Agenda de l'ENS de Lyon

Conférence Études Anglophones : Carole Bourne-Taylor (Oxford University), “The journey is everything”: Virginia Woolf’s Continental Adventure

A consciously European writer with ‘the zest of travelling’ and 'a taste for edginess', Virginia Woolf found in France a ‘congenial civilisation’ (an antidote to what she perceived as the ‘insularity’, ‘domesticity’ and ‘homeliness’ of England), where she could reject (just like Montaigne did) the notion of a being-in-stasis. Her appropriating the Montaignean motto signals her rejection of dogmatism and doxa, as well as a parti pris in favour of process and open-endedness. If the sheer strangeness of a foreign language (anticipating Barthes's own exhilaration) and landscapes spurred her spirit of experimentation – Proust was her ‘great adventure’ after all – it was Montaigne who provided her with a an epistemological model and writing protocol.

Carole Bourne-Taylor (Brasenose College, Oxford) est l'auteur de L’univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf, 2001, et maître de conférences (Fellow) à Oxford où elle enseigne la littérature de langue française de la Révolution à nos jours et dirige des travaux de recherche en littérature française et comparée.

Conférence en anglais ouverte à tous, dans la limite des places disponibles