cfp.english.upenn.edu

Montevideana is an International Conference on literary texts written and/or read across languages, regions, and cultures. Each edition addresses specifics texts or authors and their relations with Latin America, with a focus on the River Plate region. The 2011 conference will be devoted to Virginia Woolf.

Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, is located somewhere in the north of South America, in a village named Santa Marina. It is set within landscapes and vegetation at times clearly tropical, at others more Mediterranean, and populated by Spanish and Portuguese descendants who speak Spanish. Later, in her short story “Kew Gardens,” Woolf describes a character who walks in the gardens murmuring about the forests of Uruguay “blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids and women drowned at sea.”

These South American places imagined by Woolf are an invitation to the possibility of reflecting on her work from a transatlantic perspective, as Victoria Ocampo did in 1929 when she first read A Room of One´s Own. The essay confirmed many of Ocampo´s ideas on the woman-writer, and inspired her to promote critical readings and translations of Virginia Woolf´s work in the River Plate, especially through Sur, the literary journal she founded in Buenos Aires in 1931.
Seventy years after Virginia Woolf´s death, Montevideana VII calls for papers presenting innovative readings, translations, and exchanges in connection with the multiple dialogues which her work continues to establish, either directly or indirectly, with this part of the world.

Please send 1-2 page abstracts to montevideana2011@gmail.com.
Abstracts should be submitted by February 28th 2011.
For further information: www.fhuce.edu.uy/montevideanaVII