Spring 2007 Courses

English 394-01: Virginia Woolf and Her Circle (Attewell)

M/W/F 9:40-10:40am CAR 204

This course focuses on the work of that feminist, snobbish, delicate, courageous, prudish, sensitive, radical, innovative, conservative, queer, crazy, suicidal, oppressed, imperialist, anti-imperialist, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-racist, classist, pacifist, political, apolitical, major and/or minor writer Virginia Woolf (1881 – 1942). Taking a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach to Woolf's writings, we will begin with Orlando's bravura take on biography and the protean nature of the self and conclude with the elegiac To the Lighthouse. Along the way we will attend to the questions about aesthetic form, literary history, gender, sexuality, nationalism, imperialism, and war that Woolf explores in novels like Jacob's Room and Between the Acts and in essays like Three Guineas. Although we will read deeply in Woolf's oeuvre, we will also spend some time investigating the interwar cultural scene her celebrity both spotlights and simplifies. We will pay particular attention to the work of those female contemporaries with whom Woolf was most intimate, including Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, and Elizabeth Bowen. Assignments will include weekly posts to the class e-list, projects requiring bibliographical and biographical research, and two formal critical essays.

Spring 2007 Course Listings