Journal articles on the topic 'Woolf, Virginia – Criticism and interpretation'

From 2000, criticism on Woolf and the visual has quadrupled in volume. The research work about a photographic Woolf – which include other photographers’ interaction with Woolf such as Gisèle Freund or my own analysis of Woolf and Bell’s personal photo albums – shows how these newer issues of Woolf and photography are now absolutely central in any consideration of Virginia Woolf studies, gaining a noticeable importance when we consider the interdisciplinary issue of photography and gender.

O presente artigo estabelece as relações entre a A room of one’s own e a crítica feminista, observando como essa tem revisto e ressignificado o ensaio de Virginia Woolf. Serão problematizadas questões como a exclusão feminina dos espaços públicos, das esferas políticas e, consequentemente, da literatura e da história. Depois disso, abordaremos a personagem Judith Shakespeare. Por último, duas questões problematizadas serão tratadas nesta análise, a primeira refere-se à tradição literária feminina e a segunda refere-se à própria frase feminina. Palavras-chave: Crítica feminista, Judith Shakespeare, tradição literária feminina. Referências AUERBACH, E. Brown Stocking. In: ______. Mimesis: a representação da realidade na literatura ocidental. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1971. BARRETT, M. Introduction. In: WOOLF, V. A room of one’s own and Three guineas. Introd. Michèle Barrett. London: Penguin, 1993. ______ (ed.). Women and writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979. BOWLBY, R. Feminist destinations and further essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1997. ______. Walking, women and writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse. In: ARMSTRONG, I. (ed.). New Feminist discourses: critical essays on theories and texts. London: Routledge, 1992. CAUGHIE, P. L. Virginia Woolf & postmodernism literature in quest and question of itself. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991. COELHO, N. N. Dicionário crítico de escritoras brasileiras. São Paulo: Escrituras, 2002. ______. A literatura feminina no Brasil contemporâneo. São Paulo: Siciliano, 1993. GILBERT, S. Woman’s Sentence. Man’s Sentencing: Linguistic Fantasies in Woolf and Joyce. In: MARCUS, J. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury: A Centenary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. GILBERT, S.; GILBERT, S. Shakespeare’s sisters: feminist essays on women poets. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1979. ______. The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University, 2000. ______. The war of words. vol.1 of No man’s land: the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century. New Haven: Yale University, 1988. HUSSEY, M. Virginia Woolf: A to Z. New York: Oxford University, 1995. JONES, S. Writing the woman artist: essays on poetics, politics, and portraiture. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 1991. MARCUS, J. Art and anger: reading like a woman. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1988. ______. Virginia Woolf and the languages of the patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1987a. MINOW-PINKNEY, M. Virginia Woolf and the problem of the subject: feminine writing in the major novels. New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2010. MOERS, E. Literary women: the great writers. New York: Doubleday, 1976. MUZART, Z. L. Escritoras brasileiras do século XIX. Florianópolis: Mulheres, 2005. OLSEN, T. Silences. New York: Seymour Lawrence, 1978. RICH, A. Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution. New York: W W. Norton, 1995. ROSENBAUM, S.P. Women and fiction: the manuscript versions of A room of one’s own. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. SHOWALTER, E. Feminist criticism in the wilderness. In: GILBERT, S.; GUBAR, S. Feminist literary theory and criticism. New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2007. SNAITH, A. Introduction. In: WOOLF, V. A room of one’s own and Three guineas. Oxford: Oxford University, 2015. STETZ, M. D. Anita Brookner: Woman writer as reluctant feminist. In: ______. Writing the woman artist: essays on poetics, politics and portraiture. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 1991. WALKER, A. In search of our mother’s gardens. In: ______. In search of our mother’s gardens: womanist prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. WOOLF, V. A room of one’s own and Three guineas. Introd. Anna Snaith. Oxford: Oxford University, 2015. WOOLF, V. A room of one’s own and Three guineas. Introd. Michèle Barrett. London: Penguin, 1993.

Em 2019, Um teto todo seu celebrou seus 90 anos de publicação e Três guinéus foi traduzido e publicado no Brasil pela primeira vez. Esses dois eventos, mais a participação na palestra A room of my own (Um teto todo meu) organizado pelo Durham Book Festival (Festival do Livro de Durham), onde os participantes discutiram os desafios que as escritoras ainda enfrentam nos dias atuais, nos inspirou a publicar o presente artigo, para analisar o papel de Virginia Woolf como crítica e apresentar algumas de suas teorias mais relevantes. Palavras-chave: Virginia Woolf. Autoria feminina. Crítica feminista. Um teto todo seu. Três guinéus. Referências ALMEIDA, Márcia de. Cosima: à procura de um lugar de afirmação da autoria feminina. 2009. Juiz de Fora. Disponível em: http://www.ufjf.br/ppgletras/files/2009/11/COSIMA-%C3%80-PROCURA-DE-UM-LUGAR-DE-AFIRMA%C3%87%C3%83O-DA-AUTORIA-FEMININA-Marcia.pdf. Acesso em: 11 set. 2015. COMPAGNON, Antoine. O demônio da teoria: literatura e senso comum. Tradução Cleonice Paes Barreto Mourão e Consuelo Fortes Santiago. 2. ed. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2010. DERRIDA, Jacques. Essa estranha instituição chamada literatura: uma entrevista com Jacques Derrida. Tradução Marileide Dias Esqueda. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2014. GILBERT, Sandra M.; GUBAR, Susan. No man’s land: the word of wars. New Haven: Yale University, 1988. v. 1. GOLDMAN, Jane. The Cambridge introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2008. LEE, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. LEHMANN, John. Vidas literárias: Virginia Woolf. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1989. MARSH, Nicholas. Virginia Woolf: the novels. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. MOI, Toril. Introduction: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist readings of Woolf. In: ______. Sexual/Textual Politics. 2. ed. London: Routledge, 2002. p. 1-18. NEVES, Caroline R. Virginia Woolf e o espaço autobiográfico em Os anos. Orientadora: Nícea Helena Nogueira. 2018. 117 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras: Estudos Literários) – Faculdade de Letras, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 2018. OLIVEIRA, Maria Aparecida de. A representação feminina na obra de Virginia Woolf: um diálogo entre o projeto político e o estético. Orientadora: Maria Clara Bonetti Paro. 2013. 253 f. Tese (Doutorado em Estudos Literários) – Faculdade de Ciências e Letras, Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio Mesquita Filho (Unesp), Araraquara, 2013. ROSEMBERG, Molly. Foreword. In: WOOLF, Virginia. A room of my own. London: The Royal Society of Literature, 2019. p. 2-3. SHOWALTER, Elaine. A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University, 1999. SHOWALTER, Elaine. Criticism in the wilderness. Critical Inquiry, Chicago, v. 8, n, 2, p. 179-205, 1981. WOOLF, Virginia. A room of one’s own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University, 2015. ______. O valor do riso e outros ensaios. Tradução e organização Leonardo Froés. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2014. ______. Um teto todo seu. Tradução Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2004. ______. Women & writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

Autobiographies are traditionally understood as means of selfredemption or self-validation of the respective autobiographers, but they seem to have become tools of self-assertion in the recent times. The writers of this paper noticed that the underlying patterns in major autobiographies of the respective centuries such as those of Augustine, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Han Suyin and other male or female autobiographers commonly evolve around one’s ethical choices in response to the vices caused by one’s natural will and when facing ethical dilemmas caused by life challenges. This paper examines the abovementioned autobiographies via the Ethical Literary Criticism (ELC). Developed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao since 2004, ELC is one of the most insightful critiques in expounding the relationship of the self with oneself, self with others, and self with the divine or higher moral order in the context of the literary world.

L’ultimo romanzo di Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale. Infanzia, adolescenza, continua una ricerca linguistica incentrata sulla dicotomia lingua/dialetto già evidente nella produzione precedente della scrittrice, mentre sposta l’attenzione dal rapporto madre-figlia a quello tra amiche, sentimento spesso trascurato nella letteratura, non solo italiana. Il saggio analizza gli elementi di continuità e cambiamento nella narrativa di Ferrante alla luce delle riflessioni elaborate del Gender Criticism (Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Marianne Hirsch, Janice Raymond e altri) e delle teorie sullo sviluppo della personalità (Diamond).

