MLA 2025

New Perspectives on Mrs. Dalloway at 100 (guaranteed)

We invite 300-word proposals for papers on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) at the outset of the year of its hundredth anniversary. Possible topics: style of characterization, (medical) trauma, time, post-war/-pandemic life, London, influence on contemporary fiction.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 1 March 2024. Send abstracts to: Ben Leubner (leubnerb@gmail.com).

2025 marking the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway is reason enough for a panel that both commemorates and reassesses the novel. The fact that Mrs. Dalloway is not only a post-war but also a post-pandemic novel makes that 100th anniversary, coming as it does in the wake of the Covid pandemic, all the more salient. Plenty of people were envying—and writing about—Clarissa Dalloway’s morning walk to buy flowers when Covid lockdowns were in full effect all over the globe. Furthermore, Mrs. Dalloway deals with any number of other issues that not only remain pertinent to this day but that continue to have their moments of spotlight in terms of both national and international attention. As a novel about shell-shock, the text warrants a discussion of how PTSD has been understood and treated in the 100 years since its publication, and how the novel itself influenced that understanding and treatment. Additionally, the novel is also about the phenomenon of medical trauma: what happens when the source and manner of treatment themselves are problematic for the patient, whether it is Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa Dalloway herself, or even, perhaps, Evelyn Whitbread. Other angles of reassessment abound: the best way to contextualize the novel with respect to Brexit, which would necessitate a close look at Woolf’s own politics; the manner in which we understand the novel’s characters in light of more recent tropes, movements, and reappraisals of history (for example, Peter Walsh as a precursor to The Longing Man who requires both a postcolonial and a post-Me Too reconsideration); the novel’s influence on 21st-century anglophone fiction, especially books that seem to have been written with it very much in mind (e.g., Zadie Smith’s NW, for instance).

Virginia Woolf and Utopian Skepticism (possible second session)

Some gleam of hope…lured him on.
—“Solid Objects” 

We invite 300-word proposals re: Woolf’s sense of “living differently,” which rests in the tension between her skepticism of utopian promises, refusal of easy answers, and visions of liberatory, more equitable ways of living.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 1 March 2024. Send abstracts to: Amy Smith (amy.smith@lamar.edu) and Shilo McGiff (srm10@cornell.edu).

Common Readers and scholars of Woolf relentlessly seek and often find messages of hope in Woolf’s writing. From second-wave feminist criticism to contemporary studies in new materialism, we often look to Woolf to find hopeful visions of liberatory, equitable ways of living that disrupt repressive late-modern ideology and offer some hope for a future in which we might “live differently.” At the same time, Woolf scholars continue to attend to her critical skepticism regarding utopian promises and her refusal to subscribe to easy political answers. This panel will explore how the most hopeful expression of living differently rests in this tension. 

D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Visuality (possible joint session)

DHLSNA-IVWS Joint Session. We invite 300-word proposals on D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf that focus on some aspect of the visual in their work(s). We also encourage papers related to Presidential Theme (visibility).

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 8 March 2024. Send abstracts to: Benjamin Hagen (benjamin.hagen@usd.edu).

The Presidential Theme for the 2025 MLA Convention—Visibility—is the occasion for this joint session on D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, two modernist authors who never met, who are rarely considered together, but whose biographical and literary networks overlap and resonate in significant and exciting ways. Though their styles and politics (and tastes!) may differ dramatically, their writings nonetheless resonate when it comes to questions of visuality as well as the visible and invisible. From the diagnostic imperatives that encourage Septimus Smith to “Look!” (Mrs. Dalloway) to intense glances shared between lovers and friends/enemies in Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, from blind(ed) characters to vibrant descriptions of landscapes, from ethological attentiveness to what human and animal bodies do to comments on visual arts and cinema, from visual traces of ecological devastation to the dynamics of synesthetic experience—Woolf and Lawrence’s respective investments and involvements in modernist cultures, problems, theories, and aesthetics of visuality offer scholars and readers much to research, explore, and critique. Note: We encourage papers that address both Woolf and Lawrence but are open to papers that focus on one or the other. (When constructing the panel, however, a balance across papers will be a priority.)