123252 AR Literature Course - Literature 1/2 (MA)British/Irish/New English & Cultural Studies (2018W)

In this course we will analyse a range of Virginia Woolf’s texts via a focus on authorship. Virginia Woolf was born into a prominent Victorian household that embodied and celebrated ‘authorship’ in various ways. Leslie Stephen (her father), who was first married to W. M. Thackeray’s daughter, famously edited the first Dictionary of National Biography. His rich collection of books and portraits of ‘eminent Victorians’ certainly inspired but also complicated Woolf’s imagination. In a way, from the very beginning, questions of ‘fatherhood’ and ‘nationalism’ were inseparable from questions of ‘authorship’. In some way or another, all of Virginia Woolf’s writings insistently reflect on the notion of authorship as well as on the practice of writing itself. By drawing on seminal theoretical texts such as Umberto Eco’s ‘Texts and Interpreters’, Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ and Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’, we will ask the following questions: What is an author for Virginia Woolf? What does it mean to fictionally ‘resurrect’ Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own? What are Woolf’s self-masking practices in her novels and how do these tie in with her avant-garde modernist poetics, with androgyny as well as with her feminist ideas of spatial autonomy and financial emancipation? How did her psychic illness affect her own authorship? Is it fair to talk about a ‘broken’, ‘disabled’ or ‘split’ form of authorship? We will read A Sketch of the Past, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse with additional readings from her short stories and essays. We will investigate these questions by taking into account Woolf’s cultural and historical context; more precisely, her involvement in the Bloomsbury group, her acquaintances and relationships with influential figures such as Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa and Duncan Grant.