[Vwoolf] Teaching Woolf Now and Online

Mon Jun 8 11:40:51 EDT 2020

Good morning,

Many thanks to everyone for these wonderful suggestions, and to Liz for getting the ball rolling and compiling a bibliography. I would add to the list The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, by Michael North, and Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, eds. Richard Begam & Michael Valdez Moses.

(I'd also, if I may, like to put in a plug for bookshop.org, which donates a portion of its profits to independent bookstores. They've raised nearly $2 million for them during the pandemic thus far.)

Best,

Kristin

Kristin Czarnecki
President, International Virginia Woolf Society
Professor of English
Georgetown College, Pawling Hall 110
Georgetown, KY 40324
502-863-8132

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From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Elizabeth F. Evans via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2020 10:55 AM
To: Mark Hussey <mhussey at verizon.net>
Cc: Woolf Listserv <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Teaching Woolf Now and Online

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Thanks Gretchen, Jane, Erica, Trudi, Amanda, Mark, Stuart (and again to Karen, Madelyn, Cheryl, Eleanor), and all for these comments and suggestions!

To Mark's suggestion, I'd be happy to compile a bibliography of all the suggestions posted here. I'll plan on three broad categories: pandemic, race, and online. I'd be grateful to receive full citations from those who've already posted. New suggestions of course welcome!

To Mark's other suggestion, I'd love to be on a call with others thinking about how to teach Woolf this fall.

All the best,
Liz

On Jun 7, 2020, at 9:38 AM, mhussey at verizon.net<mailto:mhussey at verizon.net> wrote:

With apologies for the omissions there will always be, attached is a gathering of VW conference presentations on Woolf and race in a US context.

As I suggested the other day, creating a crowd-sourced database  or biblio would be very useful, I think. Perhaps those of us scheduled to teach Woolf this fall might also arrange a call?

Also, if people could add full citations when posting suggestions that would also be great.

All the best,
mark
From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu>> On Behalf Of Jane Marie Garrity via Vwoolf
Sent: Saturday, June 6, 2020 7:10 PM
To: Erica Delsandro <ericadelsandro at gmail.com<mailto:ericadelsandro at gmail.com>>; Elizabeth F. Evans <evansef at gmail.com<mailto:evansef at gmail.com>>; Woolf Listserv <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Subject: [Vwoolf] Teaching Woolf Now and Online

Hi Liz & everyone,
These are all wonderful suggestions and I just wanted to add a few more below that either explicitly or implicitly address race in relation to Woolf:

Sonita Sarker, “Bloomsbury and Empire”
Gretchen Gerzina, “Bloomsbury and Empire”

Not as recent but still worth reading!

Anna Snaith, “Conversations in Bloomsbury: Colonial Writers and the Hogarth Press”
Margaret Lucille Trenta, “The Noble Savage and the Savage Noble: Mulk Raj Anand’s Deconstruction of Identity in Conversations in Bloomsbury”

I hope everyone is well and safe—
Jane

Jane Garrity
Associate Professor of English
University of Colorado at Boulder
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226
Jane.Garrity at Colorado.Edu<mailto:Jane.Garrity at Colorado.Edu>

On Jun 6, 2020, at 2:16 PM, Erica Delsandro via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:

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<mailto: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<http://bit.ly/ThresholdModernism>)

Book Review Editor of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 (https://spacebetweensociety.org/home/journal/<https://secure-web.cisco.com/15MDZ1jqNgM0ckH6TjXzdZowLrwRRcgFXPat4C5Wm3_RQuahsk4dNdjJ-VQlz0hjnYelf4jmzmUGukYIqbxEK9oyYomC22MD_gnu0MVymH_ETHQw9hAYeh2enoxQDzYfwPblYM5JhYXr4i8b6MpZf2skfdyYamie-XSHxJetjQTKgf-uKHEmhlAz-t0vpYN_ypNJmvictobWp7RbKsih0fC9wooxO056Cj_ZzyjoFa-oPI4epVbDUDbhz6LcN4nf3vSJObTbiEEMxLCzHkMH4rYrPvcO9DzRJ7xytIflQTCZRSwUBiaYC7MeMQuesvzccYo1JSsOED2A18WHz4lKbtTeb8MmIjSs2iuli-i1xEkWDvIHzh2xFw9VnQLgxKAVlX5FDh_pNGHuzsMX393eUu3rs8E7qNy-fceqUREJIAw75qUzyPjMeCtA8JdlCxXYOqYiBYIoK4QIkWV_ahNgLtw/https%3A%2F%2Fspacebetweensociety.org%2Fhome%2Fjournal%2F>)

On May 27, 2020, at 4:23 PM, Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:detlofmm at miamioh.edu>>; Kllevenback <kllevenback at att.net<mailto:kllevenback at att.net>>
Cc: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto: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

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From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu>> on behalf of "vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>" <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>>
Reply-To: "Detloff, Madelyn" <detlofmm at miamioh.edu<mailto:detlofmm at miamioh.edu>>
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 6:53 AM
To: "kllevenback at att.net<mailto:kllevenback at att.net>" <kllevenback at att.net<mailto:kllevenback at att.net>>
Cc: "vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>" <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto: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<mailto: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<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/opinion/online-college-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare__;!!NCZxaNi9jForCP_SxBKJCA!HUHiC961L6ZZKKwUjWscrIONk6pxx3XuPVcZmOW5F1d-jZqoVO44iVcLGrww_Q$>

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