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More sessions added to Lit Cambridge online Study Days

Posted in Woolf Courses, tagged , , , on Tuesday 12 May 2020| Leave a Comment »

Literature Cambridge has had a great response to its new Online Study Sessions, launched due to the coronavirus, and has responded by scheduling additional sessions.

Below is the schedule of those still to come. It includes those focused on Virginia Woolf, as well as other authors. The cost is a bargain at £22 full price and £18 for students and CAMcard holders.

Upcoming Online Study Sessions

  • Sunday 17 May: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. 1: After the War, with Trudi Tate. 18.00 BST
  • Sunday 24 May: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. 18.00 BST (SOLD OUT)
  • Saturday 30 May: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. 18.00 BST (repeat lecture)
  • Saturday 6 June: Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. 2: Women and Education with Alison Hennegan. 18.00
  • Saturday 13 June: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. 18.00 BST
  • Sunday 28 June: Katherine Mansfield, Selected short stories. 18.00 BST
  • Saturday 22 August: Angela Carter, stories from The Bloody Chamber. 18.00 BST
  • Sunday 6 September: Clothing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 18.00 BST
  • Saturday 12 September: Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime, with Dame Gillian Beer. 18.00 BST

Most sessions will be held at 18.00 to 20.00 British Summer Time / 19.00 Central European Summer Time. Some sessions will take place at 10.00 am British Summer Time, for the benefit of people in different time zones, but students are welcome to book any session, wherever they are in the world. Check the web page for updates.

NOTE: BST (British Summer Time) is five hours ahead of EST (Eastern Standard Time) and eight hours ahead of PT (Pacific Time).

Literature Cambridge hopes to offer an introductory session on The Waves soon. If there is enough interest, they will offer it twice: once at 10.00 am and again at 18.00 pm BST. Date to be confirmed.

Online Study Session format and booking

Each Online Study Session has a live lecture via Zoom, followed by a moderated seminar discussion. The session lasts about 100 minutes, but please allow two hours. Details are available online.

Bookings are open and can be made online.

Resuming in-person Study Days

Literature Cambridge looks forward to being together again in person for ‘real life’ Study Days. These will take place at a new venue, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

Safety permitting, these will resume on 19 September 2020 with a full day (11.00 am to 5.30 pm) on Woolf’s comic novel, Orlando (1928).

The program also has Study Days and half-days planned on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jane Austen’s Emma, D. H. Lawrence’s poetry and novellas, and more.

A table full of Literature Cambridge T-shirts at the program’s 2018 summer course on Virginia Woolf’s Gardens

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Literature Cambridge Study Days are going online

Posted in coronavirus, events, Woolf Courses, tagged , , , on Friday 1 May 2020| 5 Comments »

Literature Cambridge has good news for those who live at a distance from the University of Cambridge:  Its upcoming Study Days are moving online. The intensive but accessible sessions will be held via Zoom, due to the coronavirus.

Each session has a lecture and seminar with a leading scholar and will last approximately 100 minutes. Organizers recommend that you allow two hours for each class, just in case they run a bit longer.

LITERATURE CAMBRIDGE ONLINE STUDY DAYS

Study Day: To the Lighthouse: The Mother in the Garden

Date and time: Saturday 9 May, 6–8 p.m. British Summer Time; 7–9 p.m. Central European Time

Join Lit Cambridge for an intensive evening studying one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest novels. Based on Woolf’s memories of childhood summers by the sea, To the Lighthouse is a powerfully moving account of love, art and loss.

Lecture and a seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

Date and Time for other time zones: Sunday 10 May 2020 (Repeat class)

Lit Cambridge will repeat the topic on 10 May, for the benefit of people in Japan, Australia, and similar time zones. But you are welcome to book, wherever you are. This will be a live lecture and seminar, via Zoom.

10.00-12.00 British Summer Time
11.00-13.00 Central European Time
18.00-20.00 Tokyo Time
19.00-21.00 Melbourne time
21.00-23.00 New Zealand Time

Study Day: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Date and time: Sunday 24 May, 6–8 p.m. British Summer Time; 7–9 p.m. Central European Time

An intensive evening studying Virginia Woolf’s memorable novel set on a single day in London in 1923. Mrs Dalloway traces the joys, sufferings, and memories of two very different characters: Clarissa Dalloway, married to a Conservative Member of Parliament; and Septimus Smith, a former soldier who is suffering from shell shock.

