Thursday 27 April 2023
14.00 (2 p.m.) Cracow & Paris time / 13.00 (1 p.m.) London time
7.00 (7 a.m.) Chicago time / 13.00 (1 p.m.) Kyiv time
20.00 (8 p.m.) Taipei time
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Meeting ID: 218 758 3567
PROGRAMME
1. Peng Yi (National Central University)
Keynote “Cardography and 1920’s: Wittgenstein and Woolf”
If we look at the methods of working in the 1920s, within which Virginia Woolf and Ludwig Wittgenstein are beginning to make their marks, in the company of other figures such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, one thing that stands out is the use of index cards or materials similar to its use. We all know Warburg’s use of the photographic montage starting from 1924 his Mnemosyne and Benjamin’s reliance on his collection of index cards and the historico-methodological deployment of the montage in The Arcades Project. If we turn to the Wittgenstein, his published works do not fully reflect his creative mode which can be characterized by the spirit of the index system, that is, increasing fragmentation on its way to a totalizing archive beyond the horizon: his Zettel (cuttings, as rendered by Christian Erbacher) is made up of “fragments made by Wittgenstein himself and left by him in a box-file.” Furthermore, these fragments “were cut from [his] extensive typescripts” which may be in multiple versions. The typescripts themselves were then discarded except those cuttings preserved in the file-boxes. This drafting mode should also be applicable to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, published in 1922, whose draft was preserved on the recto side of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks, 1914-1916. Finally, if we turn to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, we can conjecture a possible encounter between the mode popularized by the Tractatus and Mr. Ramsey (we know that Wittgenstein met Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf in 1925 and Woolf creative mode is not unconnected to the broader trend by her use of the grid mode). In that textualized encounter, i.e., seriality confronts recursiveness or seriality short-circuits itself and thus devolves into stuttering recursiveness and the confrontation seems to imply a setback if not a failure for the Mr. Ramsey’s philosophical project. Is the fictionalized meeting of the minds or in the mind of the character revealing an implicit strain between seriality and the threat of its failure in the form of recursiveness? Is this threat implicit in Wittgenstein’s creative or even philosophical project?
Are we witnessing a fictionalized critique of an emergent mode of writing and thinking within the context of the Bloomsbury group? If we take into consideration the diversity of the group, including writers, philosophers, artists and an economist or politician, can we say that the mode embodied by Tractatus is transforming from a mode to a motif and thereby reflecting its importance and its on-going force?
Peng YI is professor in the Department of English, National Central University at Jhongli, Taiwan. His doctoral thesis is on Edmund Spenser and theories of allegory. He has published articles on the modern manuscripts of modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Wang Wen-hsing, Zhou Mengdie and Gao Songfen mainly from the perspective of genetic criticism. His publications include a book in Chinese on modern manuscript studies. He has also edited and co-edited two special issues in Chinese on genetic criticism. He is currently working on the intersection between modern manuscripts in Chinese and those of modern writers from Rousseau, Dickinson, Steinbeck, Nabokov and Benjamin.
2. Discussion
3. Centre for Creativity Research: forthcoming events
dr. hab. Mateusz Antoniuk, prof. UJ
Head of the Centre for Creativity Research