Deixis is one of the sub-categories of pragmatics. It plays a very crucial role in making the context understandable. Obviously, understanding the deictic items in a literary text will make the process of interpretation easier. The objective of this research paper is to analyze deixis in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The process of analysis is confined to some samples of the types of deixis that are used in the novel. The use of deictic items in To the Lighthouse participates in enriching the meaning and conveying certain effects. Through the use of deixis, Woolf succeeds in clarifying many details concerning the speaker of utterance, place of utterance, time of utterance etc. Accordingly, this leads to revealing the interior conflict of the characters and the psychological behavior of individuals with one another

This study aims at examining the use of metadiscourse markers in literary criticism texts to identify the role of the reader and how these markers are used to produce more persuasive essays. The data of 72,727 words from 17 texts were written by three well-known authors, namely, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Stanley Fish. Hyland’s (2005) model of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was used to analyze the data. The analysis revealed that metadiscourse markers are used by literary critics to create coherent and persuasive texts. It was found out that the theory of criticism adopted by the literary critics does not affect the use of metadiscourse markers only maybe in terms of relying more on logos, ethos or pathos. The results of this study comply with those of previous research showing that metadiscourse markers are frequently used in literary criticism texts. This study will contribute to both the literary genre and the genre of critical essays by identifying the linguistic features to be used to produce more effective and convincing literary criticism texts. It will also help future critics to write more persuasive texts by highlighting the means that enable them to influence their readers and to produce more coherent and convincing texts. Keywords metadiscourse; persuasion; literary criticism; essays; critical theory

The teaching of the literary essay is usually ignored in many universities due to its probing and inconclusive form which has not favoured the existence of models of analysis. However, the argumentative nature of this discourse can be examined through a reading that allows the recognition of some rhetorical operations like the invention of arguments (inuentio), their arrangement (dispositio) and expressive manifestation (elocutio). This article proposes a model of analysis following this rhetorical approach. In particular, I apply this analysis to a short essay by Virginia Woolf, ‘Royalty’. Woolf has been considered a major writer of the twentieth century. Although the style of her novels has been extensively researched from diverse perspectives, the style of her essays has not received much critical attention. Throughout my study, I indicate how the recognition and interpretation of arguments and rhetorical figures can help to define the style of this essay. Furthermore, I provide some guidelines for the identification and further interpretation of these rhetorical elements. Both the analysis and the guidelines can be useful in the literature and composition classes.

Defined as “the decade of translations”, the 1930s saw the publication of Virginia Woolf’s novels Orlando, Flush, and To the lighthouse in Italian. In the cultural and political context of Fascism, this is unexpected, given the peculiarities of Woolf’s experimental prose. Italian literary criticism was firmly founded on a normative anti-modernist canon, supported by both the Catholic Church, which decried modernism and excommunicated some modernist writers, and by the literary movement led by the anti-Fascist and liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. This de facto intellectual dictatorship complemented the official cultural policy of the Fascist regime by generating another dimension of censorship that invariably affected the publication of periodicals and books. The present work focuses on the effects of this triple (political, moral, and literary) censorship on the first translation of To the lighthouse.

Performing a rereading of Virginia Woolf's 1931 experimental modernist masterpiece of The Waves, in this article I focus on the elusive and conflicted character of Rhoda, whose significance has been either overlooked or marginalized in the available criticism of the narrative. By pointing out a number of problems in the existing scholarship devoted to Rhoda, I propose to define her as a transgressive figure of uncertainty through which Woolf develops a critique of the unitary self. My point of departure for the following essay is Toril Moi's perspective on Woolf's oeuvre as openly feminist and deconstructive. Consequently, I begin with Moi's emphasis on Woolf's commitment to the problematization of the Western male humanism's underlying concept of the unitary self. Drawing from a number of critical and philosophical perspectives, I turn to Kim L. Worthington's idea of subjectivity as a sustained process of interpersonal narrativization in order to offer a more nuanced account of Rhoda's identity as compound and implicated in the dynamics of inter-subjective processes. I also consider Rhoda's much criticized rejection of identity vis-à-vis Woolf's strategy of impersonality, and, contrasting it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concepts of the flesh and anonymous existence, I contend that Rhoda renounces the unitary selfhood, which corroborates Moi's critique of Woolf. Through a close analysis of Rhoda's position versus the other characters, as well as by examining how Rhoda's ego boundaries are delineated in the narrative, I demonstrate that Woolf's conflicted heroine emerges as an astute critic of gendered reality, since she is the one who most acutely feels the dualistic nature of selfhood and it is chiefly through her that Woolf points to the need to overcome this dualism. Shannon Sullivan's feminist revision of the Merleau-Pontian perspective on the anonymity and the body as well as the Deweyan notion of transactionality further helps to elucidate the ways in which Rhoda's experimental and subversive discourse engages in a polemic with the Cartesian conceptualization of identity presupposed on the dualism of mind and body simultaneously inquiring about a possibility of a non-dualistic and non-unitary conception of subjectivity. As a consequence, Rhoda gains authority and agency through uncertainty which prompts her to adopt an uncompromisingly and insistently questioning stance. Finally, I suggest reconsidering Rhoda's suicide as a metaphorical act of ‘distancing,’ as discussed by Zygmunt Bauman, via Adorno, in his 2006 Liquid Fear, another context for approaching Rhoda's uncertainty.

Este artigo reflete sobre a condição humana e seu fim último, a morte, através do romance “To the Lighthouse”, de Virginia Woolf, em que a narrativa se desenvolve na relação entre a vida e a morte. Nas três partes do romance os acontecimentos giram em torno da morte, não só da morte física mas também de uma morte simbólica. Para tanto são apontadas algumas observações sobre subjetivismo e realidade objetiva, sobre temporalidade e sobre a própria prosa moderna nas formulações de Erich Auerbach. Em uma perspectiva empírica a autora aproxima o romance de sua realidade concreta, desnuda a dificuldade da escrita após um evento traumático além de apresentar aos leitores a fragilidade humana diante do inesperado. O presente trabalho foi realizado com apoio da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 001. *** When silence tells what happened: death in "To the Lighthouse" ***This article reflects on the human condition and its ultimate end, death, through Virginia Woolf's novel "To the Lighthouse," where the narrative unfolds in the relationship between life and death. In the three parts of the novel, events revolve around death, not only physical death but also a symbolic death. To this end, some observations on subjectivism and objective reality, on temporality, and on modern prose itself in the formulations of Erich Auerbach are pointed out. In an empirical perspective, the author brings the novel closer to its concrete reality, exposes the difficulty of writing after a traumatic event, as well as presenting the human frailty before the unexpected. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.Keywords: Virginia Woolf; Death; Human condition; Literary criticism.

Abstract Advanced schools of literary research today concur in their disapproval of unscaffolded interpretations of texts that “overhear” the presumed self-communing voices of authors in their solitude. Choosing from among the many antihermeneutic arguments, this essay responds in the main to the “historical poetics” of Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery, with its reconsideration of the lyric poem and its place in the canon and reading practices of modern criticism. Neither direct interpretation of a text that lacks focus on its modes of circulation and transmission nor indeed any sort of interpretation at all has been a constant in the history of criticism. Interpretation has coincided only with periods in which literature as “secular scripture” was considered at once culturally important and difficult to understand—and not even always then, as modernist texts aimed to constitute their own interpretations. If poetry is understood as statement embedded in language, and if it is still both important and difficult, perhaps we can reserve a place for interpretations that are not wholly dependent on the mediatic circumstances of which Jackson and others have taught us to be more fully aware.

Along with the development of cognitive sciences, the study of a literary text aims at broader goals than merely philological. It is connected with the revelation of individual cognitive models through traditional philological interpretation of the text. On the one hand, the basis of the interpretation of a literary text is the so-called picture of the world, which the author creates with the help of his speech, style, knowledge of historical-cultural reality, evaluations and images. On the other hand, it also includes the cognitive, ethical, aesthetic models of the perceiver which the latter applies towards the perception of the discourse, thereby ensuring the understanding of the text.The subject matter of the article is the symbol in the works of Virginia Woolf. The use of various symbols is closely connected with the aesthetic views, life experience, unique way of thinking, world vision, psychological characteristics and the literary direction of the time.Thus, the symbol is an integral part of verbal art.

