A Room of One's Own

LITFOLKS is committed to the idea that art makes a difference in the world. So, the aim of the "Can Art Make a Difference?" project was to identify stories of youths, who with their artistic endeavor rejected outdated social stereotypes and perceptions. Virginia Woolf once said that a woman needs "a room of her own" to be a writer. And the "room," doesn't mean only a physical place but also metaphorically, the time, space, mindset, and means to produce artistic works. So, to understand this, Nayan Sayed Jibon on the behalf of LITFOLKS interviewed Miss Neela Moni Goshwami who using her writing talent not only managing to access employment for her but also educating and mobilizing others. She is the first youth of this project who made a difference through the arts.

Q2: “But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so.” To what extent would you say that men and women having different values, if indeed they do, is ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’?

This essay placed first in the Newnham College Woolf Essay Competition. It explores feminist theory in the context of Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. Beginning with an analysis of 'value', the essay examines various feminist accounts of gender inequality in society (Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler) and concludes that phallocentric (English) language is a fundamental vehicle through which inequality is communicated, reinforced and recorded.

Virginia Woolf in her seminal work - A Room of One's Own, takes up the issue of women's subjugation in the field of literature. Women writers had to spend years hiding behind the pseudonyms they had to take up forcefully. The paper discusses the struggle of women's writing with special emphasis on Woolf's character- Judith Shakespeare.

A discussion of contemporary feminist art, specifically Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse", within the context of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".  I look at the connections and parallels in symbolism and ideologies that culminate in the writes and visual works of the artists.

In  the  presented  thesis  I  focus  on  the  topics  related  to  gender  in  Virginia  Woolf’s  essay  A  Room  of One’s  Own  (1929)  and  novel  Orlando  (1928).  I  aim  to  establish  whether  and  how  Woolf  offers  a solution  to  20th-century  female  writers’  problems,  and  to  decide  if  the  offered  model  is  effective  in the  fight  against  patriarchal  oppression.  Proceeding  from  the  historical  sources  and  literary  criticism I  set  out  the  conditions  of  living  in  England  in  the  interwar  period,  social  relations  and  sex hierarchy,  as  well  as  outlining  the  aims  of  the  feminism  movement.  Analysis  of  the  chosen  works enables me  to validate  whether  the author follows  her own advice  given in  A Room  of One’s Own. The  thesis  draws  on  Judith  Butler’s  ideas  regarding  gender  classification  and  the  issue  of performativity.  I  analyse  the  character  of  Orlando  through  the  prism  of  Butler’s  research  and  the situation  of  women,  their  opportunities  and  possibilities.  It  is  concluded  that  Woolf  offers  women  a model  of  society  in  which  the  qualities  characteristic  of  female  and  male  sex  intermix.  It  allows women  having  a  lifestyle  typical  of  men,  which  would  provide  them  with  freedom  and  equality. Moreover,  performativity  proves  that  gender  identity  is  not  acquired  naturally,  but  it  is  shaped culturally  and socially,  and undergoes changes in  time and space.

This paper examines in detail an epiphanic moment in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' in the light of George Herbert Mead's social interactionist theory of the mind and of cognition. The epiphanic moment is experienced as an unexpected synthesis of multiple identities and experiences, a conjunction whose very contingency opens up unforeseen possibilities of creative experience. Creativity, openness, unexpectedness, complexity—memorable moments that make the most of this synthesis provide the experience of the subliminal or the unconscious coming to consciousness, and they tend to return to mind and to become milestones in personal development, and in the story of one's relation to oneself. The attention Virginia Woolf pays to the complexity and density of the moment is a tribute both to the present and to the mind—if the mind is to be defined, for the sake of this argument, as the management of emergent complexity, and the present as the locus not just of reality, but of the mental activity that synthesizes it.

Virginia Woolf‘s famous essay A Room of One‘s Own builds a history of women‘s writing. A scapegoat of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the seventeenth century figure Aphra Behn, whose name did not state a concrete meaning in the minds, was a playwright, poet, fictionist, translator, propagandist, and a spy. A writer who not only insisted on being heard, but successfully forced the men who dominated the jealous literary world of the Restoration England to recognise her as an equal, was dismissed throughout the literary history despite her thirteen novels written thirty years before Daniel Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe, generally titled as the first novel. Though Aphra Behn was criticised, praised, constructed and reconstructed up until the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, too, pays attention to her in A Room of One‘s Own. The aim of this study is to suggest an alternative way of reading and interpreting the image of women and their literary works by analyzing Aphra Behn in Virginia Woolf‘s A Room of One‘s Own. Some biographers of Aphra Behn condemn Virginia Woolf by touching slightly upon Behn, and not crediting Behn‘s genius, but by emphasising the fact that she wrote and made money by it. At first glance, the argument might be right when Aphra Behn is considered individually and literally within the text; however, there might be an alternative way of interpretation by reading the essay from a different angle. I will try to show that by reading A Room of One‘s Own from a holistic, contextual, stylistic and fictional aspect this alternative method of interpretation might be gained. With this approach, Behn seems to gain a much stronger place with Woolf‘s idiosyncratic discourse than the ―literally-interpreted Behn.

