first class

I always feel so nervous before the first class of a semester - and so happy when it's underway, and I've met the students, and remember that yes, I do vaguely know something about what I'm teaching, or at least enough to keep the ball rolling ... This is definitely a self-indulgent grad class (even though the impetus came from the grad students themselves, who asked for it) - it's on The Visual World of Virginia Woolf, and largely seems to be made up of creative writers, which should be a whole lot of fun.  But if a Chair can't be self-indulgent in what she teaches, who can?  It's years since I've taught Woolf, and even then, it's always been one-off novels: this time, it's a slow, close-reading, largely chronological approach, considering style and the visual; visuality and the material world; color and motion and photography and film and gardens; and, of course, the whole Bloomsbury shabang of painted furniture and abstract curtain fabrics.  I can't wait ...