This article seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the influence of agriculture and farming on literary modernism. It begins with a brief analysis of agriculture in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, before exploring the significance of farming in relation to Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot. Following on from this initial consideration of literary modernism and agriculture, it then proceeds to investigate Ezra Pound's position within environmental modernism, through exploring the influence of the organic husbandry movement on his social and political criticism. In particular, it examines Pound's active engagement with notable organic magazines of the period including the New English Weekly (to which Pound contributed over 200 pieces between 1932–1940 and authored its ‘American Notes’ in 1935) and the Townsman. Through an examination of Pound's affiliation with the organic movement, it will illustrate that their mutual agricultural concerns were invariably connected to the wider financial considerations of economic and monetary reform, including the social credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas.

Nora Gilbert, “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess” (pp. 455–480) Much has been written, both during the Victorian era and in recent literary and cultural-historical criticism, about the plight of the nineteenth-century British governess, a plight that is largely attributed to her uncomfortable position of “status incongruence,” as M. Jeanne Peterson has usefully labeled it. Because the governess was deemed inferior to the family she worked for but superior to the family’s domestic servants, her free time was not uncommonly spent on her own—even, more specifically, in a room of her own. And, just as Virginia Woolf would envision in her landmark feminist treatise, the activity that this isolated, educated woman habitually and productively turned to was the activity of writing. Almost all resident governesses relied on letter writing as their primary source of connection to the outside world, but many also expressed their thoughts and opinions in the form of journals, diaries, memoirs, advice manuals, essays, poems, and works of fiction. Bringing together a diverse sampling of fictional and nonfictional accounts of the governess’s relationship to authorship (and paying particular attention to the novels and letters of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, our best-known and most culturally resonant governesses-turned-authoresses), this essay outlines the ways in which the governess, both as an iconic figure and as a real, writing woman, influenced the formal, stylistic, and thematic development of nineteenth-century women’s literature.

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705 ; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge. In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman. My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “ southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter — his Virginian material — or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work.

I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice…”. Woolf’s belief has been put to the test in the Bloomsbury Group and this paper intends to investigate the validity of her claim through a critical analysis of the selected works of its novelist members. In a central part of London during the first half of the twentieth century a group of intellectual and literary writers, artists, critics and an economist came together which later on was labeled as Bloomsbury group. The group’s members had an influential role in blooming novel in a different form of expression and profoundly affect its literary figures, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, in the composition of their fictions The Waves, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Room with a view and Howards End. The formation of Bloomsbury circle acted as a bridge from the Victorian bigotries and narrow-mindedness to the unbounded era of modernism as they searched for universal peace, individual liberalism and human accomplishments due to ideal social norms. They freely exchanged their views on variety of subjects without any limitation. The reasons behind their popularity compared to several contemporary groups were their innumerable works, the clarification of their lives through their diaries, biographies and autobiographies and their diverse kinds of activities such as criticism, painting, politics and literary writings. They were adherents of truth, goodness, enjoyment of beautiful object, intrinsic values, aesthetics, friendship and personal relationship. Intellectual intimacy and cooperation can be considered as the main attribute of its members as they collaborate with each other and employ the fundamental tenets of the group within their works. The modern style of its artists as post-impressionist highly affects the narration technique of its literary figures. These novelists tried to narrate the verbal utterances in a visual way as if the whole of the story is depicted on a canvas. Furthermore, this paper tries to discover the role of the non-literary (painters and critics) members of the group in blooming and forming of a different and novel kind of narration technique, namely ‘stream of consciousness’, through the visual impact of the painter and the discussion method of critic members of the group.

Entre as produções poéticas de autoria feminina da atualidade, a que mais se destaca são as obras de Angélica de Freitas. Com punhos armados de humor, ironia e sarcasmo, ela passa por cima de qualquer tabu. Suas poesias são como pedras atiradas, defendendo que a pluralidade de vozes implica numa pluralidade de gêneros, que expõem as dicotomias sobre o homem e a mulher que a sociedade patriarcal quer impor. Palavras-chave: Gênero. Poesia. Autoria feminina. Referências ALVES, Branca Moreira; PITANGUY, Jacqueline. O que é feminismo? São Paulo: Abril Cultural/Brasiliense, 1985. BASSANEZI, Carla. Mulheres dos anos dourados. In: PRIORE, Mary Del (org.). História das mulheres no Brasil. 7. ed. São Paulo: Contexto, 2004. p. 607- 639. BEAUVOIR, Simone de. O segundo sexo. Tradução de Sérgio Milliet. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1980. BUTLER, Judith. Problemas de gênero. 8. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2015. p. 1-70. DUARTE, Constância Lima. Feminismo e literatura no Brasil. Estudos Avançados, São Paulo, n. 17, 2003. ______. O cânone literário e a autoria feminina. In: AGUIAR, Neuma (org.). Gênero e ciências humanas: desafio às ciências desde a perspectiva das mulheres. Rio de Janeiro: Rosa dos Tempos, 1997. EVARISTO, Conceição. Eu-mulher. In: ______. Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2008. FREITAS, Angélica. Rilke shake. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007. ______ . Um útero é do tamanho de um punho. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012. MARTINS MARQUES, Ana. Da arte das armadilhas. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011. ______. O livro das semelhanças. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015. ______. A vida submarina. Belo Horizonte: Scriptum, 2009. OLIVEIRA, Rosiska Darcy de. As mulheres em movimento: feminizar o mundo. In: ______. Elogio da diferença: o feminismo emergente. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2012. p. 69-90. PIETRANI, Anélia Montechiari. Questões de gênero e política da imaginação na poesia de Angélica Freitas. Revista Fórum Identidades, Itabaiana, v. 14, jul./dez. 2013. RIBEIRO, Ana Elisa. Anzol de pescar infernos. São Paulo: Patuá, 2013. ______. Meus segredos com Capitu: livros, leituras e outros paraísos. Natal: Jovens Escribas, 2013. RODRIGUES, Carla et al. A quarta onda do feminismo: dossiê. Cult, São Paulo, ano 19, n.219, p. 30-47, dez. 2016. SHOWALTER, Elaine (ed.). The new feminist criticism: essays on women, literature and theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985. ______. A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Londres: Virago, 2009. TELLES, Norma. Escritoras, escritas, escrituras. In: PRIORE, Mary Del (org.). História das mulheres no Brasil. 7. ed. São Paulo: Contexto, 2004. p. 401-442. WOOLF, Virginia. Um teto todo seu. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1985.

