French Literature Reviews - 2026

A.-M. Smith-Di Biasio, Virginia Woolf, la hantise de l'écriture
Other Literary Studies

Review published in Acta Fabula : "Lire, traduire Virginia Woolf" by Anne-Laure Rigeade.

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, Virginia Woolf, la hantise de l'écriture

Paris: Indigo & Côté-femmes, 2010.

194 p.

Price 21EUR
EAN 9782352600677
Publisher's overview:
It is within that floating space between two languages where the image emerges and the ordinary repressions of language unravel, revealing the memory traces that haunt writing, that Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, acting as a "ferrywoman", reads and interprets the text of the mother tongue she shares with Virginia Woolf; and, as in the whisper of an uninterrupted and timeless conversation with Woolf, she endlessly re-translates and re-questions, cutting and deconstructing excerpts with her own palette: The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room, A Sketch of the Past.

Thus, La hantise de l'écriture proposes a return to the sensory and obsessive origins of Woolf's imaginary, a return to the gestures, faces, and voices harbored within writing, to its infancy memory. Through this close attention to the visible and invisible features of the written text, the aim is to read and translate traces of speech, gaze, and body — to hear and make audible rhythm, movement, sonority, image.

Like that of the epitaph, this writing is haunted by the fragmentary and enigmatic quality of silent inscription, mirroring the voice of Woolf's writing back to what haunts it. Yet, this troubling obsession seems to emanate — as in a dream — from an unbreakable bond with life. For there is a constant ebb and flow between the hallucinatory interiority of Woolf's speech and her gaze turned toward the changing tones of the outside world.

The image thinks. Those formed by this rupture of reality opened up by the grief for a loved one also figure an intimate and feminine engagement within the discontinuities of twentieth-century history. Virginia Woolf writes with her ear tuned; she gathers the remnants of an English language and culture traversed by the uncanny in an immemorial and modernist gesture that underpins her present-day vision and anchors her definitively in modernity.

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, Professor of Modernist Literature and Literary Translation at the Institut Catholique de Paris and the Centre Européen de Traduction Littéraire, is an essayist and translator. She is Vice-President of the Société des Études Woolfiennes. She has published Julia Kristeva, Speaking the Unspeakable (Pluto Press 1998) and is currently collaborating on the Dictionnaire Freud, to be published by Larousse in 2010.

This critical study explores the modernist masterpiece and foundational texts of Virginia Woolf, including The Waves, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room. Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio approaches Woolf through the lens of translation and bilingual resonance, examining how the maternal tongue and early memory shape the rhythm, sonority, and visual imagery of the prose. By tracing the fragmented yet vital inscriptions of gaze, voice, and body across these classic works, the book highlights the enduring intersection between intimate interiority and twentieth-century historical consciousness.

Ideal for scholars, translators, and readers interested in modernist literature, feminist criticism, and psychoanalytic approaches to text, this volume provides fresh insights into the creative process. It serves as a valuable resource for anyone seeking to understand the deep sonic and visual currents of Woolfian writing. The study will particularly appeal to academics engaged in comparative literature, translation theory, and the ongoing scholarly reception of Virginia Woolf within contemporary French and international literary studies.