English 449
Spring 2008: Virginia Woolf and British Modernism
Professor Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)
Email: amsp@lehigh.edu
Office:
Office hours:
Course Synopsis:
Virginia Woolf is a towering figure of the modern
novel. She is also a highly influential and accomplished essayist, and a writer
whose complex and controversial life is seen by some as an inspiration for
generations of women writers after her – though for others, Woolf’s long
struggles with recurring mental illness and ultimate suicide can only be read
as a tragedy. This course will survey both her fiction and nonfiction, from her
early short stories to major novels like "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To
the Lighthouse." Attention will be paid to Woolf's
engagement with major historical events (the two World Wars, the advent of
women's suffrage, etc.) as well as her literary milieu (the
Primary Texts
The Voyage Out (long)
Night and Day (long
– but a quick read)
Jacob’s Room
Mrs. Dalloway
Complete Shorter
Fiction of Virginia Woolf
To The Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own (Annotated)
The Waves (long –
a difficult read)
Critical texts (generally on Blackboard unless otherwise indicated)
Christine Froula, Virginia
Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (full book)
Brenda Silver, Virginia
Woolf Icon
Alex Zwerdling, Virginia
Woolf and the Real World
(note: used copies of this book are cheaply available via Amazon; you may wish
to invest
in one)
Daniel Ferrer, Virginia
Woolf and the Madness of Language
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia
Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere
David Trotter, “The Modernist Novel” in The
Marianne DeKoven, “Modernism and Gender” in The
Urmila Seshagiri, “Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse” (Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 2004)
Michael North, Reading
1922 (Chapter 2: “The Public Unconscious”)
Peter Stansky, On or
About December 1910: Early
Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism Volume 2 (Chapter 1: “Woolf’s Rapture With Language”)
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
(Others likely to be added)
General/Research
Notes
One goal of this course is to encourage students to do advanced research on Virginia Woolf, driven largely by their own ideas and interests. The number of themes and methods that can be applied is potentially quite vast – one can look at everything from Woolf’s approach to landscape, to homoeroticism, to the idea of colonialism, etc.
We’ll have more to say about the final research papers, and I’ll want to meet with each of you individually at least once starting in March regarding your ideas and research progress. But in general, I’d like for you to think of these projects as opportunities to critically debate dominant critical arguments about Woolf, as well as to look at some texts by Woolf that might not have gotten very much attention up to this point (including some of her lesser known short stories, essays, reviews, diaries, letters, etc.).
I will encourage you to use the internet as well as Lehigh’s database tools to pursue your major research ideas.
The most familiar and effective databases are of course Project Muse and JSTOR, though there are many others. These can be easily accessed from computers on campus. Off-campus, you need to log in using the proxy server (go through Lehigh’s library website to do this).
I will also strongly encourage you
to use more traditional approaches to tracking down scholarship that might have
been done on a particular theme or topic, such as the MLA Bibliography. The MLA Bibliography will likely have links to
sources that Lehigh’s library doesn’t own, so you will have to use interlibrary
loan. I also strongly encourage students to consider making a trip to one of
the big research libraries within driving distance of Lehigh at some point
during the term. The
Don’t forget that this type of research takes time to do – you’ll need to start planning your final research papers well in advance to make sure you have access to all the sources you need, and time to process them. Since resources are limited overall, I’ll encourage students share their resources with one another.
It’s also worth pointing out that one of the most effective ways to track down useful arguments and secondary sources on Woolf
English 449
Spring 2008
Tentative Syllabus
January 14 Introduction to the course – lecture.
Read two Woolf short stories in class over a coffee break, and discuss. (“The Mark on the Wall” and “The Legacy”)
January 21 The Voyage Out
(Woolf
essays: “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; “Modern Fiction”)
Roland
Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
January 28 The Voyage Out
Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early
David Trotter, “The Modernist
Novel” in The
Marianne DeKoven,
“Modernism and Gender” in The
Companion to Modernism
February 4 Night and Day
Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury
Avant-Garde (chapters to be determined)
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the
Public
Sphere (Introduction and Chapter 1, “A Democratic Highbrow”)
February 11 Finish Night and Day
Christine
Froula, Virginia Woolf and the
A Room of One’s Own
February 18 Jacob’s Room
Short excerpt from Joyce’s Ulysses (for comparison)
More
Hermione Lee
February 25 Begin Mrs. Dalloway
Michael North, Reading 1922 (Chapter 2: “The Public Unconscious”)
More
Hermione Lee
[No class March 3]
March 10 Mrs. Dalloway
Hermione Lee’s essay on Michael Cunningham’s “updated” adaptation in The Hours, and the film adaptation that followed
Short papers due (7 pages): Close reading of one of Woolf’s novels
March 17 To the Lighthouse
Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language
Urmila Seshagiri, “Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse”
(Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 2004)
March 24 To the Lighthouse
March 31 The Waves
April 7 The Waves
April 14 Woolf’s short stories from Complete Shorter Fiction (69-148; 215-293)
Annotated bibliographies
for final research paper due
April 21 In class: presentations on Woolf
[Last day of classes at Lehigh: April 25]
Week of April 28:
Final papers due (15 pages)