(In the Company of Virginia Woolf)

This seminar will revolve around Virginia Woolf; however, the ways in which it does so will depend upon the specific interests of participants. We will devote the first half of the semester to a romp through her most influential works. As an introduction to Woolf’s ideas about novel-writing, we will begin with her essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) and “Modern Fiction” (1919, rev. 1925), as well as two short stories, “An Unwritten Novel” and “The Mark on the Wall” (in Monday or Tuesdays 1921). These will be on reserve and we expect students to xerox and read them for the first session so we can start thinking about how Woolf explores in fiction the methods for capturing reality that she discusses in the essays.

In the following weeks, we will study Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), Three Guineas (1938), and Between the Acts (1941). Besides the text of the week, each student will be asked to read one critical essay about it; these will be available on reserve and the choice is entirely up to each participant.

How we proceed after that will depend in part upon our discussions at the very first class session so participants should arrive with a sense of where they would like to widen our common investigations. In other words, this seminar is a bit of an experiment, with students helping to craft the syllabus we all follow from mid-semester on. Naturally, I hope this will mean that we (as a group) will be studying what individuals have decided to investigate in their final papers.

What we will jointly propose for the second half of the semester derives from the recent work of Brenda Silver on Woolf as a cultural “icon” and of Pamela Caughie on Woolf “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” It falls roughly under the rubric “Woolf and Post-Modernism.” We can look at what has happened to Woolf in subsequent imaginative literature by reading plays and novels in which she appears either as a character or as a precursor/muse (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Hours); how her vision was transfigured at the movies through the filmed versions of her novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando); how her ideas about androgyny, transvestism, lesbianism, and transsexuality contribute to contemporary queer theory and feminist analysis (by Carolyn Heilbrun, Joseph Bristow, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick).

But we are open to other ideas that have occurred to us: how does Woolf allow us to queer modernism? how does her work illuminate that of other feminist-modernists? what are the genealogies of her aesthetic theories and practices? how does her criticism and fiction illuminate the politics of race and nation between the two World Wars? how should we assess her efforts at biography as well as the biographies composed about her? Should the group choose any one or a number of these, a quite different reading list and syllabus will result.

So as to immerse ourselves in Woolf scholarship, we will be subscribing to the VWoolf Listserv. Recommended, too, is Mark Hussey’s Virginia Woolf A-Z. Students are encouraged to talk to either instructor about the directions in which they would like the second half of the semester to go. It may be a more bumpy ride than most seminars, but we are hoping it will lead to interesting seminar papers. The only other requirement consists of two response statements to facilitate discussion. These should be sent as email attachments to everyone involved on the Wednesdays directly before our Thursday meetings.