Intermedial Woolf: text image, and in-between (Virginia Woolf)

Virginia Woolf, a writer commonly associated with modernism, feminism, Bloomsbury, Englishness, and high literariness, owes much of her current iconic status to Edward Albeé’s play Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Brenda Silver writes: ‘it would be hard to overstate the importance of Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? in constructing and securing Virginia Woolf’s name recognition and the persona attached to it. Produced on stage in New York in 1962 and then in London in 1964 before becoming the film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1966, Albee’s play did more than make his title and “Virginia Woolf” household words, “part of everyday speech”’. Virginia Woolf’s articulations in the various media since the 1960s and the way in which these articulations are in turn projected onto the frgure of the author and her work make clear that the reading of literature needs to be thought of as involving more than the reader’s decoding of a verbal text. Insofar as the reader’s complex interaction with electronic and other media inevitably impinges on the reading process, literary understanding itself is intermedial: it is formed by images, sounds, fragments of texts and in the interrelations of these to one another. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.