Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature (368-0-20)

Topic

Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury and the Arts of Life

Instructors

Christine Froula

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 215: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

In the early twentieth century, a moment in some ways uncannily like our own, Virginia Woolf and the young artists, thinkers, and writers now known as "Bloomsbury" came of age in a violently globalizing world that their elders wouldn't have recognized. Even as social movements challenged Europe's racialized imperialist and patriarchal order, the Great War shattered millions of lives and led to a struggle between democratic freedoms and totalitarianisms that culminated in World War II and continues today. In such turbulent times, how to live, what to do?

Centering on Virginia Woolf's most important works, our seminar will explore the modernist Bloomsbury circle's rich and influential creative and critical legacy. Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield wrote novels, short stories, poems, and essays in groundbreaking forms. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington translated PostImpressionist style to painting, homes, gardens, and the domestic arts. Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf extended the art of biography, or life-writing, in fresh, illuminating ways. Vita Sackville-West inspired Woolf's biographical fantasia Orlando and created a world-famous garden. Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, whose list includes Freud's complete works in translation and made Virginia "the only woman in England free to write what I like." Ethel Smyth composed a suffrage march, a vocal symphony The Prison, and Der Wald (1903), which until 2016 remained the sole opera by a woman to be staged at the Met. John Maynard Keynes warned the world against the Versailles Treaty and led postWWII economic thought at Bretton Woods. The Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova Keynes acted Shakespeare, was sketched by Picasso, and helped Keynes found the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Throughout the decades, these extraordinary friends' letters, diaries, memoirs, and notebooks document their practice of the everyday arts of life, private and public--family, conversation, travel, adventure, exploration, theatre, reading, walking, pets (dogs; Leonard's marmoset Mitz), photography, fashion—against the backdrop of world-historical conditions and events.

Teaching Method

Discussion.

Evaluation Method

Attendance, preparation, participation; written and oral exercises; class presentation; option of two shorter or one longer course paper or project; self-evaluation.

Class Materials (Required)

Texts available at: Norris.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.