Lecture and seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, who has a chapter on Mrs Dalloway in her book, Modernism, History and the First World War .

Tickets and Bookings

£22 full price

£18 students and CAMcard holders

Bookings are open and can be made online.

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Charleston, home of the Bloomsbury group, needs our help to survive

Posted in Charleston Farmhouse, coronavirus, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 12 April 2020| 1 Comment »

Charleston, a treasure trove of Bloomsbury art and culture, is in dire need. Can you help?

Charleston

The longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group, along with its garden, galleries, shop and café, are temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

That means the charity that receives no public funding is bereft of income from visitor admissions, as well as its main fundraising event. The Charleston Festival, scheduled for May, is cancelled.

As a result, Charleston has issued an emergency appeal for donations from those who appreciate this unique venue, no matter what side of the pond they live on.

You can find out more, including how to make a donation — whether you are a UK citizen or not — here.

Charleston as seen from the farm track to the home. The gravel, the lawn, bushes, and the facade of the house are the same as in the time of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

The Charleston garden

The Famous Women Dinner Service painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant between 1932 and 1934 has been on display in the Outer Studio at Charleston.

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Virginia Woolf fans read Proust during a pandemic

Posted in coronavirus, Proust, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Wednesday 8 April 2020| 1 Comment »

The New York Times reports that about half the world is in lockdown, due to COVID-19. So is now the time to read Proust? Some say yes. Others say no.

Drew Shannon’s Modern Library set of Proust

One naysayer is Suzanne Moore of The Guardian. She writes, “I never managed Proust in pre-virus days, so don’t saddle me with him now, for God’s sake.”

Others say yes. In fact, a Facebook group formed by Elisa Kay Sparks and dubbed “The Woolf Pack Reads Proust” has taken on Proust as a pandemic reading project. It has 29 members from around the globe.

Woolf on Proust

Woolf herself read Proust. Here’s what she had to say about him:

Last night I started on Vol 2 [Jeunes Filles en Fleurs] of him (the novel) and propose to sink myself in it all day. [. . . ] But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures?theres something sexual in it?that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann” – Letter to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922 (Letters II 525)

My great adventure is really Proust. Well–what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped–and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance?  One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical–like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses. – Letter to Roger Fry, 3 October 1922 (Letters II 565-6)

Resources for reading Proust

Founding member Benjamin Hagen, who is also heading up the 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance, which has been postponed until 2021, has added a number of resources to the group page.

They include:

Hagen, assistant professor of 20th-Century British and Anglophone literature at the University of South Dakota, also posted this drawing and comment to the group page on April 6. He is also blogging about his experience.

Me [Ben Hagen] trying (with not too much success) to map out connections between topics / themes from last week’s reading.

Focusing — or not — on Proust

Hagen has made much more progress than I have, bless him. I must confess that the farthest I have gotten with reading Proust is locating the first volume on my bookshelf and dropping it on my desk. There it sits, unopened and unread.

The inability to focus on the task at hand is common at this time, no matter what we are doing. Here’s a quote shared to the group Facebook page by Gill Lowe, who said of her own reading of Proust: “I started. But I just can’t concentrate…”.

Proust on illness

It is illness that makes us recognise that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. – The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

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Pass time during the pandemic with Virginia Woolf brain teasers

Posted in coronavirus, events, tagged , , , , on Sunday 5 April 2020| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf readers and scholars around the globe are coming up with creative ways to fill the time as they shelter at home during the current coronavirus pandemic.

  • A Norwegian typesetter is setting a sentence a day from On Being Ill.
  • Members and followers of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society are posting photos of themselves reading Woolf and reading her letters aloud via video.
  • And now, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is sending its members 100 questions about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury — a few at a time. “There’s no prize, just a sense of satisfaction, perhaps even smugness, if you get them all right,” states the society’s email.

The first five brain teasers from the Big VW Quiz

Play along by answering these questions:

1) When was Virginia’s play Freshwater first performed?

(a) April 1933

(b) November 1934

(c) January 1935

d) December 1936

2) Where was it performed?

3) What year did Virginia first meet Vita Sackville-West?

4) What was Virginia’s first piece of published shorter fiction (as defined by Susan Dick in “Complete Shorter Fiction”)?

5) In which years were the first and second Post Impressionist exhibitions?

Join up

If you’d like to join the society to get the remaining 95 questions, you can find out more on the VWSGB website’s membership page.

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