In "On Being Ill" Virginia Woolf asks why novelists have routinely preferred certain emotions over illness for driving plot. They have canonized passions as much as plotlines: love motivates protagonists; jealousy sustains entire trilogies; loneliness wins our sympathy, but illness almost never drives an epic. Illness does, in fact, have thematic potential: the ill could be catalysts for climax because they are direct. "A childish outspokenness [exists] in illness; things are said, truths blurted out" (13). Because the sick already foresee their deaths, they invest less in the future but want more from the moment. They would find strong antagonists in their already-canonical opposites, the Vigorous. Why couldn't "The Good and the Bad" give way to "The Healthy and the Diseased"? Woolf wants to direct our attention, at least, to this possibility. She does also admit to the impracticality of reinventing our methods of interpretation. We inhabit ideologies, as Slavoj Zizek later tells us in different words. Woolf herself avoids the technical, impersonal term "ideology" but, I will argue, she develops a model of the rules that circumscribe her culture. She argues that interpretive strategies for literary and daily events motivate each other: we have come to expect a rise and fall, a tragedy and dénouement, in our lives and our books. I suggest not only that she describes ideology but that she also prefigures what could be called a modern strategy of escape: she suggests we can only figure the boundaries of ideology by performing our victimization to them. Woolf begins by offering exaggerated versions of the existing categories of the "healthy" and "sick." She positions herself - as an author of a sane, or comprehensible, text - on the side of the healthy. She finally performs a seemingly self-conscious failure by slipping onto the side of the diseased. Here she enacts the martyrdom that Slavoj Zizek has elsewhere argued is the sole way to gesture outside of symbolic systems we inhabit. Woolf and Zizek's models diverge in argumentative style but converge in an emphasis on the sick. Both suggest the sick have sole, limited access to pre-symbolic instincts, if not to pre-symbolic thinking. Both suggest communities sustain ideology through a refusal to incorporate moments of disjunction or trauma into the public stories they create. Healthy subjects refuse the destruction of extreme surprise; only the sick lack the energy necessary for the same sustained self-preservation. Woolf especially credits biology for the difference. The ill have unique access to unconventional ideas not because of intelligence or a passionate decision, but because they lack the physical resources for sustaining a public story. Of course this biological binary also partially restricts Woolf to one side of the divide: as long as she sustains a literary dialogue, she contributes to the very literary conventions that model public myth. All acts of communication (literary and other) help sustain ideology, which is simply the story that can elicit understanding between healthy members of a community. "The army of the upright marches to battle," Woolf writes (16): bakers, shoemakers, politicians, and even allegedly racial philosophers play the roles needed to allow a joint drama to run fluidly. "In health [a constant] pretence [is] kept up" (14); ultimately only when we radically, biologically change - when "the bed is called for [and we] cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright [- can] we become deserters" (14), which is also precisely why Woolf's "we" here is performative. She voices transgression while surrendering her claims to it. With "we" she recovers pre-symbolic instinct: "…still we must wriggle. We can not stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds" (17). She sometimes suggests ideology is less universal than contingently psychological: We simply want our life stories, like some long book we have started to read, to keep making the sense we have invested in. Zizek in turn consistently insists on an impermeable division between ideology and what lies beyond it. He would agree with Woolf that by merely partaking in language games, we confirm and sustain a dominant symbolic order. But Zizek harbors less hope for "escape." He argues that linguistic systems necessarily commit their inhabitants to boundaries. Language is the structure of ideology, which always successfully hides its secret, Lacan's objet petit a, within it. Symbolic systems, and the political systems that use them to instate their control, avoid the central lack, even though efforts at "avoidance" are actually unnecessary. The objet petit a is defined precisely as that surplus that escapes signification. To mention the unmentionable is already impossible. Zizek's subjects sustain public myth merely by acting sane: "Our belief is already materialized in the external ritual; in other words, we already believe unconsciously" (Object 43). Even political revolutionaries who attempt resistance contribute to a public story by weighing in on one side of an existing dichotomy. Zizek explains that the Jacobites failed because they failed to rethink the system they inhabited. They severed the head of a King instead of convincing themselves that the king was a mere human being. Admitting to the terms of monarchy meant preserving the system; and ultimately, whoever fights or argues within a system preserves some of its foundations. Zizek's model does echo Woolf's when he states that only the sick escape the cycle of perpetuity: "The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject….who is not really caught up in the signifying network" (Object 166). Those who can 'think new' are those who misread language altogether. Having established the division common to both theorists, Woolf finds herself in an impasse. She leaves herself no room for intellectual reinvention. In the end of her essay, she drops her own voice to point to someone else's work. She offers us Augustus Hare and titles him a second life-model alongside the Sick, as the Untalented. The untalented and sick relate because both fail through biological limitation; both escape genre by a natural inability to produce it. So Woolf makes a strange rhetorical move, devoting an unbalanced last fourth of her essay to summarizing Hare's bad novel, The Story of Two Noble Lives. She ends her own work with a book she says "flounders" (20); Hare's story is sick in temper, or poorly edited; he describes insignificancies when he needs clarity. She finishes on her own descriptive word, "agony," describing Hare's own suffering heroine. This final imbalance marks Woolf's refusal to finish, and it finds an important companion strategy in her choice of words. Woolf's rhetorical move here recurs often in her speeches, which benefit from the verbal play. She picks a central term that falls short of its alleged duty (here, "Illness"; in "Craftsmanship," it was "words"). She positions the refrain as if it fully encompassed the central subject of her work and positions herself as the narrator who wants to speak merely about "illness." Of course, as said, Woolf is actually talking about more than the status of the sick in literature in "On Being Ill." She is trying to suggest several possible avenues to the unexpected. She nonetheless launches the essay pretending to be talking about the ill, and throughout continues to enact her own satisfaction with the subject. Zizek clarifies again: Woolf shows some complicity in ideology by performing a game she knows to be flawed but "proceeds as if [she] did not know" (For 53). Zizek characterizes the members of any ideology by that schizophrenia: subjects know that prevailing assumptions are flawed but proceed as if they did not know. A subject would never be able to claim that 'the objet petit a lies here' or that, 'the emperor is wearing no clothes,' because the nudity or lack at the center of a symbolic system is actually defined by its inaccessibility. Efforts to name the objet petit a might, at best, shift its location. This division inherent to ideology - between knowledge and the inability to change - is also our only potential insight into its failures. We cannot unravel a story while we partake in it; we can only reinvest in its existing terms. But Zizek suggests we might be able to signify a flaw by becoming martyrs to the system we inhabit. A martyr like Socrates performs his complicity within a system but then falls victim to it, silently revealing the flaw at the center of the system that condemns him. Both Zizek and Henry Sussman mention Socrates as a subject who performs an ironic martyrdom: He refuses to fight or take sides in Athenian law but allows the performance of his failure to explain what he can not fully say, himself. Woolf becomes a similar sort of martyr when she silently surrenders to the failure of her central term. She sets the scene for her own failure, which Zizek calls the "'dramatization' [which] gives the lie to the theoretical position by bringing out its implicit presuppositions" (For 42). Woolf's refusal to note the limitations of her central term also strengthens the effect of her failure by allowing the reader to work for her own discoveries. The reader feels more allegiance to what she uncovers herself than to the issues Woolf directly develops (like the status of the sick in the canon; our forced sympathies, etc..). The reader who privately interprets also encounters a certain subtlety in the text that strengthens her relationship to her discoveries. Woolf's central term, "illness," is - however incomplete - actually not so distant from the central idea of the essay. Woolf does not use the term overtly ironically or even as a metaphor to speak of a distinct second topic. "Illness" is in fact almost sufficient for Woolf's central idea. And even though we are left to note the gap between that term in the title and the developing ideas, Woolf's emphatic embrace of the word does not entail overt acting on her part. She performs and does not perform. She, even more importantly, refuses to acknowledge her performance, leaving us to trust our own instincts in a new interpretation. The decision to trust our own interpretation is hard: with even a slight shift in our ideas about the history of reading (imagining Woolf's Victorian residue, her faith in the very language she struggles to rework), her intent looms impossibly distant. We might imagine Woolf's own complicity with her central term. Like this, she becomes Zizek's "master," a self-satisfied leader who looks away from us. We are attracted by her distraction but are suspended in our desire to know what she keeps from us. On the one hand we can guess that Woolf is satisfied with her terms. On the other hand, we note her failure and are excited by a search for her unspoken frustration. Woolf's final silence excites us to independent imagination (why doesn't she criticize her terms?). We experience a free-falling freedom that would not have come through a direct explanation of language. Woolf can find no perfect central term; she motions towards the flaws in all central terms, and somehow comments on the impossibility of health. References Woolf, Virginia. The Moment: And Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Sussman, Henry. The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press,1982. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991.

A creative assignment for an Introductory Literary Theory and Criticism course, The Battle of the Dubyas: Romantic vs. early Modernist version depicts a fictional dialogue between the Romantic poet William Wordsworth and modern writer Virginia Woolf. The informal nature of a dialogue allows for a heated debate between the two theorists, where their distinct style of speaking—Woolf with her many dashes and Wordsworth with his complete sentences—convey the periodical and ideological differences. The first subject of the debate is the topic of androgyny, where Woolf explains the demerits of confining writing to a single­sexed medium—whether it be an overtly direct writing, or covertly complicated one—and chides Wordsworth for being too masculine in his thought. The second topic arrives at the issue of material conditions needed for literary genius—where Wordsworth’s notion of the Poet transcending all physical obstacles is debunked and silenced by Woolf’s fictional account of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith. Between the opposing stances of each theorist’s views on gender divide in writing and nature vs. nurture in breeding genius, Woolf’s ideals of androgyny and material necessity for genius triumph that of Wordsworth’s arcane and masculine views on natural genius of the Poet.

