The London Scene and documentary culture

• Autores: Radyk, Lucrecia
• Año de publicación: 2019
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: documento de conferencia
• Materia: Humanidades; Virginia Woolf; Documentary Culture; Good Housekeeping; Paul Rotha; Humanidades
• Institución: Universidad Nacional de Río Negro

Fil: Radyk, Lucrecia. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Laboratorio Texto, Imagen y Sociedad; Argentina
Fil: Radyk, Lucrecia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Laboratorio Texto, Imagen y Sociedad; Argentina
The essays grouped in The London Scene by Virginia Woolf, originally published between 1931 and 1932 in Good Housekeeping magazine, appear as one perfect example of those “less evidently experimental texts” by principal modernist figures mentioned in Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms. I would like to suggest that these pieces seem to be closer to the ‘documentary culture’ as referred to by scholars such as Laura Marcus, who have examined the relations between literature and film in the 1930s. Not only because of the fact that the series paints a portrait of London—its history as well as the economic, cultural and social life in the city—, but also because in each essay Woolf alludes to capital issues regarding social justice, democracy, and women’s place in society, among others. Indeed, the British documentary movement proposed to instruct the general public in social matters, and John Grierson affirms in his “First Principles of Documentary” that ‘social responsibility’ is one of the fundamentals of documentary films. The London Scene texts, with no insightful characters nor stream of consciousness, reveal a different modernist aspect of the author.