Special Author: Virginia Woolf Q3023
Autumn 2016
Tutor: Dr Hope Wolf
Email: [email protected]
Course description
This course focuses on the work of one of the best-known writers of the twentieth
century, Virginia Woolf. It aims to deepen your knowledge and understanding of
Woolf’s work, both in its historical context and in terms of the kinds of conceptual
and theoretical questions that her work has been seen to raise. By the end of the
term, we will have read most of Woolf’s novels. We will also have examined her
writing in other genres. Additionally, we will be thinking about her critical reception,
and how her life and writing have been represented.
Course Structure
1.
Short Story
2.
Elegy
3.
Bildungsroman
4.
Modernist Form
5.
Gender
6.
Criticism
7.
Reading Week
8.
Space
9.
Affect
10.
Photography
11.
Film
12.
Office Hours
Assessment: a 3000-word essay. Deadline: Please see Sussex Direct for
exact submission dates.
You may choose your own original essay question. Please consult me about it before
your submit an essay outline and confirm your topic by email. Suggested essay topics
are also listed on Study Direct.
Feedback: Please visit me in my office hours to discuss your essays. You should
also submit a brief essay outline (see the guidelines provided) in the seminar of
week 10 so that I can give you feedback on it by the end of term. You may, during
the course, want to consult texts and topics we have not covered in class yet. In this
case you will need to read ahead.
Resources: Sussex University is ideally situated for studying Woolf’s work. I would
heartily recommend that you explore Woolf’s papers at the Keep; you can use these
in your essays should you wish. You might also want to visit the home of Virginia and
Leonard Woolf, Monk’s House, and Charleston, home of Woolf’s sister, artist
Vanessa Bell. Note when both close for the winter.
Primary Material: Please bring all set texts to your seminars. For your essays,
make sure to consult an authoritative edition (books with page numbers are
required for citations please). All of the primary essays and short stories are
available online via the University of Adelaide free ebook website:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/
Secondary Material: can be found either in libraries or on the digital reading list
accessible via Study Direct. Please make sure to read all starred texts (*) and bring
them to class. Further reading should assist you with writing your essays, should
you wish to pursue any of the topics discussed in class further. There is also a list of
additional criticism on Study Direct.
I.
Short Story
Main text:
*Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘Blue and Green’ from A
Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction (Vintage, 2003). You can also access
these stories and others online at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/.
Please make sure to bring them to class.
Required secondary reading:
*Brown, Bill. ‘The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of
Modernism)’, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999). 1-28
Further reading:
Bowlby, Rachel. ‘Things’ in Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia
Woolf (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp.100-109
Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton
University Press, 1998), pp. 26-89
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Virginia Woolf’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and
British Modernisms.’ Bad Modernisms, eds Douglas Mao & Rebecca L.
Walkowitz (Duke University Press, 2006). This essay is particularly relevant
to ‘The Mark on the Wall’.
2.
Elegy
Main text:
*Woolf, Virginia, Jacob’s Room (1923)
Required secondary reading:
*Kathleen Wall, ‘Significant Form in Jacob’s Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy in
Jacob’s Room’, Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Suzanne Raitt (Norton,
2007), pp. 302-323
Further reading:
Bowlby, Rachel, ‘Jacob’s Type,’ in Feminist Destinations: Essays on Virginia Woolf
(1996)
Marcus, Laura, ‘The Novel as Elegy: Jacob’s Room and to the Lighthouse’,
Virginia Woolf (Northcote House, 2004)
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko: ‘Jacob’s Room’ in Virginia Woolf and the Problem of
the Subject (2010)
Alex Zwerdling, ‘Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy’, ELH, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter,
1981), pp. 894-913
3. Bildungsroman
Main text:
*Woolf, Virginia, The Voyage Out (1915)
Required secondary reading:
*Esty, Jed, ‘Virginia Woolf's Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction’ in
Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, eds. Richard
Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. (Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 70-90
Further reading:
Beer, Gillian, ‘Virginia Woolf and Prehistory’ in The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian
Beer (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 6-28
Ruotolo, Lucio, P., ‘Being Chaotic: The Voyage Out.’ The Interrupted Moment: A
View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels (Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 19-46
Wollaeger, Mark. ‘Woolf, Postcards and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in
The Voyage Out’, Modernism/Modernity 8.1 (January, 2001), pp. 43-75
4. Modernist Form
*Woolf, Virginia, The Waves (1931)
Secondary Reading:
*Patrick McGee, ‘The Politics of Modernist Form; or, Who Rules the Waves?’ in
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 1992, pp.631-650.
Further reading:
Marcus, Jane, Brittania Rules the Waves in Decolonizing Traditions: New Views of
Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1992)
Ryan, Derek, ‘Posthumanist Interludes: Ecology and Ethology in The Waves’,
Virginia Woolf: Twenty-first Century Approaches, eds. Jeanne Dubino, Gill Lowe,
Vara Neverow, and Kathryn Simpson. (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp.
148-66.
