Instructor: Margaret Rennix
Austen and Woolf
“She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own.”
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Virginia Woolf’s analysis of Jane Austen in The Common Reader shows the extent to which she
attempted to anatomize, and thereby understand, one of the great female writers that preceded
her. This tutorial will consider the relationship between Austen and Woolf by looking at their
respective attitudes toward love, marriage, gender, artistry and community. It will interrogate
the ways in which theoretical, autobiographical, and close readings can contribute to our
understanding of each author. The course will end by looking at representations of Austen and
Woolf’s work in contemporary culture, and consider how their works meaningfully speak to us
today.
Texts:
“Love and Friendship” by Jane Austen
“The History of England” by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
Films:
The Hours, Bridget Jones’s Diary
Course Requirements:
Class Participation
3 3-page papers
1 20 page paper
1 visit to the library for a research-training session with Laura Farwell-Blake, the English
Department’s research librarian (this will replace ½ of one of our regular meetings)
Reading Schedule:
January 30: Selections from The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Love and
Friendship,” “The History of England”
Instructor: Margaret Rennix
Love and Marriage
February 6: Sense and Sensibility
David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (excerpts)
February 13: Night and Day
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (excerpts)
February 20: Night and Day
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” from The Rustle of Language
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”
[Short paper #1 due]
Modern Women
February 27: Pride and Prejudice
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Author and
the Anxiety of Authorship” and “Jane Austen’s Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents)”
from The Madwoman in the Attic
March 5: Mrs. Dalloway
Alex Zwerdling, “Woolf’s Feminism in Historical Perspective” from Virginia Woolf and
the Real World
Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (excerpt)
[Short paper #2 due]
March 12: No class
Artists
March 19: Emma
D.A. Miller, “No One is Alone” from Jane Austen and the Secret of Style
Mary Poovey, “Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form: The Case of
Jane Austen” from The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the
Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
March 26: To the Lighthouse
Rebecca Saunders “Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of To the Lighthouse”
(article)
Benjamin – “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
[Short paper #3 due]
March 30: Paper Prospectus and Bibliography Due
Instructor: Margaret Rennix
Community
April 2: Persuasion
Alex Woloch – “Characterization and Distribution” from The One vs. the Many: Minor
Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson – “’Unbecoming Conjunctions’: Comic Mourning and the
Female Gaze in Persuasion” from Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive
Laughter, Embodied History
April 9: The Waves
Christine Froula – Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde: War, Civilization
and Modernity (excerpts)
John Carey – “The Revolt of the Masses” from The Intellectual and the Masses: Pride
and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939
Nina Auerbach, “The Communal Eye,” from Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction
[Annotated Bibliography Due]
April 16: Paper Workshop
[Outline Due]
April 23: Contemporary Austen and Woolf – The Hours and Bridget Jones’s Diary
[Final Paper Draft Due]
Due Date Overview
February 20: Paper I
March 5: Paper II
March 26: Paper III
March 30: Paper Prospectus/Bibliography
April 9: Annotated Bibliography
April 16: Outline
April 23: Final Paper Draft
May 4: Final Paper