist and observer. By repeatedly invoking structures that connect and separate—such as doors, windows, mirrors, and tree lines—Between the Acts challenges the illusion of irreconcilable divides. Through its largely plotless form, the novel discloses the fragility of seemingly solid frameworks, showing how preconceptions distort perception. Building on modernist ethical scholarship, this paper demonstrates the need for self-awareness in reading and evaluating art, contending that the recognition of illusory boundaries can foster more flexible meta-thinking about art’s role. Ultimately, reframing these fixed perspectives sheds new light on Woolf’s interrogation of how artists and audiences find themselves separated and joined by their stake in creative failure.  

     This paper explores the political implications of sound technology in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, through the lens of affect theory as proposed by Lauren Berlant. In Between the Acts, the gramophone serves not only as a technological device but also as a sensory medium that disrupts and mediates collective affective experiences, reflecting the fragmented and dissonant nature of public emotion during the interwar period. Woolf’s use of sound technology destabilizes the linearity of narrative and communal memory, creating an auditory rupture that challenges conventional modes of historical representation.

     Alongside Woolf, this paper also examines the role of sound and its affective resonance in the works of contemporary Korean author Bae Suah. Bae frequently incorporates auditory motifs and ambience that echo the disruptive power of sound as seen in Woolf’s work. By comparing the portrayals of sound in both author’s writings, this paper aims to trace how auditory experiences function as affective mediators that challenge the coherence of both personal and collective identities.

      By bringing Woolf’s last novel into dialogue with Bae’s contemporary Korean context, this paper contributes to an expanded understanding of how sound operates as an affective and political force across different cultural and historical settings. Ultimately, this paper argues that the political implications of sound in literary narratives are crucial for examining the affective dynamics and tensions that shape modern collective consciousness and the fragmentation of identity.

     Having published Jacob’s Room (1922) and composing Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) notes in her diary of 21 June 1924 that she ‘grow[s] more & more poetic’. As her essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ (1927) indicates, Woolf from that time ventured into ‘poetic’ prose which expresses various moments as ‘the centre and meeting place of an extraordinary number of perceptions’. Woolf likewise contends in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) that the writer should ‘think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact […] but not losing sight of fiction either’. Her following novels, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), are some outcomes of her study of the realm.

     Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) arguably took over Woolf’s exploration of the ‘poetic’ as a BBC radio scriptwriter. In his introduction (1944) to his radio drama Christopher Columbus (1942), MacNeice writes ‘the radio dramatist, however prosaic or colloquial or dry his dialogue, is by his nature nearer to the poet than to the journalist’. This is also true of the radio feature writer, he adds. It is also notable that MacNeice arranged and produced Woolf’s The Waves for radio (1955), sensing the radiogenic nature of the novel Woolf called an ‘eyeless book’ and ‘a playpoem’.

     Taking Woolf and MacNeice as fine examples, this paper thus explores the ‘poetic’ effects in prose and radio. Analysing the ‘poetic’ will eventually clarify some crucial aspects of modern, contemporary, and future literature, I believe.

     Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway uses key modernist techniques like stream of consciousness to show the grasp that societal structures had on women in 20th century England. She provides readers with a feminist viewpoint of the rigid gender roles and social class constraints that governed post-war society in the 1920s. By examining Clarissa Dalloway’s experiences, readers can see how Woolf uses the socialization of her characters to convey how gender and class intersect. She uses key modernist and feminist techniques to define identity, reflecting the oppressive societal structures of the postwar period. This paper explores the party that Clarissa Dalloway hosts, discovering that the party and its guests serve as a microcosm for postwar Britain. Her party provides a space where women are expected to conform to societal norms of beauty, grace, and hospitality, while masking their inner dissatisfaction and personal struggles as inconsequential. Woolf critiques how the intersection of gender and class stifles women's agency and enforces conformity, making it difficult for Clarissa to separate her own desires with her social obligations. Woolf’s treatment of time and memory conveys the intersection of class and gender, resulting in the disregarding and discounting of her female characters’ voices. By blending past and present, Woolf reveals the ways in which Clarissa’s life is continuously shaped by the choices that were made because of her gender and class. Through her character Clarissa, Woolf presents a compelling feminist critique that highlights how social class and gender intersect to limit women’s autonomy, ultimately revealing the societal pressures to conform while simultaneously fulfilling the expected roles of a wife and mother. The presentation concludes by connecting past and present, explaining how these issues are increasingly relevant in our society today.

     This study examines relationships among four English women writers—Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf—through the lens of queerness and care.

     In 1966, Brittain named Woolf as one of seven women who influenced her. Nevertheless, she did not mention Woolf’s writings in her diaries or autobiographical works, except in a 1940 biography of her close friend Holtby. One explanation can be inferred from Brittain’s 1929 essay “Halcyon: or The Future of Monogamy,” part of the To-Day and To-Morrow series. In this essay, Brittain proposed alternative marital forms such as semi-detached marriage and companionate marriage, which she enacted by living apart from her husband in America while raising her children with Holtby. Holtby, known for one of the earliest critical memoirs on Woolf, maintained a deep friendship with Brittain—a relationship often discussed through the lens of lesbianism and queerness, though its exact nature remains undefined.

     This presentation will compare Holtby’s The Crowded Street (1924), Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Woolf’s The Waves (1931)—a novel that inspired Holtby’s critical study of Woolf. Through this comparison, I will analyze representations of sexual minorities and their allies. Finally, I will focus on Brittain’s rejection of “ectogenesis” technology in “Halcyon,” arguing that her essay conveys a vision of care as an ally to women and sexual minorities, thereby imagining a future beyond monogamy.

