This podcast on the Times Literary Supplement website includes a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s April 29, 1937, BBC broadcast of her eight-minute talk, “Craftsmanship.”
In it, American Woolf scholar Emily Kopley fills us in on the context and background of Woolf’s third BBC radio talk. Fast forward to 35:30 to hear Kopley put the talk in context, which the moderator describes as “rather loaded.”
You can also read Kopley’s commentary on the topic, “At the Service of Words,” which was posted on April 27 and is no longer behind the paywall.
If you haven’t joined the site Academia.edu, you may want to sign up. A number of papers on Virginia Woolf are uploaded there and can be downloaded free of charge. Some of them were shared at recent Woolf conferences. You can also search the site for additional Woolf resources.
Upcoming calls for papers for the Virginia Woolf Miscellany include:
Spring 2014 issue, with the special topic Woolf and Materiality. The submission deadline is Aug. 1. Editor is Derek Ryan at D.Ryan@exeter.ac.uk.
Fall 2014 issue, with the special topic Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. The submission deadline is March 1, 2014. Editor is Kathryn Simpson at kathryn.simpson88@gmail.com and Melinda Harvey at melinda.harvey@monash.edu.
Two sightings that locate Virginia Woolf in academia — a natural fit of course.
First up is a sighting posted by Emily Kopley to the Virginia Woolf Listserv that has also made its way around Facebook. It appeared in the April 8, 2013, issue of TheChronicle of Higher Education as an essay on teaching English to high school students and was titled “What my Ph.D. Taught Me.” The author is Jessica Levenstein, an English teacher at Horace Mann.
Kopley posted “the Woolfian bit” to the list, since the article is available to Chronicle subscribers only. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Thirties Poets (Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2011, #60 in the Bloomsbury Heritage monograph series).
“Every now and then, in the classroom, there are transcendent moments that surpass my own great expectations, formed in the classrooms of my astounding professors. Last spring, as we finished discussing Clarissa Dalloway’s June day, we read aloud Clarissa’s reaction to the news of Septimus’s suicide: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.”
“The room was quiet for a moment, as my students considered what that “thing” might be for Clarissa, and what it might be for them. Finally, an 11th-grade girl at the far end of the table sighed, “I wish I could always be in the middle of reading *Mrs. Dalloway.*” Become a teacher, I thought, and your wish can come true.
The second academic sighting is Simon Gikandi’s editor’s column, “The Fantasy of the Library,” in the January issue of PMLA. Gikandi begins the piece by relating the envy of Woolf that he felt “Once upon a time, when I was dreaming of becoming a writer.”
His envy, he explains, was “because she had the good fortune to live in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and its famous Reading Room.” He goes on to cite Woolf’s descriptions of the room in A Room of One’s Own and Jacob’s Room.
