Presentation by Professor Susan Friedman (US)

Presentation and Discussion | Susan Stanford Friedman (US):
Why We Need Literature, Art, and Fantasy: The Case of Virginia Woolf and Kabe Wilson

Why are literature, art, and fantasy important to the genders and cultures of equality? They don’t offer hard facts, policy initiatives, political strategies, or economic benefits. But they help to make new futures.

In this presentation Virginia Woolf Professor Susan Friedman (US) explores what the humanities offer by examining how a hope for a more equitable future can be forged through a creative, even fantastical, engagement with the past. She will discuss the work of Kabe Wilson, a contemporary multimedia artist and novelist, who recycles Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Cutting up Woolf’s essay into word-pieces, he reassembles these words (and only these words) into a novel titled Of One Woman Or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri (an anagram of Woolf’s name and title). It features a mixed-race queer student at Cambridge who burns down the University Library, but stops short of destroying Woolf’s displayed manuscript, deciding instead to “recycle” it. This “remix” performs a fantastical parable of how feminists today can imaginatively engage with the past to remake a more equitable future—not by burning down or ignoring the past but by making the old new.

This presentation was held before at the GRACE conference in Kingston upon Hull (GB) in May 2016.

Susan Stanford Friedman (US) is Hilldale Professor in the Humanities and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

More information and registration: https://www.atria.nl/en/calendar/presentation-susan-friedman-us