MODERNISM: PLAY WITH HISTORY?
SPEAKER: ANGELIKI SPIROPOULOU, UNIVERSITY OF THE PELOPONNESE, GREECE
Counter to the conventional perception of modernism as ahistorical, there have been many recent academic and critical efforts to historicize it. This paper will attempt to address modernism's entanglement with the concept of history, notions of historiography and the historical and ideological context of modernity in which it emerged, primarily through the work of Virginia Woolf and especially Orlando, her most playful engagement with history and bio/historiographical practices. The investigation of the politically-informed playfulness of Woolf's historiographical imagination poses the question of how an innovative modernist aesthetics also proves a transformative force of history-writing practices, thus bringing into relief the political potential of ludics.