History is usually written by the winners; those who lose retain their own. The extent to which these differ and whether the differences affect the fate of mankind are all issues that require constant rendering and re-examination. The future confidently retains the answers, but do these answers change the circumstances? Can philosophy, feminist literary criticism or post-structural theories obscure the meaning of fiction? We are composed of strange particles that create our being and identity, which does not likely pave the way to our becoming true by solely ‘static’ existence, but by one that unites the past, present and the future. Such particles placed on the platform of literary expression sometimes have the character of a more permanent testimony to history, either written, or tobe-written. One figure, who struggled to raise our awareness and to remind us that the essay can represent a dialogue, that the reader carries special importance and a role in both the creation and reception of artistic skills, yet that language and meaning do not have a stable structure, was Virginia Adeline Stephen Woolf, who was rewriting and reclaiming both individual and common histories. Reflecting on the dilemmas and perplexities of both historical and fictional structural norms in literature, Mrs. Woolf unobtrusively portrayed an androgynous and ever-living creature in her novel Orlando, who seeks, among other feats, to re-evaluate the importance of witnessing and re-examining history

Maclear, Kyo. Virginia Wolf. Illus. Isabelle Arsenault. Toronto : Kids Can Press, 2010. Print. Vanessa awakes one morning to find her sister, Virginia, transformed. Virginia is not herself. She has become furtive and embittered, snippy and distinctly wolfish. While Isabelle Arsenault's illustrations have a consistent prettiness and amiable levity, the ambiguous and slightly sinister nature of Virginia's' transformation is undeniable. Kyo Maclear's narrative balances how children will interpret the change that has come over Virginia and Vanessa's attempts to return her sister to herself and how adults will understand the allusions to depression and alienation. Virginia is literally - in the context of a child's understanding and the illustrations - a wolf in an archetypal little girl's dress. She is also genuinely frightening in the depths and intensity of her withdrawal and this gives Virginia Wolf a lovely little frisson of fairy tale dread. Vanessa perseveres in trying to redeem her sister and rescue her from her dour transformation. It is creativity, honesty of self-expression and love that eventually reestablish the sister's rapport. As Maclear elegantly conveys, accompanied by an inspired and expressive page design, “Down became up. Dim became bright. Gloom became glad.” Inspired by Maclear's creative interpretation of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the story can be enjoyed at many different levels. The reader can certainly intuit how much the writer and artist enjoy each other’s work and are relishing the imaginative potential of their subject matter. The layered complexity of the text is enriched by the intuitive collaboration between artist and writer evident in the evocative text and toothsomely vivid illustrations.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda Roche Matilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud.

