Just a quick post to announce the publication
of my article on academic blogging and tweeting:
My article was written with the help of
fellow bloggers Charlotte Mathieson, Bob Nicholson and Paul Dobraszczyk. It
also owes a heavy debt to the various online communities fostered by
social media and brought together via Twitter hastags: #phdchat #phdadvice
#acwri #academia #highered #loveHE #twitterstorians #twitcrit #twitterature to
name but a few!
Just a quick post to announce the publication
of my book chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Roger
Fry (1940), the Omega Workshops and her contradictory theorising of
biography:
‘"But something betwixt and between": Roger Fry and the contradictions of biography’, in Contradictory Woolf, ed. by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press,
2012), pp. 82-7
This chapter forms part of an edited
collection emerging from the 21st Annual International Conference on
Virginia Woolf, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2011. Print copies
are available to order, but I’m very happy to see the online version is open access. [The series back catalogue is also available online, and I have a
chapter on Orlando (1928) and the
‘limits’ of biographical representation in Woolfian Boundaries (2007).]
Although the paper evolved during the writing process, becoming increasingly concerned with the relationship between Woolf's theories of biography and Fry's theories of art and craft, I thought I would whet your appetite with a glimpse of my original abstract:
"But something betwixt and between": Roger Fry and the contradictions of biography
He chooses; he synthesises; in short, he has ceased
to be the chronicler; he has become an artist. (‘The New Biography’, 1927)
And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a
craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something
betwixt and between. (‘The Art of Biography’, 1939)
Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry (1940) remains the black sheep of the Woolfian canon. No
critical edition is currently in print. It is conspicuously absent from the
Penguin and Oxford ‘Classics’ lists, and though Vintage reproduces the text as
part of its ‘Lives’ series, there is no scholarly introduction or editorial
apparatus. It seems that Roger (to appropriate Woolf’s nickname for the
work) has a bad reputation. This is due, in large part, to Woolf’s own
response. In her diaries and letters, Roger
becomes ‘donkey work & […] sober drudgery’, or nothing more than ‘a
piece of cabinet making’. But it is the connection between Roger and ‘The Art of Biography’ that strikes the fatal blow.
This paper will explore Woolf’s contradictory
theorising of biography, from the optimism of ‘The New Biography’ to the
seeming retractions of ‘The Art of Biography’. Woolf bestows and then strips
biography of its claim to art, with the result that Roger (contemporaneous with ‘The Art of Biography’) has been read
as an embodiment of its conservative aesthetic. I will argue, however, that
Woolf’s later writing on biography, far from enacting a volte face, serves to develop and adapt her earlier position. As such, I will offer a reassessment of
Roger, using its method and practice
to demonstrate an ongoing Woolfian experiment. In Roger, as in her earlier biographical works, Woolf exploits the
productiveness of paradox and contradiction—that ‘something betwixt and
between’ at the heart of ‘The Art of Biography’.
