The Feminist Book Club 1

12.10.2023

Edouard Louis: Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme, 2021.
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own, 1929.

12. 10. 2023.

Each of these books is so complex that we could devote an entire session to it, if not more. However, we have opted for this perhaps somewhat unusual combination so that we can follow the continuity of certain themes from the beginning of the 20^th century: writing, emancipation, emancipation through writing, the role of sex/gender in the act of writing. Some of the questions we discussed about Louis’ novel are the following:

• How are the paradoxes of emancipation portrayed and embodied in the novel?
• What role does Eddy's sexuality play in his relationship with his environment, and what role does it play in his relationship with his mother?
• What happens when Eddy becomes a “class defector”?
• How is class difference manifested in language?
• What idea of literature is implied in this novel?
• How does the narrator deal with his own position?

With the question of gender inequality and education, we connect Louis' novel with the famous essay by V. Woolf. It is an essay published in 1929 (based on two lectures Woolf gave in Cambridge in 1928) that has achieved the status of a feminist classic. We discussed the following questions:

• What kind of treatment does the author receive at university? Can a connection be made with the position of women in literature?
• How is the figure of the professor – the bearer of power – portrayed?
• What future does Virginia Woolf predict for the two sexes?
• How would we define the genre of this text? What is the relationship between fiction and fiction?
• What is the status of the narrator?

To conclude the first meeting, we compared the ways in which both Woolf and Louis provide insights into the structural conditions of knowledge and power and use writing – a literary technique – to engage with the established institution of literature, focusing on the role of sex/gender in the literary and cultural field.

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