In March 2020, co-authors burrough and Starnaman with Technical Director Dale MacDonald had just finished collaborating on a work of computational art, A Kitchen of One’s Own, for The Photographers’ Gallery in London. In this essay we discuss the genealogy of our Zoom performance, Epic Handwashing for Synchronous Participation, which was an extension of two earlier projects—one that was derailed due to COVID-19, and the other that resulted from our pivot towards reflecting on the pandemic experience. Our performance was a response to, and offered a collaborative moment of reflection on, the uncertain moment in time of living in a global pandemic and understanding our experience through participatory art. A Kitchen of One’s Own was commissioned for “Data/Set/Match”—a year-long program dedicated to analysing, interpreting, and visualising image datasets (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald). The image dataset we interpreted is Epic Kitchens’ 2018 collection. Epic Kitchens is a dataset of videos collected by a group of researchers whose participants create non-scripted recordings of daily activities in kitchens. It is the largest known dataset produced using first-person vision. Researchers assign each recorded action with a verb like “wash”, “peel”, “toast”, or “rub” to describe and categorise the event. Our project juxtaposed the videos from Epic Kitchens with quotes from a dataset created by Starnaman with research assistant Alyssa Yates. This work was scheduled for installation on the approximately nine by nine-foot media wall, viewable to the public inside the gallery and to passersby on the street in London’s SoHo neighborhood. However, the work was not sent until May because of the COVID-19 lockdowns in London and Dallas. Thus, feeling trapped and frustrated in our respective homes, totally separated by quarantine, but close in distance, we responded to our historical moment with art. Figure 1: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman with technical direction by Dale MacDonald, A Kitchen of One’s Own, single frame on the media wall seen from Ramilles Street. The Photographers’ Gallery, London, October 2020. A Kitchen of One’s Own explored personal and domestic kitchen spaces as mundane, politically-charged, and inspirational (fig. 1). The familiar, comforting space of the home kitchen became charged with domestic tropes of the pandemic: hand washing, sanitising, and cooking. We explained, A Kitchen of One’s Own is a speculative remix that confronts Epic Kitchens, a dataset of first-person cooking videos, with quotes from articles and social media posts on sexual harassment in professional and domestic kitchens, podcasts about the kitchen as a political space, and reflective texts by women authors about food and cooking. (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Kitchen”) Taking inspiration from our Kitchen project, we pivoted for audiences online with a browser-based project, Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. This project (fig. 2) showcases 68 videos found in Epic Kitchens’ 2018 dataset that had been tagged by researchers with the keywords “wash” or “hand”, which burrough and MacDonald optimised for the web browser and republished in a showcase on Vimeo (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Epic”). Starnaman and burrough developed a new dataset of complementary quotes for this iteration including selections from literature written during or about pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Figure 2: Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. Browser-based project for The Photographers’ Gallery and Unthinking Photography. March 2020 (https://unthinking.photography/projects/epichandwashing/). We developed Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation (fig. 3) as a Zoom performance of our browser-based project for a virtual engagement session at the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) conference in the summer of 2020 (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic”). In this article, we illustrate these projects as a series of interrelated investigations, and centre on the Zoom performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. We then reflect on the way these works engage a range of public audiences and participants. Figure 3: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. Virtual engagement session and participatory performance hosted on Zoom for the ELO conference. This still frame shows a final group performance of hand washing at 21:56 (the complete session was 27:32). July 2020. Blurring Boundaries: Audiences, Participants, Maintenance, and Labour Our past projects demonstrate our commitment to participatory creative practices in which the boundary between audience members, performers, and participants is blurred in the generation of the work of art. Our earliest collaboration, The Laboring Self, was an installation of cardboard cut to the shape of virtual workers’ hands. We collected tracings of hands from workers on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk work platform and laser-cut them from recycled Amazon boxes. In the gallery we invited participants to inscribe or embroider the hands with statements about work before adding them to The Laboring Self installation. Audience members shared their stories, sentiments, anxieties, and hopes about the labour they perform in their everyday lives on hands that crowded a wall space during the span of the exhibition (fig. 4). This work was inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles's 1970s feminist performances in maintenance art, which elevated care-taking and everyday “maintenance” activities to the platform of fine art. In Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Ukeles confronts the boundary between her everyday performance as a mother, woman, and artist. In particular, with regard to maintenance, Ukeles proposes to “simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art” (qtd. in Burnham). So too, we exhibited the hands of hidden workers to bring visibility to the invisible and asked audience members to become participants by putting on view their own reflections on the various forms of labour they embody. Figure 4: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, The Laboring Self, installation view approximately 8 by 10 feet. The Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. October 2017-January 2018. For our more recent Zoom-based performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation, we again focus on the hands of our audience members-turned participatory performers. As Ukeles used her hands to wash the steps of an urban museum, turning often invisible labour visible through performance, we sought to make the private act of hand washing—an act of personal protection and civic duty—a public performance in the digital town square. The individual hand, which has been central to our work in the past, synecdochally represents the worker, or in this case the person-turned-public-health-citizen. In a world of ubiquitous Zoom calls, the focus is almost always on our faces, our bodies cut off around the shoulders or mid-torso. Hands are but a fleeting on-screen guest. Yet, for this performance, our hands were at the centre of the screen, standing in for our physical effort and existential fear. Directions for Participants Before our performance, we shared this set of directions with participants: Prepare to wash your hands on Zoom in real time by setting up a camera to live stream or recruit a person to film you near your sink. Log into the Zoom link provided. Wash your hands on camera for 20 seconds while we read along with your performance. Notes from the Live Event On 18 July 2020, about 24 people participated in our event as solo participants, as couples, and as families on one Zoom call. The invitation to this project included the instruction to be camera-ready for hand washing at any household sink, so our participatory public entered the call from their kitchens and bathrooms. Before our formal introduction, a couple of tech-savvy kids drew on the Zoom screen (fig. 5), initiating a spirit of playfulness that the adults on the call stepped right into. While we had anticipated this event would elicit a sense of communal action, we were not prepared for just how community- and play-starved we all were. Figure 5: Opening Title Slide, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. ELO Virtual Engagement Session. 18 July 2020. We set the stage for the performance by introducing Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives, our spring 2020 browser-based project, and gave participants a moment to click through it and to read the texts we had culled for our database of “pandemic quotes” (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic Hand Washing Text Dataset”). Then we explained that our facilitator and Zoom host, John Murray, would be calling on the participants one at a time to wash their hands, while we took turns reading quotes from our archive. The first participant quietly washed their hands, and the pairing of our first quote created a serious tone: “so, at the bidding of the queen, they washed their hands, and all took their places…” (Boccaccio 26). However, the rhythm of the call and response, and the joy of witnessing each other in our various households across the globe, lightened the experience. We, along with participants, reveled in the intimate hygienic dance of hand washing at kitchen sinks and bathroom vanities; one after another we shifted our presence to another person’s living quarters and joined them at the sink. This was a truly mixed, global group. Scholars and artists for whom ELO is a disciplinary home rubbed virtual shoulders with our friends and their own friends who would not have attended ELO otherwise. This event replicated the same kind of shared experience across time and space that the archive of pandemic and hand washing texts elicited. These texts bring humanity together through the calamity of plague and disease, allowing for a sense of larger community, and that is exactly what we saw on the screen: human experience mediated by the screen in conversation with writers across time and connected by the word. Moreover, this event took place in July 2020, a time of “early pandemic”, a time when the complete unknown of the epidemic had given way to the acceptance of quarantining, but before the exhaustion and cynicism of The Long Confinement and Zoom fatigue had fully set in. Thus, we saw an enthusiasm to connect and play with the medium in a way that might have been impossible eight months later. Synchronous Participation as a Performance While the complete performance is archived on the ELO website, we have excerpted a clip from the performance for