English 150

Other Readings and Media

Required texts include Virginia Woolf?s Between the Acts, Jacob?s Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One?s Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, The Waves, A Writer?s Diary, The Years, and critical essays included in a course reader. A wide range of secondary materials will be placed on reserve.

Description

This seminar will be devoted to an intensive and extensive reading of Virginia Woolf?s literary career, focusing on her fiction, but also taking into account her essays, diaries, and letters. We will trace the evolution of Woolf?s narrative strategies and subjects, representations of consciousness, engagements with history and politics, and refashioning into a contemporary cultural icon. We will also assess her contributions to modernist aesthetics and to gender theory. In preparation for writing the senior thesis, we will explore a range of critical approaches to Woolf?s fiction?psychoanalytic, formalist, historical, feminist, postcolonialist, philosophical, biographical?and consult recently published scholarly editions and holograph manuscripts. The seminar will culminate in a twenty-page thesis on a topic of your choice.