Stefanie Heine氏（コペンハーゲン大学准教授、一橋大学客員研究員）講演会

２０２４年６月２９日（土）午後４時から

東京大学駒場キャンパス１８号館４階コラボレーションルーム２

英語（通訳なし）、事前予約不要、対面のみ

当日、１８号館入り口は外側からは開けられませんので

午後４時少し前までに入り口までお越しくださるようお願いいたします。

講演者紹介

Stefanie Heine is associate professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse: Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (2014) and Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature’s Syncope (2021), co-editor of Reading Breath in Literature (2019), and editor of Mineral Poetics (2022). Her latest book, Tangential Terrains: Cormac McCarthy’s Geoaesthetics is under review at the University of Nevada Press.

講演タイトルおよび要旨

Weak More-than-human Agency in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
The lecture argues that reflections on exhaustion and withdrawal in Woolf’s writing open up an ecocritical and non-anthropocentric trajectory. Woolf often links mortality, illness, and bodily frailty with an ongoingness beyond the human through a particularly literary and material language. In this language – which is envisioned in her essays and implemented in her literary work – a counterforce to warfare and human domination of nature is staged. This counterforce can be described as a weak more-than-human agency which is not governed by intentionality and will-to-power; simultaneously destructive and creative, and always on the brink of passing away, it strangely persists, thus challenging grandiose phantasies of both apocalypse and deep time. The lecture will concentrate on the middle part of To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes”, which famously focuses on an abandoned house that is slowly taken over by nature while World War I – only mentioned marginally and in brackets – rages. Here, a weak agency counteracting human destruction can be detected in the “airs” and “breaths” pervading the house. Detached from human beings, the breaths are embedded in literary imagery and passages where the material and sensual dimensions of language are highlighted – in other words, they are staged as particularly linguistic agencies. The last part of the lecture will explore how these literary airs and breaths came to be through close readings of Woolf’s drafts for Time Passes, tracing a weak agency at work in Woolf’s writing process.