BA Seminar, Autumn 2014
S. MacDuff
B 305, Wednesday 12-14
Department of English
In this seminar we will study three of Virginia Woolf’s most innovative novels in the context of her autobiographical and critical writing, exploring the ways in which she employs “stream of consciousness” techniques. Woolf’s letters and diaries record how the ideas for Mrs Dalloway (1925) took shape through a creative dialogue with Ulysses and The Waste Land (both 1922), but the
“tunnelling process” she devised to “dig out beautiful caves” behind her characters, caves that connect and come “to daylight at the present moment,” led to a very personal development of the interior monologue. In “A Sketch of the Past” Virginia Woolf describes how the early loss of her mother led her to compose To the Lighthouse (1927): death “unveiled and intensified” experience for Woolf, so that the “shock” became a “revelation… of some real thing behind appearances,” leading to a new aesthetic of the modernist novel as a collection of “moments of being.” In A Room of One’s Own
(1928), and the diary she kept in the late 1920s, Woolf developed this aesthetic into the rich prose poetry of The Waves (1931), in which the lives of six characters are gradually unfolded through six extended interior monologues, interwoven with the ebb and flow of the tides.
Texts
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway . Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse . Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves . Ed. Kate Flint. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.
Texts are available from Off the Shelf in Payot Chantepoulet
Course reader, available in the English department
A selection of relevant secondary literature is available on the seminar shelf in the English library
Course overview (may be subject to change)
1.
17/9
2.
24/9
3.
1/10
4.
8/10
5.
15/10
6.
22/10
7.
29/10
8.
12/11
9.
19/11
21/11
10.
26/11
11.
3/12
12.
10/12
13.
17/12
Introduction
Virginia Woolf, diary extracts (1922-23); Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway
“A Sketch of the Past”; To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse
Reading week (essays due 12/11)
Virginia Woolf, diary extracts (1927-31);
A Room of One’s Own
The Waves
12.15-13.45: Seminar with Marie-Paule Ramo and Nathalie Prokhoris on their production of Une Chambre à Soi (with Dr Kukorelly and Dr
Fehlbaum, B**), followed by the show at Théâtre du Grütli (19.30)
The Waves
The Waves
Conclusion
Second contrôle continu (1.5 hour exam)