Small Talk/New Networks: Virginia Woolf’s Virtual Publics

Abstract

How does one talk about talk in a formal essay, when what one wants to convey is the very informality of the activity and its role in changing literary publics and discourse? The answer, I decided, is to act as if it were talk, the small talk, conversation, chat that animates interactions among individuals and links them into networks. Think of the talk that occurs at conferences, the Virginia Woolf Back to Bloomsbury conference, say, where the discussions generated by the staged panels and the small talk between the acts extend far beyond the time and space of the conference itself. Or, more to my point, think of VWOOLF, the email discussion group that for eleven years now has talked it way into becoming a network that may or may not constitute a community, that may or may not be considered a public. How much, I began to wonder, can VWOOLF be read as a contemporary inscription of what we think of as ‘Bloomsbury’, reconfigured as a vibrant discursive manifestation of cyberspace and internet culture? And what does it tell us about the nature of literary discourse occurring not in the academy, but among the growing number of readers who hold their conversations online?