Les Apories de la référentialité dans Orlando: A Biography de Virginia Woolf

Authors

  • Floriane Reviron-Piégay Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Etienne

Abstract

Orlando: A Biography was published in 1928, in the midst of intense debates regarding the referentiality of painting and photography. As such, it remains Virginia Woolf's most elaborate exploration of the ability of these different types of languages to represent life. In this mytho-poetic or fictional biography of Vita Sackville-West, she tried to capture the spirit of her friend in a text that is as heterogenous as the illustrations that were carefully chosen to accompany it. Woolf was both trying to revolutionise the genre of biography and to pay homage to her friend: the result is a mixture of parody and satire that undermines the photographer's, the painter's and the biographer's claims to veracity. Indeed the images (be they photographs of Vita or historical portraits of her ancestors) very rarely match their legends just as they very rarely bring any light upon the text they most often fail to “illustrate”. Woolf explores such notions as mimesis and invention, creativity and duplication only to show the fundamental instability of signs. Woolf challenges the reader's assumptions about representation in a bold, inventive text that is only superficially light: deep down she tries to educate our eyes and our minds to read and decipher signs beyond their obvious meaning. Her modernist text teaches us that vacillating between the feminine and the masculine and between different arts (as her heroine does) may well be the only means to fully grasp her text and the world around us.

Author Biography

Floriane Reviron-Piégay, Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Etienne

Floriane Reviron-Piégay est Maître de Conférence dans le Département d’Études Anglophones à l’Université Jean Monnet (Saint-Etienne) où elle enseigne depuis 2009. Elle est l’auteur d’une Thèse sur « La Révolution biographique » menée par Virginia Woolf et Lytton Strachey dans les années 20. Ses articles portent sur Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Jean Rhys et notamment sur les liens entre écrits publics et privés, fiction, biographie et autobiographie. Elle a aussi publié sur le Bloomsbury Group, notamment sur les rapports entre Bloomsbury et le cinéma et s’intéresse plus largement à la question de la représentation, littéraire, picturale ou cinématographique, à la charnière entre époque victorienne et modernisme. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur les voyages d’exploration et de découverte, sur le lien entre récit de voyage, mythe et fiction et en particulier sur les récits de voyage d’Isabella Bird-Bishop, grande voyageuse et photographe de la fin du XIXème siècle. Elle a édité l’ouvrage Englishness Revisited, chez Cambridge Scholars Press en 2009 et le premier numéro de la revue « Voix Contemporaines » intitulé « Auto/biographies familiales » publié en juin 2019. https://voixcontemporaines.msh-lse.fr/ (revue en ligne hébergée par la MSH Lyon-St Etienne)

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Published

2020-01-31

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019): Référence et référentialité 2

Section

ARTICLES

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