A much larger room:

a dialogue with Virginia Woolf on a young woman’s experience in Northeast Brazil academia

Abstract

This work is an experiment in creative writing based on the essay A room of one’s own ([1929]2014) by Virginia Woolf, originally published in 1929. Some of its main inquiries regarding aspects of the female experience within the academia have been incorporated and recontextualized into a distinct setting – a young woman from Northeast Brazil, who has recently enrolled in a small Faculty of Literature at a public university from her country. By a textual dynamic previously proposed by authors such as Coetzee in his Diary of a bad year (2008) and Elizabeth Costello (2004), in the framework of this fictional essay the main voice in the text is that of a feminine creative experience. However, between the lines, words that insist on dictating and guiding pathways of work and thought emerge, interweaving discourses and perspectives that shed light on power dynamics within the academic environment. Sections were divided into discrete thematic axes as a result from an essayistic endeavor to transpose the challenges concerning the status of female intellectuality from a nearly century-old England to contemporary Northeast Brazil. This text elaborates on perspectives concerning Brazilian literature and higher education in a marginalized scenario, raising questions about paths undertaken by women aspiring to enter the literary field.