This study analyses the works of Virginia Woolf, most notably A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando, through the lens of two prominent writing techniques associated with Woolf; androgyny and ecriture feminine. It presents a critical debate surrounding each theory, providing discussion on the theories themselves, how they are presented in Woolf's work, and how her work is perceived as a result. This study will also applies contemporary queer and feminist theory to Woolf, androgyny, and ecriture feminine in order to gain an understanding of how these theories can be considered valuable to a modern readership. The aim of this thesis is to understand and elaborate on the tension between androgyny and ecriture feminine within Woolf criticism, and question whether the two need be at odds with one another.

RESUMEN: Apoyándose en la reapropiación crítica de la obra de Virginia Wolf Un cuarto propio (Woolf, 1929) y contextualizando dicho escenario en la actual Cultura-Red, este artículo se pregunta por la vigencia feminista y la redefinición de los espacios de concentración y privacidad, convertidos en nodos de relación y trabajo inmaterial en una sociedad conectada. Bajo la hipótesis de que dicho espacio en red conforma un nuevo escenario público-privado para la reflexión ciberfeminista, este trabajo se propone indagar en las condiciones y posibilidades de emancipación y construcción subjetiva en el hogar conectado. Pretende, además, reflexionar sobre las consecuencias de la redefinición de las esferas productivas, derivadas de las nuevas formas de producción, prosumición y trabajo online. ABSTRACT: Based on the critical reappropiation of «A room of one’s own» (Virginia Woolf, 1929) and setting this work into the actual Net Culture, this paper is about the feminist validity and the redefinition of the spaces of concentration and privacy, converted in nodes of relation and immaterial labor in an online society. According to the hypothesis that this online space makes up a new public-private stage to cyberfeminist reflection, this work want to ask about the conditions and possibilities for emancipation and subjective construction in the online home. Besides that, this paper try to reflect about the consequences of the redefinition of the productive realms, that derive from the new forms of online labor, production and prosumption.

Nikt wcześniej ani nikt później nie zwrócił uwagi w sposób, jak uczyniła to Virginia Woolf, na znaczenie własnego pokoju, czyli przestrzeni osobistej kobiety, miejsca pracy twórczej. W ujęciu Woolf własny pokój jest równie ważny jak sama praca twórcza. Własna przestrzeń, przestrzeń fizyczna, stanowi bowiem warunek pracy twórczej: symbolizuje swobodę i wolność intelektualną, której kobiety były przez wieki pozbawione...

The article probes the social background to the controversial ‘Kitchen Debate’ between the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US vice-president Richard Nixon, which occured at the American trade exhibition in Moscow during summer 1959.  Political histories narrowly focus on diplomatic point-scoring between the two leaders, leaving largely untouched the purpose of the landmark exhibition, and its expression of America's ‘suburban’ values.  This discussion traces a broad arc exploring:

- The exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon, especially their discussion of housing
- What was shown in the Moscow exhibition (detailing the display kitchen that prompted Khrushchev’s indignation), and the US State Department’s broad aims.
- The expansion of suburbia in post-war America (census figures quoted), and changes in property development including the emergence of commuter suburbs.
- The influential Levittown model for mass home construction & instant suburbs, and the impact of its highly publicised estates on Long Island, Connecticutt and New Jersey.
- Nature and extent of suburban conformism, including pointed criticisms made by urban planning commentators, the sociologist William Whyte, and the Feminist Betty Friedan.
- Mounting distress of women who did not feel fulfilled as homemakers, and their main grievances.
- Segregation, and enforced racial exclusion at the Levittowns.
- Portrayal of suburban values in the key literary works, ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ (1955), ‘Revolutionary Road’ (1961), ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1972)
- Efforts to raise the quality of home and suburb design in California, prompted by the magazine ‘Arts and Architecture’
- The pioneering Case Study House project.
- Role of the Los Angeles firm Eames Office in post-war domestic design.
- Contribution of Eames Office to the Moscow exhibition.
9pp.