Panel 3A: Literary Transcodifications/3
Session 3 – July 2, 11:00 – 13:00
Transcodifying the Trans: From Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Katie Mitchell’s
Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando can be read (and has been) as a novel about trans-: trans-identities (the character’s gender change during the narrative), trans-narratives (transformation of the narrative in the course of the novel as well as narrative codification of biographical data), and more generally trans-literary forms (appropriation and transformation of literary forms such as biography). What happens when this novel, whose subject bears on transformations in gender, narratives, and forms, is itself transformed into a movie or a play? This paper will investigate the implications on the question of trans-identities and trans-processes of the transcodification at work when Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel, becomes a film (directed by Sally Potter, 1993) and then a play (directed by Katie Mitchell, 2019).