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LUDICS
SPEAKER: Angeliki Spiropoulou, University of the Peloponnese, Greece
Counter to the conventional perception of modernism as ahistorical, there have been many recent academic and critical efforts to historicize it. This paper will attempt to address modernism's entanglement with the concept of history, notions of historiography and the historical and ideological context of modernity in which it emerged, primarily through the work of Virginia Woolf and especially Orlando, her most playful engagement with history and bio/historiographical practices. The investigation of the politically-informed playfulness of Woolf's historiographical imagination poses the question of how an innovative modernist aesthetics also proves a transformative force of history-writing practices, thus bringing into relief the political potential of ludics.
About the Speaker
Angeliki Spiropoulou is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece and Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She studied English and Critical theory at the University of Athens and the University of Sussex. She has also taught at the University of Athens, the Hellenic Open University, the Open University of Cyprus and as a Visiting Professor she also taught at : Goldsmiths College-University of London; the Instituto del Teatro in Barcelona; the Accademia di Belli Arte di Venezia; the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU); London Southbank University; and Bogazici University -Instabul. Additionally, she has delivered invited lectures and graduate research seminars at the Paris College of Art; Université Paris VII- Denis Diderot, Sapienza Univerity of Rome; Goldsmiths College-University of London; Greenwich University and comvened the research Seminar ‘Comparative Modernisms’ at IES, School of Advanced Study-London.
Angeliki Spiropoulou publishes in English and Greek. Among her publications are her monographs, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010); and Topoi of the Modern: Modernity and European Literature (forthcoming, Alexandreia publications). She has co-authored the Hellenic Open University textbook, History of European Literature: From 18th to 20th Century (2008), and has edited or co-edited the volumes: Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity (Alexandreia Publ., 2007); Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading Texts (Peter Lang, 2002); Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Orientations and Crossings (Alexandreia Publ., 2002); Representations of Femininity: Feminist Perspectives (Centre for Research and Documentation, 1994); and the issue 'Gender Resistance' for the European Journal of English Studies (2012); In 2021, Angeliki Spiropoulou co-edited with Jean-Michel Rabate the volume Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). She is a Member of the Executive Committee of the European Network of Comparative Literary Studies Spiropoulou’s research interests focus on literature and the arts; gender; and modernism, especially Virginia Woolf, in the ideologicial, philosophical and historical contexts of modernity. She has contributed to many volumes on modernism, such as, 1922: History, Culture, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh University Press); as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and the Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism.
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