Literary Interpretation: Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare

Calendar

Class #	Topics / Readings	Assignments
1	Introduction.
2	A Room of One’s Own. Chap. 1-3.
3	A Room of One’s Own. Chap. 4-6.
4	Antony and Cleopatra.	Assignment of report topics.
5	Discussion of the use of other texts in Room, including Antony and Cleopatra and possible reports on some of the following: As You Like It; Aphra Behn’s poems and The Rover; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; and poems by Christina Rosetti and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
6		Hand in your 5-pp. essay, appraising Woolf’s use of another literary text in Room.
7	Mrs. Dalloway.
8	Mrs. Dalloway. Possible reports on WWI poets, including Wilfred Owen (“Mental Cases,” “Dulce et Decorum est,” “Strange Meeting”) and selections by Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. Possible reports on Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain pp. 3-23 and skim pp. 60-157; “Living in a War Zone: An Introduction to Virginia Woolf as a War Novelist” by Mark Hussey, and “The Female Victims of War in Mrs. Dalloway” by Masami Usui. (Both in Virginia Woolf and War).
9	_Cymbeline. _Film screening of Mrs. Dalloway. (One day after Class #9)
10	Report on “Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s Sister: Chapters in a Woman Writer’s Autobiography,” by Christine Froula (in Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare, Marianne Novy, ed.): pp. 123-142.	Mrs. Dalloway and Cymbeline. 2-pp. response essay on some aspect of their relationship.
11	Orlando. Chap. 1-3.
12	Report on Sir Thomas Browne, “Hydrotaphia.” Reports on Dympna Callaghan, “‘Othello was a White Man’: properties of race on Shakespeare’s stage” (in Alternative Shakespeares vol. 2, ed. Terence Hawkes): pp. 192-215; Barbara Smith “Racism and Women’s Studies” “Healing the Great Divide” (in The Truth that never Hurts), and/or Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark.	Orlando and Othello. 2-pp. response essay on some aspect of their relationship.
13	Orlando. Chap. 4-6. Video screening of Orlando.
14	Orlando. Reports on selected poems by Alexander Pope, selected essays by Dr. Johnson.
15	To the Lighthouse, “The Window.”
16	To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes.” Selected Shakespeare sonnets. Report on Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, introduction and discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
17		To the Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse.” 2-pp. response essay.
18	The Winter’s Tale and To the Lighthouse. Reports on Adrienne Rich, “The Domestication of Motherhood” (pp. 110-127), “Mother and Son, Woman and Man” (pp. 186-217), “Motherhood and Daughterhood” (pp. 218-255) Of Woman Born; “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (pp. 23-75) in Blood, Bread, and Poetry.
19	Research day: Work in library.
20	The Waves.
21	_The Waves. _Reports on Keats, selected poems and letters; Coleridge, essays on Shakespeare. Report on “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’Écriture féminine,” by Ann Rosalind Jones (in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter): pp. 361-377.
22	The Waves.
23	Three Guineas.
24	Between the Acts.
25		Between the Acts. 15 pp. paper due: include a research component, as well as your own analysis.
26	Between the Acts. Student paper reports.
27	Back to A Room of One’s Own. Student paper reports.	2-pp. response.