Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In this class we will learn how to experiment from Virginia Woolf, who recognized that life must be transmuted into “something rich and strange” in order to seem “real” in writing. “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another,” she wrote to the point in Orlando. Out of the fearless, flowing fabric of observation and feeling, Woolf composed short stories, literary criticism, novels, biography, and memoir: prose which altered the bounds of these genres. Passages that streamed with impressions, “the incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (“Modern Novels”), became her trademark—a mode which heralded modernism.

This three-hour seminar will introduce you to a number of Woolf’s lyrical shorter works, and use her innovations in point of view, time, consciousness, and character to embolden us in our own explorations of form. We will dip into her playground of expression—diaries and letters—to get in touch with “the soul or life within us ... which is always saying the very opposite to what other people say” (“Montaigne”).

Whether we take Flush, the imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, or Orlando’s centuries-long foray into androgyny for examples, in this seminar, we'll all have something to gain for letting our hair down and trying on voices, subjects, and musings we’ve never dared before.