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Course Description

Summary

In addition to being one of the major novelists of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was also an incisive literary critic, an influential editor and publisher, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a prolific diarist, and a public figure whose lectures and essays re-shaped the discourse on women’s roles in literature and society. This course is a close study of Woolf’s major works—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves—with a special focus on her contributions to Modernism and the pioneering narrative technique of stream of consciousness. We will explore the historical, cultural, and biographical contexts of her work, but our main focus will be the study of craft. How is time assembled, alchemized, in her novels? How is interiority mapped onto landscape? Gender onto history? Does her interplay with historical texts come to inform her work’s modernity? And how is consciousness—that fickle and involuntary phenomenon of perception—approximated in language, on the level of the sentence? Engaging critically with Woolf’s work, major projects will include a midterm paper and the assembly of a semester-long reading diary that uses Woolf’s own diaries, letters, and criticism as a model for their creation.