Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Reading (AAEC055) Level: 6, Credits: 15 Teaching Method: Two-hour seminar Convenor: Professor Anna Snaith, Room VWB 7.39, ext. 2174, anna.snaith@kcl.ac.uk Semester One Assessment: 4000 word essay (topics to be devised by students in consultation with course leader): 90% Oral Seminar Presentation and written summary: 10% Course Description: Virginia Woolf is one of the most iconic writers of the twentieth century. Her image continues to circulate in contemporary culture, a ready signifier of experimental modernism, bohemian London, 1970s feminism, pacifism, madness, and the drive to suicide. She is a writer who has generated an enormous amount of critical and popular attention, her oft-controversial status a result of her interest in culturally troubling questions, those that still preoccupy us in the twenty-first century. This course will treat a range of Woolf s work via a focus on reading: both the ways in which she has been read and her own politics of reading. Woolf s investment in the common reader and her related concern with reading publics, public libraries, education and the politics of language make her uniquely situated in the context of the modernist avant garde. We will study a selection of her work across a range of genres, always paying close attention to the historical and political contexts out of which her writing emerged. Her engagement with the politics of difference class, gender, race, sexuality will form another thread throughout the course. We will explore the ways in which her experiments in aesthetics intersect with her political concerns. New ways of living and new ways of writing go hand in hand for Woolf. NB The key primary texts will be supplemented by primary and secondary material provided on KEATS (King s elearning service). Week One: Introduction: Reading Woolf and Woolf Reading [material in handout on KEATS] Week Two: Empire: The Voyage Out (1915) Week Three: Education: Jacob s Room (1922) Week Four: Urban Spaces: Mrs Dalloway (1925) Week Five: Feminism: A Room Of One s Own (1929) Week Six: Reading Week Week Seven: Biography: Flush (1933) Week Eight: The Common Reader: selected essays Week Nine: History: The Years (1937) Week Ten: Fascism: Three Guineas (1938)
Bibliography Primary Texts: Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Ed. Lorna Sage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. -----. Jacob s Room. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. -----. Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. -----. A Room of One s Own and Three Guineas. Ed. Anna Snaith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. -----. Flush. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. -----. The Years. Ed. Jeri Johnson. London: Penguin, 1998. -----. Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. See also The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols); The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols), The Essays of Virginia Woolf (5 vols). Weekly Supplementary Reading (available via KEATS or online): Week One (Introduction): Introduction, Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (pp. 4-12) Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1926) Two letters to Woolf from readers of A Room of One s Own and Three Guineas Week Two (The Voyage Out): Jed Esty, Virginia Woolf s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction in Modernism and Colonialism ed Begam and Valdez Moses Week Three (Jacob s Room): Woolf, Why? in Selected Essays Week Four (Mrs Dalloway): Scott Cohen, The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley and Imperial Monuments, Modern Fiction Studies 50.1(2004): 85-109. Week Five (A Room of One s Own): Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Sexual Identity and A Room of One s Own : Secret Economies in Virginia Woolf s Feminist Discourse, Signs 14.3(1989): 634-50. Week Seven (Flush): Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, Chapter 5. Week Eight (The Common Reader): Extracts from Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (2003). Week Nine (The Years) Extracts from the manuscript drafts (The Pargiters) Week Ten (Three Guineas) Extracts from The Three Guineas Letters, Woolf Studies Annual 6 (2000)
Merry Pawlowski, Exposing Masculine Spectacle: Virginia Woolf s Newspaper Clippings for Three Guineas as Contemporary Cultural History (online) Reference Works: Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989. Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. McNees, Eleanor, ed. Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Sussex: Helm Information, 1994. Snaith, Anna (ed). Palgrave Advances in Woolf Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Woolf Studies Annual. New York. Pace University Press. Secondary Reading: Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Barrett, Eileen and Patricia Cramer, eds. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Black, Naomi. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Bradshaw, David. Hyams Place: The Years, the Jews and the British Union of Fascists. In Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, edited by Maroula Joannou, 179-191. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005. -----Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Daugherty, Beth Rigel, ed. Virginia Woolf s How Should One Read A Book? Woolf Studies Annual 4(1998): 123-185. -----, ed. Letters from Readers to Virginia Woolf. Woolf Studies Annual 12 (2006): 1-212. -----. Virginia Woolf Teaching/Virginia Woolf Learning: Morley College and the Common Reader. In New Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Helen
Wussow, 61-77. Dallas: Contemporary Research Press, 1995. DeGay, Jane. Virginia Woolf s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh University Press, 2006. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. Dubino, Jeanne (ed). Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Palgrave 2011. Dusinberre, Juliet. Virginia Woolf s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? London: Macmillan, 1997. Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Fernald, Anne. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader. London: Macmillan, 2006. Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf & the Bloomsbury Avant Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. -----. Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf s The Voyage Out, Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature, 5.1(1986): 63-90. De Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988. Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post- Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. -----. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Harris, Alexandra. Virginia Woolf. Thames and Hudson, 2011. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. -----. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Koppen, R. S. Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity. Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Light, Alison. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Viking, 2006. Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. -----. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. ----- ed. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. -----. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pawlowski, Merry M. Reassessing Modernism: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and Fascist Ideology. Woolf Studies Annual 1 (1995): 47-67. -----,ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators Seduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Peach, Linden. Virginia Woolf. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Phillips, Kathy. Woolf Against Empire. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981. Reinhold, Natalya, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004. Rosenberg, Beth Carole and Jeanne Dubino, eds. Virginia Woolf and the Essay. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Saloman, Randi, Virginia Woolf s Essayism. Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Sellers, Susan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Sim, Lorraine, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Ashgate, 2010. Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1999. Snaith, Anna. Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf s Flush. Modern Fiction Studies. 48.3(2002): 614-36. ----- and Michael Whitworth eds, Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. -----, ed. The Three Guineas Letters. Woolf Studies Annual Vol. 6 (2000): 1-168. -----. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. -----, ed. The Years. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Southworth, Helen (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Palgrave 2010. Squier, Susan. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Whitworth, Michael. Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wollaeger, Mark, Woolf, Postcards and the Elision of Race: Colonising Women in The Voyage Out, Modernism/modernity 8.1(2001): 43-75. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Useful websites:
International Virginia Woolf Society: http://www.utoronto.ca/ivws/ Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain: http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/