Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Woolf class week 4


Everyone looks very serious and full of concentration - which is, of course, how it should be ... Why, though - is that an open bottle of prosecco hiding in full view behind my lap top?  I'm not sure how we've settled on prosecco, as well as home baking (apple and cinnamon muffins, today! and cheese and crackers, and dates stuffed with cheese and celery, and tangerines), as suitable accompaniments to our slow, deliberative progress through Woolf, but it works well ...  Out of the window, you'll just make out the end of an extraordinary apricot colored sunset.

I'm glad to be the far side of Jacob's Room: it's my least favorite Woolf novel, and I can never quite put my finger on why: it seems to be trying too hard - to the extent that (as I was trying to discuss in class) I'm not sure whether some passages are bad writing, or trying to get inside the mind of someone who thinks in, say, alliterative clichés.  I think that much more of the novel is satiric than I once did - but there again, I'm not always sure.  It may just be interestingly inconsistent about (and embodying) whether pattern and ordering is a good or a bad thing (cue to talk about Vanessa Bell's textile designs, and Clive Bell's aesthetic theories, etc).  The class was made a little strange by the fact that most of the grad students came furnished with the OUP World's Classics edition to which I wrote the intro - which I still think is a good piece of writing, and points forward to lots of ideas about visuality and prose that I tried to grapple with in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination.  But the notes to the edition are terrible! and to me, that's a real give-away about what seemed habituated knowledge in England in 1992 (for which read - "for a well-educated person teaching at Oxford in 1992").  Truly, I should have given them as an exercise - find three references in the text that need a footnote, and have been overlooked. 

Also, when I came out of class and left Taper Hall at around 7.40, there were three large Great Blue Herons moseying around outside, seeing if there was anything interesting in the grass.  Why?


2 comments:

  1. Kate, just to say how much I'm enjoying your Virginia Woolf weekly updates. I read all of her novels in order in 2015, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Mrs Dalloway through to The Waves is such an achievement!
    Huw

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  2. Thank you, Huw! I may seem to be writing more about what we eat than what we talk about ...! ... but I’m much enjoying this - I’ve never taught a course on her before where we looked at every single novel, and quite a lot of essays and short stories besides ... it’s so interesting seeing the repetition of ideas and imagery, and yet the continuing reworking of them.

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