[Vwoolf] Teaching Woolf Now and Online

Sat Jun 6 16:16:41 EDT 2020

Hello Liz and the Woolf Crew!

I lean heavily on Urmila Seshagiri's *Race and the Modernist Imagination*
in my Modernism on the Margins class.  Urmila's book offers a twofold
contribution: context and model.  She provides us with the cultural and
historical context for reading race in modernist writing AND, through her
close readings, models for us a way to close read texts that she doesn't
explicitly examine.

An interesting pairing might be Saidiya Hartman's *Wayward Lives, Beautiful
Experiments* (excerpts) with any text or excerpt from Woolf in which a
marginal character with a marginalized identity (race, class, etc.)
figures.  Woolf has these more or less anonymous women in her work and
although she is committed to the voices of anonymous women -- arguably
white -- many female characters with cameo roles appear and remain in the
shadows.  (Crosby in *The Years* jumps to mind.)  Actually, as I write
this, I am imagining many generative affiliations and critiques (of Woolf,
of white modernism) that could emerge by putting Woolf in conversation with
Hartman's project.

A pairing that I have written on is *Three Guineas *and Ta-Nehisi
Coate's *Between
the World and Me*, as both are epistolary.  Personally, I have wanted to
teach those two books together for quite some time!  I think there is some
interesting synergy to be explored that provides a way to examine Woolf's
failures in racial consciousness while analyzing her structural critique of
social and political structures. And such a pairing introduces students to
Coates (yes, please!), opens up modernist writing to contemporary issues,
and illustrates the importance of an intersectional approach.  (Which
neither author employs.)

Thanks for restarting the conversation, Liz!

