This course will focus on the novels, essays, and short stories of Virginia Woolf, and through them we will explore new forms of writing being developed in early twentieth-century modernism; a new awareness of relations between gender, genre, and war; and the consideration of the role of sexuality in human identity. Even Virginia Woolf’s work by itself could be considered “interdisciplinary.”
But the “Bloomsbury” part of this course will intensify its interdisciplinary focus. The “Bloomsbury Group” was a group of brilliant writers, artists (mostly painters), intellectuals, art critics, historians, economists, and philosophers whose friendship with one another advanced and inspired their work. It was a collective or a coterie, depending on how you look at it; either way, the collective was bigger than the sum of its parts. Through a printing press that Virginia Woolf established with her husband Leonard Woolf, the Hogarth Press, they also advanced the work of many important voices outside their own.
In their hey-day, they were known as anti-establishment figures. They led colorful countercultural lives often touched by scandal. And yet, later, when times changed, they were often accused of elitism. They were indeed privileged, and they knew it – and from their various points of view they launched a critique of society – and a defense of beauty and sexual freedom – that is still valuable today.
We will read: Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, A Room of One’s Own -- along with brief selections from the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and the novelist E. M. Forster. We will look at post-impressionist paintings by Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. In the end, we will read The Hours, a 1998 Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham -- that riffs on the work of Virginia Woolf -- and was later made into an Oscar-winning film by the same name, which we will also watch and discuss. In this last section of the course, we will discuss the idea of adaptation and consider how work from the past lives on in renewed forms.
About Professor Williams
Carolyn Williams specializes in Victorian literature and culture, with special interest in Victorian theater and Victorian poetry. She currently serves as Chair of the Department of English in New Brunswick. Until 2010 she was Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of the Writers at Rutgers and the Writers from Rutgers reading series. She was the founding Director of Writers House, now directed by Mark Doty. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA). Outside Rutgers, she has served on the Supervisory Board of The English Institute and the Executive Board of The Dickens Project, and she now serves on the PMLA Advisory Committee as well as the editorial boards of Victorian Literature and Culture and English Literature in Transition.