Westling, Louise, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World’, New Literary
History, 30.4 (1999), pp. 855-875
5. Gender
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Secondary Reading:
*Showalter, Elaine, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny’, A Literature of
Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton University
Press, 1977), pp. 263-297.
*Moi, Toril. ‘Introduction.’ Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1985), pp.
1-18.
Further reading:
Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf
(Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp.100-109
6. Criticism
Main text:
*Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Required secondary reading:
*Jean Mills, ‘To the Lighthouse: the Critical Heritage’ in Cambridge Companion
to To the Lighthouse, ed. by Allison Pease (Cambridge University Press, 2014),
pp. 158-172
Further reading:
Auerbach, Eric, ‘The Brown Stocking’, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, trans. by Willard Trask (first published 1946). Also
reprinted in Rachel Bowlby (ed.) Virginia Woolf (Longman, 1992).
Gillian Beer: ‘Hume, Stephen and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,’ in Virginia Woolf:
the Common Ground, pp. 29-47
Mary Jacobus, ‘The Third Stroke’: Reading Woolf with Freud’ in Grafts: Feminist
Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (Verso, 1988), pp. 93-110; repr. in Critical
Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Longman, 1993)
Martha Nussbaum, “The Window: Knowledge of the Other in Virginia Woolf’s To
the Lighthouse” New Literary History 26:4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 731-753
7. READING WEEK
8. Space
*Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Secondary Reading:
*Thacker, Andrew, ‘Woolf’s literary geography’ in Moving Through Modernity: Space
and geography in Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2003)
Further reading on Space:
Bowlby, Rachel. ‘Walking, women and writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse’ in Still
Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis’ (Routledge,
1992) pp. 1-33
Rosner, Victoria, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia
University Press, 2005)
Snaith, Anna and Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Introduction: Approaches to Place and
Space in Woolf’ in Anna Snaith and Michel Whitworth ed., Locating Woolf: The
Politics of Space and Place (Palgrave, 2007), pp. 1-30
Further Reading on Mrs Dalloway:
Rachel Bowlby, ‘Untold stories in Mrs Dalloway’,
Textual Practice, 25 (3) (2011), pp. 397-416
J.H. Hillis Miller, ‘Repetition as the Raising of the Dead’ in Fiction and Repetition:
Seven English Novels (Harvard University Press, 1982).
Nicholas Royle, ‘“The “telepathy effect”: notes toward a
reconsideration of narrative fiction’ in The Uncanny (Palgrave, 2003), pp. 256276
Laurence Scott, ‘Petrified Mermaids: Transcendence
and Female Subjectivity in the Aesthetics of
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Andre Breton’s Nadja’,Textual Practice, 28
(1) (2014), pp. 121-140
9. Affect
*Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts (1941)
Short excerpt from *Woolf, Virginia, ‘Sketch of the Past’ [1938], Moments of
Being (Pimlico, 2002).
Secondary Reading:
*Crangle, Sara, ‘In the Meantime’ and especially the section ‘Between the Acts:
Not Now’ in Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, Anticipation (Edinburgh
University Press, 2010)
Further reading:
Beer, Gillian, ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf’ in
Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press, 1996),
pp. 149-78
Barrett, Michèle. ‘Virginia Woolf and Pacifism’, Woolf in the Real World, ed. by
Karen V. Kukil (Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson U Digital P, 2005), pp.
37-41
Esty, Jed, ‘Insular Rites and the Late Modernist Pageant Play’ in A
Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton
University Press, 2004).
Stonebridge, Lyndsey, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in MidCentury British Culture (Palgrave, 2007)
Zwerdling, Alex. ‘Between the Acts and the Coming of War.’ Virginia Woolf and
the Real World (University of California Press, 1986), pp. 302-23
10. Photography
Main Text:
*Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) – if you have not acquired one already please find
one with the photographs in place. If not I will copy them for you.
Secondary Text:
Colin Dickey, Virginia Woolf and Photography in Maggie Humm ed. Virginia
Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
For more photography:
Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and see Susan Sontag’s comment on it in Regarding the
Pain of Others (2003). You can see the scrapbooks for Three Guineas at the Keep.
Also look at how Lytton Strachey uses photographs in Eminent Victorians (1918). For
more on Vanessa Bell’s use of photographs see:
Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf
and Vanessa Bell (Rutgers University Press, 2005)
Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures (Rutgers University Press,
2003)
For more on biography:
Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939)
Marcus, Laura, Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice
(Manchester University Press, 1994)
Saunders, Max, ‘Woolf, Bloomsbury, the ‘New Biography’ and the New
Auto/Biografiction’ in Self-Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction, and the
Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 438-483
11. Film
Film, Stephen Daldry, The Hours (2002).
Further reading
Cunningham, Michael, The Hours (HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 3-8
Lee, Hermione, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Nose’ in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing
(Pimlico, 2008), pp. 28-44
12. Office Hours: I will be running extra office hours to see you all about your
essays in place of a seminar.
Additional Criticism on Woolf (not listed above) is listed on Study Direct.
Some Suggested Essay Ideas (please consult Study Direct also as ideas
may be added over the course of the term).