In health and hope -- EGD

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 1:03 PM Elizabeth F. Evans via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I really enjoyed this thread on the challenges and opportunities of
> teaching Woolf online in our age of pandemic. I wanted to resurrect the
> discussion and also to add a new question: how to best teach Woolf in this
> time when systemic racism, "genteel racism," and authoritarianism are also
> very much on our minds in the US. (Hence the revised subject line.) I'll be
> teaching a Woolf class this fall and am hoping to incorporate a meaningful
> engagement with such issues, as well as reflection on
> pandemics/quarantine/illness. It's a lot to juggle in one course, but, then
> again, we're all already juggling these balls! I don't yet know what the
> mode of delivery will be but am anticipating it to be at least partially
> online.
>
> For discussing Woolf in relationship to systemic racism, casual racism,
> and authoritarianism, *Three Guineas* will obviously be an important
> touchstone. *The Voyage Out* would also be useful, though I'm not sure if
> I'm willing to make room for it. I'm planning to teach *A Room of One's
> Own* alongside Kabe Wilson's remarkable rewriting of the book as *Of One
> Woman or So by Olivia N'Gowfri*, which is told from the perspective of a
> female African student at contemporary Cambridge. (More about that on Blogging
> Woolf
> <https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/author-rearranges-woolfs-words-into-a-novella/>.
> Susan Stanford Friedman has written and presented on Wilson's project.)
> Jane Marcus's groundbreaking discussion of *Room* in "A Very Fine
> Negress" will be apropos. Does anyone have recommendations for more recent
> scholarship that explicitly engages with Woolf and race in ways that would
> be useful for the current moment in the US?
>
> Returning to the topic of teaching online, I'm hoping to take advantage of
> born digital materials, like Melba Cuddy-Keane's on-line essay, ‘Mapping *Mrs.
> Dalloway*: London as a Networked City’: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/97406
>
> Hope you're all hanging in there.
>
> With best wishes,
> Liz
>
>
> Elizabeth F. Evans
> Associate Professor of English
> Wayne State University
> https://bit.ly/ElizabethEvansProfile
>
> Author of *Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces
> of Imperial London* (Cambridge University Press, 2019) (
> bit.ly/ThresholdModernism)
>
> Book Review Editor of *The Space Between: Literature and
> Culture, 1914-1945 *(https://spacebetweensociety.org/home/journal/)
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 27, 2020, at 4:23 PM, Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> wrote:
>
> Thanks Madelyn, Cheryl, Eleanor (& hello out there! Hope everyone is doing
> ok!)
> Like Eleanor, I’d successfully avoided ever teaching online until being
> thrust into the zoom in March. 6 of the 12 students from my spring
> modernism class have signed up for a fall Woolf seminar, so I decided not
> to put Mrs D on the syllabus again (though, as many people have already
> pointed out, that novel, in the context of Elizabeth Outka’s reading in *Viral
> Modernism*, has popped up in all kinds of places online recently).
> I only teach undergrads, but it struck me that if many of the Woolf
> community are going to be teaching online, a thread like this sharing ideas
> and resources would be very welcome, especially to novices like me. Our
> interlibrary loan is functioning smoothly for articles, and I’ve also
> sometimes been able to provide scans of various Woolf things for colleagues
> who can’t get into their libraries at the moment. Perhaps we could
> establish a kind of database of materials?  Just a thought…
>
> Stay safe out there.
> mark
>
> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> *On Behalf Of *Eleanor
> McNees via Vwoolf
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 27, 2020 3:10 PM
> *To:* Detloff, Madelyn <detlofmm at miamioh.edu>; Kllevenback <
> kllevenback at att.net>
> *Cc:* vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [Vwoolf] NYTimes: The Future of College Is Online, and
> It’s Cheaper—and teaching Woolf?
>
> Dear All,
>
> As it happens I’m teaching online for the first time ever in my 40+ years
> of teaching, and this happens to be my graduate seminar, Woolf and the
> Victorians (not Woolf and Bloomsbury, but close). I have 15 mostly PhD
> students, and we meet for two hours Thursday afternoons on Zoom with an
> optional mid-week office Zoom hour. I began with “On Being Ill,” and one of
> my students persuaded me to change the title of the course to add “A Zoom
> of One’s Own.” We have active discussion posts about the readings, only the
> last two weeks of which are specifically Woolf’s novels, *Mrs. Dalloway *
> and *The Years*. For these I’ve delved into the current work on the 1918
> pandemic, especially Outka’s essays (don’t have her book). Wonderful Jane
> de Gay made a video lecture on Woolf and religious background which my
> students discussed last week (another feature of online teaching—allowing
> us to collaborate and share from great distances), and I hope to do one for
> her in the fall. Finally, we’ll end the quarter with a Zoom panel
> discussion of their various projects. All of the Victorian novels we’ve
> read—*Jane Eyre*, *David Copperfield*, *Middlemarch* and *Far From the
> Madding Crowd*—have been prefaced by Woolf’s and Leslie Stephen’s essays
> on these novelists so that students are reading these through a
> Stephen/Woolfian lens. Finally, of course, I’ve  had to adjust some of the
> readings, but thanks to DU’s having access to the TLS database and many
> others, including Hathi Trust, we’ve been able to gather many sources. I’m
> only sorry that Leaska’s *The Pargiters *doesn’t seem available.
>
> Best wishes to all of you,
> Eleanor
> Dr. Eleanor McNees
> Interim Director of Graduate Studies
> Department of English and Literary Arts
> University of Denver
> Denver, CO 80208
>
> <image001.png>
>
>
>
> *From: *Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of "
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu" <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Reply-To: *"Detloff, Madelyn" <detlofmm at miamioh.edu>
> *Date: *Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 6:53 AM
> *To: *"kllevenback at att.net" <kllevenback at att.net>
> *Cc: *"vwoolf at lists.osu.edu" <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Subject: *Re: [Vwoolf] NYTimes: The Future of College Is Online, and
> It’s Cheaper—and teaching Woolf?
>
> HI all,
> I hope you are all safe and healthy.  I will miss seeing you at the
> conference.  As we Chicago Cubs fans are fond of saying, "Wait until next
> year!" :)
>
> I teach online but usually WGS courses, so I don't have specific modules
> set up for Woolf. That said, I think that an online course might be a good
> opportunity to do some interesting work on her letters, since they present
>  a form  of communication that presumes the need to connect across
> separateness.  It might also be interesting to read "On Being Ill" together
> with a class this fall. I could imagine an assignment where students create
> their own updated takes on On Being Quarantined, or something similar.
>
> Take care, all, and... I can't wait until next year!
>
> Madelyn
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 6:47 PM Kllevenback via Vwoolf <
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>
> Has anyone exciting/interesting approaches to on-line teaching of VW and
> Bloomsbury?
> Stay safe, be well—
> Karen Levenback
>
>  The Future of College Is Online, and It’s Cheaper
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/opinion/online-college-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare
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>
>
> Sent from my iPad
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> Madelyn Detloff
> *Chair and Professor of English *
> *Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies *
> *Miami University *
> 356 Bachelor Hall
> Oxford, OH 45056  O: 513-529-5221 | MiamiOH.edu/English
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> her, hers will do in a pinch*
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-- 

*EGD*

*she/her/hers*
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