アメリカニズムと二人のヴァージニア・ウルフ : The New Republic誌における"The Movies and Reality"と"On Not Knowing French"の受容

抄録

This paper examines the reception of Virginia Woolf in the American periodical, The New Republic, a magazine that was the major publisher of her short articles in America in her lifetime. One result of her being published in American periodicals was that a number of images of the author were created for readers, not only through the representation of Woolf's own texts in magazine format, but also through such paratexts as comments from other contributors, correspondence from readers, and from the character of the magazines themselves in which the articles appeared. Through an analysis of two essays "The Movies and Reality" and "On Not Knowing French" which were carried in The New Republic, this paper argues that the magazine produced two contradictory "Woolfs", reflecting an ambivalent Americanism prevailing in the magazine at the time. First, Woolf's "The Movies and Reality", an essay better known as "The Cinema", and Gilbert Seldes's response to it are discussed as an example of a misreading of Woolf's essay, taking it as support for film, a new form of art, and for the Americanism espoused by Seldes. In the second example, Woolf's "On Not Knowing French" and the magazine's readers' hostile responses are discussed, demonstrating how another "Woolf" was regarded as a writer who looked down upon the Americans and English they spoke, thus supporting a jaundiced view of Anglo-American and Euro-American relations.