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Archive for April, 2016

Immerse yourself in Virginia Woolf in Cambridge

Posted in Woolf Courses, Woolf in academia, tagged , on Thursday 28 April 2016| 2 Comments »

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Dr. Trudi Tate of the University of Cambridge.

Our Woolf course, ‘Virginia Woolf in Cambridge’, 18-22 July 2016, is filling up, but there are still a few rooms available at the favourable summer school rate.

Virginia Woolf in Cambridge 2016 looks at some of the best-loved of Woolf’s books (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own) from fresh angles, putting them alongside contemporary creative work by Susan Sellers (Vanessa and Virginia) and Kabe Wilson (Of One Woman or So). Gillian Beer’s lecture on ‘Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime’ promises to be a highlight, giving us a way into this fascinating book for the 2017 Woolf course, in which we plan to study The Waves and other exciting and challenging Woolf works.

Our summer course gives students the experience of a Cambridge-style supervision (a tutorial). Two or three students spend an hour with an experienced Cambridge supervisor, discussing the work of the day, and engaging in careful close reading, in the tradition of Cambridge English since the 1920s.

We will explore some of the historical context of Woolf’s books, asking what they have to say about their own time, and how they speak to ours.

For more details — and to register — visit the Virginia Woolf in Cambridge website.

 

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Recognizing WWI poet Isaac Rosenberg

Posted in Virginia Woolf, World War I, tagged , , , on Wednesday 27 April 2016| 1 Comment »

A website and a Facebook page, dubbed the Isaac Rosenberg Statue Appeal, have been set up to help raise funds to erect a statue in honor of the noted World War I poet and artist.

Organizers Emma Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, author of Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life, say Rosenberg has not received the widespread recognition he deserves as one of the greatest of the First World War poets.

Writers of his generation would agree. T. S. Eliot called him the “most remarkable” of the World War I poets. Siegfried Sassoon called him “a genius.”

The statue will be erected at Torrington Square on the Birkbeck College campus in Bloomsbury by April 1, 2018, the centenary of his death.

Organizers will launch a crowdfunding site to help raise funds for the statue, which is expected to cost £92,000. Donation can also be made by post, with checks made payable to Jeecs-Rosenberg Statue appeal, c/o Clive Bettington, P.O. Box 57317, London E1 3WG.

Rosenberg

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Blackbird Habits: A Letter to Virginia Woolf | BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

Posted in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, tagged , on Monday 25 April 2016| Leave a Comment »

By Emily K. Michael

Dear Mrs. Woolf, I hope you will not mind bending time to receive my letter. I have wanted to write to you since the day I closed A Room of One’s Own and realized that you could…

Source: Blackbird Habits: A Letter to Virginia Woolf | BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

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Woolf’s life writing in concert at Leeds conference

Posted in 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, music, Virginia Woolf, tagged , on Wednesday 20 April 2016| Leave a Comment »

Hearing Woolf’s Life Writing, a concert showcasing music that inspired Virginia Woolf’s writing, will be held in conjunction with the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at The Concert Hall, Leeds School of Music, Friday, June 17, at 8 p.m.

Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life

VW: A Musical Life

The concert focuses on settings of Woolf’s diaries and letters and features three world premieres:

  1. The song cycle “A Lonely Mind” by Jan-Willem van Herpen
  2. Richard Barnard’s song cycle “Woolf Letters,” previewed in the YouTube video below
  3. A song by Jeremy Thurlow.

Barnard’s and Thurlow’s works were commissioned for this concert. The fourth work of the concert is Dominick Argento’s “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf” (1974, written for the English mezzo-soprano Janet Baker).

This concert is the second in a series showcasing music that inspired Virginia Woolf’s writing and that directly responds to her work, including new commissions, world premieres and little-known music by women composers.

Woolf famously stated , “I always think of my books as music before I write them,” and her writing continues to influence composers who have set her words or been inspired by her novels.

The series is a collaboration between pianist Lana Bode of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Dr. Emma Sutton of the University of St Andrews. Other performers include Annelies Van Hijfte, soprano; Marta Fontanals-Simmons and Nicola Rose, mezzo-sopranos; and Sian Cameron, pianist.

For more events in the Virginia Woolf and Music series, visit the website.

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Woolf as a proto social media critic?

Posted in Online discussions, Virginia Woolf, Woolf and social media, Woolf quote, tagged , on Sunday 17 April 2016| 2 Comments »

JornalistEmmaTeitel

Journalist Emma Teitel uses Woolf to critique social media.

Although Woolf lived in a pre-Internet world, one journalist has connected her ideas about artistic and social conformity with contemporary society’s obsession with social media, and the depressive effects of scrolling through photos and updates of others’ curated lives.

The Canadian publication TheStar.com has published an essay by Emma Teitel which uses some of Woolf’s ideas from The Common Reader to describe the, “soul-numbing sensation of too much time spent on social media.”

Teitel writes:

In 1925, English novelist and outcast Virginia Woolf wrote about what happens to a person when she spends her entire life trying to fit in.

‘Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it,’ Woolf wrote in The Common Reader, a collection of essays, ‘and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.’

Woolf Quote--Conform

Woolf’s words from 1925 are as relevant today as they were in her own time, and when applied to social media, her critiques seem to explain the depression many people experience when looking through social media sources. Teitel explains:

…there are no words more precise than ‘dull, callous and indifferent’ to describe the emotional after-effect of scrolling your way into a funk on Facebook and Instagram, where you’ve inwardly begrudged the success and beauty of other people, all the while attempting to make your own appear far greater than it actually is.

KylieJennerSelfie

A selfie of Kylie Jenner, a member of the Kardashian family, who has 58 million followers on Instagram.

Teitel asserts that Woolf’s critical line, “outer show and inward emptiness,” can even be used as the “official tagline” of social media. And perhaps the best lines from Teitel’s article, link Woolf’s writing to Kylie Jenner:

In fact, ‘Outer show and inward emptiness,’ could serve as the medium’s official tagline  not to mention the caption beneath every Twitter selfie of Kylie Jenner.

Is there any aspect of contemporary life to which we can’t apply Woolf’s writings?

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