analysis (burrough and Starnaman, “Excerpt”). It is a 2:15 clip from the middle of the performance, during which we took turns reading quotes from our database while participants washed their hands on camera, one at a time. We showcase this selection of the performance to highlight the repetition embedded in the script. Our directions for participants and our moderator, John Murray, became repetitive mantras throughout the performance, while the reading of the quotes gave participants space to wash their hands. We read four quotes for each participant, which we measured to leave approximately thirty seconds of time for hand washing. We wanted participants to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds, following the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) guidelines, and we predicted that there would be moments when we would begin reading but participants would not yet be washing their hands. Since their performances were out of our control, we decided to read for slightly more than twenty seconds for each participant. From 0 to 22 seconds, Sabrina and our moderator, John Murray, enact the transitional directions between participants. At the start of the clip, Sabrina thanks the participants who have just finished washing their hands—our friends’ twin children, Cora and Henry, who fill the screen in Zoom’s Spotlight mode until eight seconds. The twins are at a double-vanity, washing their hands in coordinated outfits, and moving towards separate towels at the left and right sides of the screen at six seconds. At eight seconds Sabrina is spotlighted. She directs our moderator with the same “set-up phrase” that we repeat throughout the performance: “please mute everyone but us and the next selected hand washer, and don’t forget to change the spotlight to them. When you’re ready, announce who will begin washing their hands.” From 12 to 22 seconds participants are visible in Gallery View while John announces that Tina Escaga will wash their hands next (fig. 6). From 0:22 to 1:07 Tina appears in Spotlight mode. The screen is filled with Tina in the bathroom washing their hands with a white bar of soap. The next set of four quotes are read by xtine, as we watch Tina perform hand washing: "Can we not contrive that he somehow wash himself a little, that he stink not so shrewdly?” (Boccaccio 149). “We are now close to a well, which is never without the pulley and a large bucket; ’tis but a step thither, and we will wash him out of hand” (Boccaccio 149). “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language” (Woolf 33). “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache” (Woolf 34). Figure 6: Tina washes their hands at the sink with a white bar of soap. From 1:01 to 1:29 xtine thanks Tina, repeats the set-up phrase to John, and John announces that Renee Carmichael is the next performer. The spotlight shifts from Tina to xtine to Gallery View to Renee. From 1:29 to 2:00 Renee appears at their kitchen sink and washes their hands in Spotlight mode as Sabrina can be heard reading the following four quotes: “We’ve not seen anything of the sort before...” (Camus 6). “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” (Camus 1). “It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature” (Woolf 32). “They determined to attach him to the rope, and lower him into the well, there to wash himself...” (Boccaccio 149). From 2:00 to 2:15 Sabrina thanks Renee, repeats the set-up phrase, and John announces “OK, next up, Leo”. From 2:00 to 2:07 we see Sabrina in Spotlight mode, at 2:07 to 2:15 participants are visible in Gallery View, and though this clip ends at 2:15, in the full-length documentation of the performance, Leo is next seen in the Spotlight. In this short clip, it is evident that the repetition of the performance directions sets the stage for our audience / guests / performers, who voluntarily came to this ELO virtual engagement without prior rehearsal. Cora and Henry, Tina, and Renee are prepared with the camera near their sinks and wash their hands for the complete duration of our reading. Tina and Renee (and all of our adult participants) are seen in the video wearing headphones or earbuds for their performance. Our directions did not advise this, but we were encouraged to see that the participants thought ahead about their technical engagement. We also did not advise participants to turn off the water while they were scrubbing their hands. If we were to restage the event, we would include this for water sustainability purposes. It should not be so surprising to us, but we are still amazed at how thoroughly all of our participants washed their hands. Clearly, our performers had watched the directions provided by the CDC for washing viral matter from our bodies. Conclusion Our original project A Kitchen of One’s Own had viewers peering into the recorded kitchen scenes of anonymous participants in person at The Photographers’ Gallery or through the gallery window on Ramillies Street in SoHo, London. Viewers watched the private actions of strangers in their kitchens while being presented with various texts. Some offered descriptions of sexual harassment in often famous professional kitchens and others, the meditations of women about the significance of creation in their home kitchen. This developed an exploration of the significance of women’s experience in place. While fewer people were able to visit the gallery installation, A Kitchen of One’s Own, in London due to the pandemic, many people viewed Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narrative online. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation put the audience in the domestic space while sharing the historic, traumatic experience of a pandemic, dislocated across time. It invited an entirely online audience to experience a live performance of hand washing at the sinks of strangers and friends, fully mediated through screens on both sides. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation did exactly what we named it to do—engage people in a live, synchronous elevation of a mundane human action in a personal, yet ubiquitous space to a work of art, while experiencing the asynchronous voices of people who had already lived through global pandemics. This iteration offered us the embodied experience we had originally envisioned for A Kitchen of One’s Own. As a result of the pandemic, people in technologically connected communities are intimately familiar with the online interactive public that was once the realm of digitally savvy producers and users. This reality thus broadens the audience for our online projects. Our previous browser-based art and archive project An Archive of Unnamed Women was largely visited at workshops and conference presentations that we hosted. In previous projects like The Laboring Self, which was installed at the DMA and in the lobby of the California State University, San Marcos library, we transformed library patrons into a participatory-art public. In a moment of transformation, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation reinvented the pedestrian action of hand washing, like turning an ordinary visit to the library into an encounter with art. Similarly, it reinvented the ubiquitous act of hand washing into a live-for-Zoom performance. We are intrigued by transformation, and this shows in the way we accompany a project though many different forms before moving on to something completely different; our work is iterative by nature. A Kitchen of One’s Own germinated from our project An Archive of Unnamed Women, which pairs images of unnamed women from the New York Public Library with textual selections from fiction by women about women (“Archive of Unnamed Women”). That project engaged the archive and sought to reclaim these women from the obscurity of history. A Kitchen of One's Own took us into the kitchen, exploring what it means for women to labour and create in kitchens, both in ease and amid the duress of sexism and sexual harassment, through videos paired with text. With the pandemic arising in the U.S. and Europe in Spring 2020, we were swept up into the shared confusion, and like so many, we sought to make sense of a moment so catastrophic. We turned to writers of the past who had endured plagues and epidemics to help us gain clarity, creating a video and text synthesis that again allows for speculative meaning-making through fortuitous pairings. Presently, we are evolving this project from pandemic to enlightenment, with an iteration that takes up as inspiration the Instructions for the Zen Cook by thirteenth century Zen Master Eihei Dōgen Zenji. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation is an iterative work arising from the tensions of a time in transformative upheaval. It was one way we sought to make sense and bring people together in a playful experience that was beyond easy understanding. References Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Filippo and Bernardo Giunti: 1370-71. Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Edition. <http://flc.ahnu.edu.cn/__local/7/E7/75/6AB8DEBA692DD0CF6790CA70701_26DE4EC2_17EED4.pdf?e=.pdf>. Burnham, Jack. “Problems of Criticism IX: Art and Technology.” ArtForum (Jan. 1971). <http://www.artforum.com/print/197101/problems-of-criticism-ix-art-and-technology-38921>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman. “Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation.” Electronic Literature Organization Virtual Engagement Session. July 2020. <http://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2020/live/events/12>. ———. “Excerpt of ELO Virtual Engagement, ‘Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation’ (2:15).” Vimeo, 19 May 2021. <http://vimeo.com/xtineburrough/elo-zoom>. ———. The Laboring Self. Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. Oct. 2017 to Jan. 2018. <http://dma.org/visit-center-creative-connections-community-projects/laboring-self>. ———. Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives: Text Dataset. Mar. 2020. <http://drive.google.com/file/d/1hSV-9l_ETTOruBpI-NCOChjuPtprlZue/view>. ———. An Archive of Unnamed Women. Browser-based project. Oct. 2019. <http://visiblewomen.net/unnamed-women/index.html>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman, with Technical Direction from Dale MacDonald. “A Kitchen of One’s Own.” The Photographers’ Gallery, 1-28 Oct. 2020. <http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/akitchenofonesown>. ———. “Epic Hand Washing.” Vimeo. <https://vimeo.com/showcase/4611141>. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Gallimard, 1947. <http://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-plague.pdf>. Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The Criterion, 1926. <http://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf>.

Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.

This article is a comparison of two remarkably different takes on a single subject, namely the shifting meaning of the word ‘publishing’ brought about by the changes in literacy habits related to Web 2.0. One the one hand, we have Andrew Keen’s much lambasted 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, which is essentially an attempt to defend traditional gatekeeper models of cultural production by denigrating online, user-generated content. The second is Spin journalist Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good, focusing on the Emo subculture of the early 2000s and its reliance on Web 2.0 as an integral medium for communication and the accumulation of subcultural capital. What I want to suggest in this article is that these two books, with their contrasting readings of Web 2.0, both tell us something specific about what the word “publishing” means and how it is currently undergoing a significant change brought about by a radical adaptation of literacy practices. What I think both books also do is give us an insight into how those changes are being interpreted, to be rejected on the one hand and applauded on the other. Both books have their faults. Keen’s work can fairly easily be passed off as a sort of cantankerous reminiscence for the legitimacy of an earlier era of publishing, and Greenwald’s Emos have, like all teen subcultures, changed somewhat. Yet what both books portray is an attempt to digest how Web 2.0 has altered perceptions of what constitutes legitimate speaking positions and how that is reflected in the literacy practices that shape the relationships among authors, readers, and the channels through which they interact. Their primary difference is a disparity in the value they place on Web 2.0’s amplification of the Internet’s use as a social and communicative medium. Greenwald embraces it as the facilitator of an open-access dialogue, whereas Keen sees it as a direct threat to other, more traditional, gatekeeper genres. Accordingly, Keen begins his book with a lament that Web 2.0’s “democratization” of media is “undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience, and talent … it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions” (15). He continues, Today’s editors, technicians, and cultural gatekeepers—the experts across an array of fields—are necessary to help us to sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored. (45) As examples of the “white noise,” he lists some of the core features of Web 2.0—blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. The notable similarity between all of these is that their content is user generated and, accordingly, comes from the position of the personal, rather than from a gatekeeper. In terms of their readership, this presents a fundamental shift in an understanding of authenticated speaking positions, one which Keen suggests underwrites reliability by removing the presence of certifiable expertise. He looks at Web 2.0 and sees a mass of low grade, personal content overwhelming traditional benchmarks of quality and accountability. His definition of “publishing” is essentially one in which a few, carefully groomed producers express work seen as relevant to the wider community. The relationship between reader and writer is primarily one sided, mediated by a gatekeeper and rests on the assumption by all involved that the producer has the legitimacy to speak to a large, and largely silent, readership. Greenwald, by contrast, looks at the same genres and comes to a remarkably different and far more positive conclusion. He focuses heavily on the lively message boards of the social networking site Makeoutclub, the shift to a long tail marketing style by key Emo record labels such as Vagrant and Drive-Thru Records and, in particular, the widespread use of LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) by suburban, Emo fixated teenagers. Of this he writes: The language is inflated, coded as ‘adult’ and ‘poetic’, which often translates into affected, stilted and forced. But if one can accept that, there’s a sweet vulnerability to it. The world of LiveJournal is an enclosed circuit where everyone has agreed to check their cynicism at the sign on screen; it’s a pulsing, swoony realm of inflated emotions, expectations and dialogue. (287) He specifically notes that one cannot read mediums like LiveJournal in the same style as their more traditional counterparts. There is a necessity to adopt a reading style conducive to a dialogue devoid of conventional quality controls. It is also, he notes, a heavily interconnected, inherently social medium: LiveJournals represent the truest and easiest realization of the essential teenage (and artistic) tenet of the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’, and yet the framework of the website is enough to make each individual room interconnected into a mosaic of richly felt lives. (288) Where Keen sees Web 2.0 as a shift way from established cultural forums, Greenwald sees it as an interconnected conversation. His definition of publishing is more fluid, founded on a belief not in the authenticity of a single, validated voice but on the legitimacy of interaction and communication entirely devoid of any gatekeepers. Central to understanding the difference between Greenwald and Keen is the issue or whether or not we accept the legitimacy of personal voices and how we evaluate the kind of reading practices involved in interpreting them. In this respect, Greenwald’s reference to “a room of one’s own” is telling. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, Web 2.0 wasn’t even a consideration, but her work dealt with a similar subject matter, detailing the key role the novel genre played in legitimising women’s voices precisely because it was “young enough to be soft in [their] hands” (74). What would eventually emerge from Woolf’s work was the field of feminist literary criticism, which hit its stride in the mid-eighties. In terms of its understanding of the power relations inherent to cultural production, particularly as they relate to gatekeeping, it’s a rich academic tradition notably lacking in the writing on Web 2.0. For example, Celia Lury’s essay “Reading the Self,” written more than ten years before the popularisation of the internet, looks specifically at the way in which authoritative speaking positions gain their legitimacy not just through the words on the page but through the entire relationships among author, genre, channels of distribution, and readership. She argues that, “to write is to enter into a relationship with a community of readers, and various forms of writing are seen to involve and imply, at any particular time, various forms of relationship” (102). She continues, so far as text is clearly written/read within a particular genre, it can be seen to rest upon a more or less specific set of social relations. It also means that ‘textual relations’—that is, formal techniques, reading strategies and so on—are not held separate from ‘non-textual relations’—such as methods of cultural production and modes of distribution—and that the latter can be seen to help construct ‘literary value.’ (102) The implication is that an appropriation of legitimised speaking positions isn’t done purely by overthrowing or contesting an established system of ‘quality’ but by developing a unique relationship between author, genre, and readership. Textual and non-textual practices blur together to create literary environments and cultural space. The term “publishing” is at the heart of these relationships, describing the literacies required to interpret particular voices and forms of communication. Yet, as Lury writes, literacy habits can vary. Participation in dialogue-driven, user-generated mediums is utterly different from conventional, gatekeeper-driven ones, yet the two can easily co-exist. For instance, reading last year’s Man Booker prize-winner doesn’t stop one from reading, or even writing, blogs. One can enact numerous literacy practices, move between discourses and inhabit varied relationships between genre, reader, and writer. However, with the rise of Web 2.0 a whole range of literacies that used to be defined as “private sphere” or “everyday literacies,” everything from personal conversations and correspondence to book clubs and fanzines, have become far, far more public. In the past these dialogue-based channels of communication have never been in a position where they could be defined as “publishing.” Web 2.0 changes that, moving previously private sphere communication into online public space in a very obvious way. Keen dismisses this shift as a wall of white noise, but Greenwald does something equally interesting. To a large extent, his positive treatment of Web 2.0’s “affected, stilted and forced” user-generated content is validated by his focus on a “Youth” subculture, namely Emo. Indeed, he heavily links the impact of youthful subcultural practices with the internet, writing that Teenage life has always been about self-creation, and its inflated emotions and high stakes have always existed in a grossly accelerated bubble of hypertime. The internet is the most teenage of media because it too exists in this hypertime of limitless limited moments and constant reinvention. If emo is the soundtrack to hypertime, then the web is its greatest vehicle, the secret tunnel out of the locked bedroom and dead-eyed judgmental scenes of youth. (277) In this light, we accept the voices of his Emo subjects because, underneath their low-quality writing, they produce a “sweet vulnerability” and a “dialogue,” which provides them with a “secret tunnel” out of the loneliness of their bedrooms or unsupportive geographical communities. It’s a theme that hints at the degree to which discussions of Web 2.0 are often heavily connected to arguments about generationalism, framed by the field of youth studies and accordingly end up being mined for what Tara Brabazon calls “spectacular youth subcultures” (23). We see some core examples of this in some of the quasi-academic writing on the subject of “Youth.” For example, in his 2005 book XYZ: The New Rules of Generational Warfare, Michael Grose declares Generation Y as “post-literate”: Like their baby boomer parents and generation X before them, generation Ys get their information from a range of sources that include the written and spoken word. Magazines and books are in, but visual communication is more important for this cohort than their parents. They live in a globalised, visual world where images rather than words are universal communication media. The Internet has heightened the use of symbols as a direct communicator. (95) Given the Internet is overwhelmingly a textual medium, it’s hard to tell exactly what Grose’s point is other than to express his confusion over new literacy practices. In a similar vein and in a similar style, Rebecca Huntley writes in her book The World According to Y, In the Y world, a mobile phone is not merely a phone. It is, as described by demographer Bernard Salt, “a personal accessory, a personal communications device and a personal entertainment centre.” It’s a device for work and play, flirtation and sex, friendship and family. For Yers, their phone symbolizes freedom and flexibility. More than that, your mobile phone symbolizes you. (16) Like Keen, Grose and Huntley are trying to understand a shift in publishing and media that has produced new literacy practices. Unlike Keen, Grose and Huntley pin the change on young people and, like Greenwald, they turn a series of new literacy practices into something akin to what Dick Hebdige called “conspicuous consumption” (103). It’s a term he linked to his definition of bricolage as the production of “implicitly coherent, though explicitly bewildering, systems of connection between things which perfectly equip their users to ‘think’ their own world” (103). Thus, young people are differentiated from the rest of the population by their supposedly unique consumption of “symbols” and mobile phones, into which they read their own cryptic meanings and develop their own generational language. Greenwald shows this methodology in action, with the Emo use of things like LiveJournal, Makeoutclub and other bastions of Web 2.0 joining their record collections, ubiquitous sweeping fringes and penchant for accessorised outfits as part of the conspicuous consumption inherent to understandings of youth subculture. The same theme is reflected in Michel de Certeau’s term “tactics” or, more common amongst those studying Web 2.0, Henry Jenkins’s notion of “poaching”. The idea is that people, specifically young people, appropriate particular forms of cultural literacy to redefine themselves and add a sense of value to their voices. De Certeau’s definition of tactics, as a method of resistance “which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality” (489), is a prime example of how Web 2.0 is being understood. Young people, Emo or not, engage in a consumption of the Internet, poaching the tools of production to redefine the value of their voices in a style completely acceptable to the neo-Marxist, Birmingham school understanding of youth and subculture as a combination producing a sense of resistance. It’s a narrative highly compatible within the fields of cultural and media studies, which, despite major shifts brought about by people like Ken Gelder, Sarah Thornton, Keith Kahn-Harris and the aforementioned Tara Brabazon, still look heavily for patterns of politicised consumption. The problem, as I think Keen inadvertently suggests, is that the Internet isn’t just about young people and their habits as consumers. It’s about what the word “publishing” actually means and how we think about the interaction among writers, readers, and the avenues through which they interact. The idea that we can pass off the redefinition of literacy practices brought about by Web 2.0 as a subcultural youth phenomena is an easy way of bypassing wider cultural shifts onto a token demographic. It presents Web 2.0 as an issue of “Youth” resisting the hegemony of traditional gatekeepers, which is effectively what Greenwald does. Yet such an approach has a very short shelf life. It’s a little like claiming the telephone or the television set were “youth genres.” The uptake of new technologies will inadvertently impact differently on those who grew up with them as compared to those who grew up without them. Yet ultimately changes in literacy habits are much larger than a generationalist framework can really express, particularly given the first generation of “digital natives” are now in their thirties. There’s a lot of things wrong with Andrew Keen’s book but one thing he does do well is ground the debate about Web 2.0 back to issues of legitimate speaking positions and publishing. That said, he also significantly simplifies those issues when he claims the problem is purely about the decline of traditional gatekeeper models. Responding to Keen’s criticism of him, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig writes, I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times (Lessig). What Lessig expresses here is the different, but not mutually exclusive, literacy practices involved in the word “publishing.” Publishing a blog is very different to publishing a newspaper and the way readers react to both will change as they move in and out the differing discursive spaces each occupies. In a recent collaborative paper by Sue Thomas, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger, they describe this capacity to move across different reading and writing styles as “transliteracy.” They define the term as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks” (Thomas et al.). It’s a term that perfectly describes the capacity to move fluidly across discursive environments. Here we return to Greenwald’s use of a framework of youth and subculture. While I have criticised the Birminghamesque fixation on a homogeneous “Youth” demographic enacting resistance through conspicuous consumption, there is good reason to use existing subculture studies methodology as a means of understanding how transliteracies play out in everyday life. David Chaney remarks, the idea of subculture is redundant because the type of investment that the notion of subculture labelled is becoming more general, and therefore the varieties of modes of symbolization and involvement are more common in everyday life. (37) I think the increasing commonality of subcultural practices in everyday life actually makes the idea more relevant, not less. It does, however, make it much harder to pin things on “spectacular youth subcultures.” Yet the focus on “everyday life” is important here, shifting our understanding of “subculture” to the types of literacies played out within localised, personal networks and experiences. As de Certeau has argued, the practice of everyday life is an issue of “a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using” (Certeau 486). This is as true for our literacy practices as anything else. Whether we choose to label those practices subcultural or not, our ability to interpret, take part in and react to different communicative forums is clearly fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, regardless of our age. Sarah Thornton suggests a useful alternate definition of subculture when she talks about subcultural capital: Subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the aces of age, gender, sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay (105). This is an understanding that avoids easy narratives of young people and their consumption of Web 2.0 by recognising the complexity with which people’s literacy habits, in the cultural sense, connect to their active participation in the production of meaning. Subcultural capital implies that the framework through which individuals read, interpret, and shift between discursive environments, personalising and building links across the strata of cultural production, is acted out at the local and personal level, rather than purely through the relationship between a producing gatekeeper and a passive, consuming readership. If we recognise the ability for readers to connect multiple mediums, to shift between reading and writing practices, and to seamlessly interpret and digest markedly different assumptions about legitimate speaking voices across genres, our understanding of what it means to “publish” ceases to be an issue of generationalism or conventional mediums being washed away by the digital era. The issue we see in both Keen and Greenwald is an attempt to digest the way Web 2.0 has forced the concept of “publishing” to take on a multiplicity of meanings, played out by individual readers, and imbued with their own unique and interwoven textual and cultural literacy habits. It’s not only Emos who publish livejournals, and it’s incredibly naive to assume gatekeepers have ever really held a monopoly on all aspects of cultural production. What the rise of Web 2.0 has done is simply to bring everyday, private sphere dialogue driven literacies into the public sphere in a very obvious way. The kind of discourses once passed off as resistant youth subcultures are now being shown as common place. Keen is right to suggest that this will continue to impact, sometimes negatively, on traditional gatekeepers. Yet the change is inevitable. As our reading and writing practices alter around new genres, our understandings of what constitutes legitimate fields of publishing will also change. 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