Eret Talviste presents a book on materiality and embodiment

Eret Talviste, Research Fellow in Contemporary English Literature at the University of Tartu, will present her first monograph, Strange Intimacies: Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. The book presentation will take place on 21 November at 17:00 in the lobby of Lossi 3.

The first hour is dedicated to presenting the book in conversation with Raili Marling, Julia Kuznetski, Francecsa Arnavas, Indrek Ojam, Jaak Tomberg and Josh Bacigalupi. The conversation will continue informally over snacks and drinks. All colleagues are very welcome.

30% discount flyers for the book will be available at the event.

This book will be published by Edinburgh University Press.

About the book

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Strange Intimacies: Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys inquires how Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings, despite being set in times of wars and social change that often wreck lives, maintain an attachment to and love for life – an attachment defined as strange intimacy. The book plays with strange as external and intimate as internal, and considers how intimacy is never, or should never be, narrowly defined in heteronormatively romantic or familial relationships or constrained to the human realm only.

The central question of this book, which inspires its title, is: how do Woolf’s and Rhys’s characters become strangely intimate with life? The short answer goes along these lines: to be strangely and intimately attached to life, one needs to be aware of the embodied nature of one’s own being, the materiality of the world and the affective connections between one’s body and the bodies of others, both human and not.

The answer tries to sketch an affirmative instead of disenchanted narrative of modernism and modernity and proposes that exploring Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings within the theories that mark an increasing interest in the material and the affective (alongside the abstract and the linguistic) illuminates the enchanting narrative via emphasising strange intimacies in Woolf’s and Rhys’s language. The enchanting narrative is not naive but asks whose bodies and how are allowed to be attached to life under heteropatriarchal and imperial regimes.

While one central tenet of this book positions Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernism within the intersecting theories of affect and new materialism by emphasising the posthuman elements of both, a second brings Hélène Cixous’s writings, particularly ‘The School of Roots’ from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993) to demonstrate that posthuman theories are indebted to decades of feminist writing on embodiment and materiality. Cixous’s work illuminates how Woolf’s and Rhys’s language springs from the body and its material environments, and in writing, crystallises the materiality of life.

The book cover features an image of Alexandra Hughes' painting Soap (Swimming) (2021).