The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality.

The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.     

A dialogic approach to understanding regime conflicts: the case of the development agenda

Despite the fact that early work on international regimes conceptualised them as dialogic in nature, this fundamental regime property has remained relatively underdeveloped. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, this article proposes a dialogic framework for understanding regimes and the political struggles that constitute them. Focusing on the contextual and relational properties of signification processes within a regime, one of the key arguments is that neither their dialogic nature nor the trajectory and outcome of a particular conflict can be understood without giving full attention to language as a power-laden form of action. By focusing on how language and discourse are implicated and put to work in a particular instance of regime contestation, namely the Development Agenda proposed by a group of developing countries’ representatives at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2004, efforts are made not only to bring to the fore the political and ideological nature of the ‘shared understandings’ without which a regime would not exist, but also the manner in which they are reproduced and reinvigorated, even by acts that set out to challenge them.     

Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice

This article explores the significance of citizenship for those working in Citizens Advice, a network of voluntary organisations in the UK that exists to provide peer-to-peer advice and support to those facing problems. Drawing on a recent research study, the article considers the ways in which the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is imagined and translated into practice. Despite current political and policy moves to shrink citizenship (in terms of eligibility, access and substance), the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is regularly thought about in expansive ways that draw on other imaginaries of citizenship. We suggest that these everyday discursive practices of citizenship are important both in analytic terms and in reinvigorating a political discussion otherwise focused upon restriction and exclusion.     

对峙与和解——性别诗学视野下的两性关系

性别维度是人存在的一个重要维度,性别诗学探讨的是性别因素在社会现象中的种种表现,这包括女性主义对男性压迫女性历史的梳理.性别诗学又是超越女性主义的,它更关注两性的和谐相处,暗示两性间要走向对话、达成伙伴关系的趋势.尽管伙伴关系具有强烈的乌托帮性质,但性别诗学指向的却是对理性逻各斯的否定以及对诗意艺术精神的追求.     

论对话主义者洛特曼

苏俄塔尔图符号学派代表洛特曼继承巴赫金对话主义精髓,理论建构上通过主体间的彼此联系构建人的多元存在,弘扬文本的多语性。实践举措上,通过塔尔图学派的自身建设进行对话主义的具体实施。