This talk analyzes the importance of suture—a word that captures the act of translation and an interweaving— in the work of Virginia Woolf and Algerian writer, Sabrina Kherbiche. Inspired by Kherbiche’s own citation and translation of Woolf in her novella, La Suture, Dr. Winston examines the intertextual formal resonances between these two women writers who both grapple with the past—whether it is Woolf’s desire to align herself with ancient Greece, or Kherbiche’s patching together of her former life in Algeria through narrative. What emerges is a new, transhistorical model for understanding Woolf’s relation to Hellenism and Kherbiche’s relation to modernism.

Shannon K. Winston is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Writing Center. She completed her dissertation, Interrupted Visions: Seeing and Writing the Mediterranean of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is also a poet and published her first volume of poetry, Threads Give Way, in 2010.