     The three rights that the women's movement has aimed for were suffrage, the right to physical self-determination and the right to an education, a profession and the opportunity to earn their own money. (Breen 25) Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas(1938) in particular elaborate on the third right.  This presentation will examine how Woolf viewed the suffragettes as contemporaries and how she thought their perceived problems should be overcome.

     In A Room of One's Own, Woolf has the narrator, whose aunt's inheritance rolled over and earned her an annual income of £500, state that “Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” (Woolf, 1929, 29).  She also imagines the ambivalent situation in which women find themselves: “if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been […] no Mary” (--- 17).  Woolf was well aware of the difficulties of balancing childbirth and childcare with continuing to educate and work for the advancement of women.

     The theme of Three Guineas seems to have been how women should pursue higher education, become economically self-sufficient and protect their culture and intellectual property, without being subservient to the inhumanity of war and the male-dominated anti-war movement that opposes it. 

     Woolf’s solely intellectual and education-focused method of extending women's rights runs the risk of falling into elitism at the same time.  This presentation will also address how the suffragette movement was designed to ensure that lower and working class women were not left out.

     This thesis examines Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours (2002) as a contemporary engagement with the modernist aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), particularly their shared attentiveness to the ordinary. Scholarly responses often frame Mrs Dalloway as a modernist break from conventional narrative and The Hours as an overly dramatic adaptation. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s concept of adaptations as “repetition without replication,” this study argues that Daldry’s film defamiliarizes ordinary moments in ways that echo Woolf’s literary techniques. Using Henri Lefebvre and Rita Felski’s theories, it explores how the “ordinary” is challenged by the “extraordinary,” focusing on the temporal nature of kisses in both works. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf transforms an ordinary kiss into an exquisite moment; Daldry mirrors this through cinematic techniques like editing, music, and visual symbolism, guiding viewers to see its underlying significance. Close readings reveal how these moments bridge literature and visual arts, translating modernist defamiliarization into film. Connecting to Woolf’s “moments of being” and “moments of non-being,” the thesis argues that every trivial instant holds power—a concern amplified in a post-pandemic world where each hour feels precarious. By blending modernist scholarship with analysis of adaptation as an artistic form, this study highlights how The Hours reimagines Woolf’s vision across mediums, offering fresh insights into the ordinary’s enduring relevance.

     This study discerns signs of the emergence of climatic ontology in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and World War I in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and examines how Maggie Gee, the author of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), who claims to be Woolf’s successor, radically develops a contemporary climatic ontology in The Ice People (1998), paying homage to Woolf’s works. Mrs. Dalloway portrays that our existence as sentient beings is immersed in what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms “a weather-world,” sensuously depicting “the air” as a medium in which we breathe in and out, perceive, and interact. Its opening accentuates the material presence of air wrapping Clarissa through her recollection of plunging into the fresh air at Bourton. Her feeling that something awful is about to happen as she watches the smoke winding off the flowers and trees, suggests Woolf’s ominous awareness of air pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. By associating the sun becoming extraordinarily hot with the explosion of the royal motor car’s engine, she implies her sense of the connection between global warming and imperialism. In this manner, Woolf subtly introduces the birth of climatic ontology, sensing that the weather-world influences people’s ways of life and affective traits, and Maggie Gee seems to have been deeply affected by Woolf’s interest in the weather-world. Her two novels dealing with climate disasters, The Ice People and The Flood (2004), appear to inherit the two great climate disasters from Woolf’s Orlando (1928)—the Great Frost and the Flood—and develop them into contemporary climate fiction. The Ice People portrays the impact of global warming on relationships between men and women, gender roles, ways of love, and family structure, exemplifying climatic ontology through a civilization history entirely dependent on climate. Moreover, by depicting the transformation of European culture due to the coming of an ice age, it presents a macro climatic ontology, where climate reshapes the structures of race, ethnicity, nation, and class, exerting the power to rearrange global power dynamics.

In this presentation, I explore Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) through the lens of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), reconsidering Woolf’s portrayal of marriage in relation to the era’s discourse on efficiency. While Lawrence’s heroine, Connie Chatterley, seeks to escape the modern system of efficiency through ecstatic passion outside marriage, Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway finds subtler forms of resistance within the ordinary patterns of domestic life.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence depicts Connie’s marriage as a stifling arrangement, emblematic of what Max Weber calls the “iron cage” of rationalized, efficient modern life. Connie’s escape comes through her illicit relationship with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Their union culminates in extraordinary moments of ecstatic intimacy—literally “being beside oneself.”

Mrs Dalloway similarly presents ecstasy as a liberation from the “iron cage.” However, Clarissa Dalloway’s marriage to Richard is devoid of ecstasy, especially when compared to her past relationships with Sally Seton and Peter Walsh. On the surface, her marriage may appear to be a quiet failure.

Yet Woolf’s treatment of marriage is more nuanced than Lawrence’s. Unlike many of their upper-middle-class peers, Richard resists the dominant ideology of social engineering and shares Clarissa’s unspoken revulsion toward Sir William Bradshaw, a zealous eugenicist. Living with him allows Clarissa to find moments of respite from the demands of bureaucratic modernity while remaining herself in her everyday life. Unlike Lawrence, Woolf reclaims the ordinariness of marriage as a site for resisting the demands of efficiency.