1. Any original subject you choose; please consult me before you begin your
research and hand in your essay plan. You should approve your topic and title with
me by email before the end of term.
2. Eudora Welty writes: ‘Virginia Woolf…was at least as interested in a beam of light
as she was in a tantrum’ (‘Reading and Writing’ 157). Trace the evolution of a
particular object or aspect of everyday life in Woolf's work, and set up an argument
explaining the significance of her continual return to particular things. You might
consider, for instance, letters, flowers, insects, clothing, food, birds, windows,
rooms, the wind, light, or the sea.
3. Discuss the representation of race, ‘Englishness’ or Empire in any two Woolf
texts.
4. Consider Woolf’s presentation of British history.
5. Consider the treatment space in Woolf’s writing. You might consider how she
represents one of the following: rooms, houses, cities, wilderness, etc. You could
also think about how characters move through space (walking, dancing, etc.).
8. How far do you regard Woolf’s work as elegiac?
9. Compare and contrast Woolf’s treatment of character or personality to the way
in which she has been represented.
11. Discuss the representation of war in any three texts by Woolf.
12. The portrayal of animals in literature has recently received a great deal of critical
attention. Formulate an argument about Woolf’s animal lovers.
13. How do Woolf’s writings compare with her sister’s paintings?
14. How does Woolf use photography in her writing? Compare and contrast two
texts.
15. Hermione Lee writes in her biography that Woolf claimed to loathe egotism.
Discuss the presentation of self or subjectivity in Woolf’s work, perhaps in relation
to notions of legacy, naming, or obscurity.
16. How does Woolf represent children in her writing?
17. Woolf is one of the most highly regarded authors of stream-of-consciousness
narration. But it is important to remember that neither she nor her characters are
directly rendering their thoughts on the page; in her fiction, a narrator always
intervenes. Study two or three of Woolf's narrators, and determine what we might
understand about who they are and the role they play in Woolf's writing. Are they
authoritative, omniscient, judgmental, poetic, or occasionally bored? How do they
affect the structure, tone and content of Woolf’s writing? Students who choose this
question might want to consider Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
18. Why are social occasions so central to Woolf's novels? Think about events such
as dinners, dances, parties, and, with particular reference to Orlando, carnivals.
19. What role does the newspaper play in Woolf’s writing?
Planning your essay
Over the course, you should be thinking about what you would like to discuss in
your 3000 word essay. In Week 10's seminar you will hand in an outline of you
essay.This not only ensures that you are starting to plan your research project well
in advance of the deadline, it also means you will receive feedback and advice about
your project before you hand it in, helping you make improvements prior to
submission.
Essay plans should:
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


Be at most two A4 pages, double spaced.
Include an outline of the topic you intend to explore.
You should say what Woolf texts you will concentrate on and what your key
critical sources are.
You may use websites as starting points for your research, but please note that
unless these sites are peer-reviewed (i.e. recognised as valuable and legitimate
by other scholars - ask if unsure) they will not be considered credible if used in
the main body of your essay.
Selecting and defining a topic:
To help you define the topic you want to research you should ask yourself the
following questions:
a) What is the central question I want to ask? e.g. ‘What is the connection
between madness as a psychological discourse and imperialism as a political one in
Woolf’s work?’ You can also formulate this question as a hypothesis, e.g. ‘Woolf’s
work sets out to establish a direct causal link between the discourse of madness and
that of Empire - the madness and irrationality of Empire is the direct cause of the
madness and irrationality of its subjects’.
This question should emerge out of your reading both of Woolf’s texts and of the
critical texts on Woolf. It should be as specific as possible – phasing such as ‘the
world and the self in Woolf’s work’ are best avoided. Remember that your aim is to
build an argument, i.e. you should have a point you want to put across rather than
just a topic you want to illustrate with apt quotations and references.
b) How am I going to address this question? Using the example above, consider: ‘I
will analyse the ways in which madness and politics are intertwined in Woolf’s texts
through the interplay of character, language and setting’.
This then needs to be broken down into smaller bits, giving some examples, e.g.,
Septimus and Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway, Rachel and Helen in The Voyage Out, the
linguistic and stylistic differences between the two texts, the settings in England and
South America, etc.
c) How will I organise my essay? What subsections will it have? Once you have
determined the various themes and ideas you will address, compile examples from
your primary texts (Woolf’s writings) and secondary texts (criticism and research)
under those headings. Remember to keep track of citations and page numbers so
you can return to this information as needed.
d) How do I choose a theme and find relevant material? A good starting point is
to choose one critical essay you liked or found helpful and then use its notes and
bibliography to identify other relevant texts. MLA Bibliography is a good on-line data
base for articles and books published worldwide. Some hard-copy bibliographies of
works on Woolf can also be found in the library.
You may use any bibliographical style you choose as long as you use it consistently:
MHRA, Chicago Manual of Style system,
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html or MLA style.
Please look at the academic rules on misconduct and plagiarism, and make sure that
your essay is your own work.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/adqe/standards/academicmisconduct
Further essay guidelines can be found on Study Direct.