The Many Lives of Virginia Woolf: Contemporary Conversations and Adaptations

3 credits · Graduate

Virginia Woolf—famed for her visionary Modernist writing style, her 20th-century western articulations of feminist thought, her membership in the illustrious Bloomsbury circle of thinkers and artists, and also celebrated as a diarist, literary critic, and co-publisher of The Hogarth Press—maintains an iconic position in contemporary literature and culture; yet, it is also Woolf who wrote in her diaries: “I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me.” With consideration for Woolf’s wisdom on the conditions for how one writes and/or creates as the underpinning to this course, we will read—alongside some of Woolf’s original novels, essays, criticism, diary entries, and letters—other artists who, using Woolf’s work and life as a point of inspiration or as a grounds for conversation and adaptation, engage with the exciting act of making something new. Our work will include seminar teaching, an archival research assignment, an analogue letter-writing assignment, and will culminate in either a major research paper, a work of creative writing, or a public humanities project. FORMATS: Seminar