Part of
‘Walking the City’ TCCE Annual Walking Weekend 2016

Walk Guide: Diana Damian Martin,
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Duration: about 60 minutes

“When you asked me to speak about women and criticism, I wandered the streets of Bloomsbury with books by my side, in a roaming assembly”
adapted from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’

In 2015, Diana Damian Martin, Mary Paterson and Johanna Linsley started a conversation about the spaces, voices and structures of ‘feminist critical practices’, embracing newspaper and on-line criticism, from academic critical discourse to a broader cultural stance of criticality.  

In this walk, we aim to further extend this ongoing, informal conversation in a public space, building on the  histories of Bloomsbury as the site of literary and critical history.

Bloomsbury will act as a poetic and historically charged backdrop to our walk – a roaming, open-ended, public Salon. We will be prompted into conversation by extracts from key female figures of criticism, from Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler.

We will congregate in Bloomsbury’s squares to listen to these extracts, and during our walks, we will discuss feminism, writing and critical thought today. We will end with an assembly of poetics, inspired by both site and conversation.

We welcome participants to read an extract out loud, if they would like to, or simply engage with the conversation. Texts will be provided.

This walks starts at Tavistock Square and takes us around the squares of Bloomsbury, ending at Queens Square.

Please note: Participants should wear appropriate clothing and footwear.

This walk is not designed as a tour of Bloomsbury; instead, it draws on the site to invite participants, no matter their background, into a wider conversation around writing, critical attitudes, affect and form.

Diana Damian Martin and Mary Paterson
This walk is part of a project led by Diana Damian Martin and Mary Paterson which addresses feminist critical practice from a multiplicity of vantage points, and with deliberate interest in staging public, open-ended conversations that weave in history and different forms of collective discourse.