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In memoriam to Woolf and modernism scholar Laura Marcus

Posted in in memoriam, tagged , , , on Monday 27 September 2021| Leave a Comment »

Editor’s Note:  I did not know Laura Marcus personally, but her passing on Sept. 22 has prompted tributes from scholars and institutions around the world. Here is one of them, posted on the English faculty web page of the University of Oxford, where she was a Fellow of New College. Tributes to her scholarship, as well as her teaching and friendship, were also posted on social media.

Laura Marcus

Professor Laura Marcus

We are devastated to report the death on Wednesday 22 September 2021 after a short illness of Professor Laura Marcus FBA, Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature in the Faculty of English and Fellow of New College. In her influential work on modernism and Virginia Woolf, on life-writing and fiction and film, Professor Marcus was admired for her immense scholarly range, her mastery of theory and narrative and genres, her deep knowledge of literary and cultural connections and influences, and her illuminating, serious interest in, and practice of, feminist thought. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007). She was bringing to completion a new monograph built on her project ‘Rhythmical Subjects: the measures of the modern’ which the Faculty of English and Oxford University Press hope to see through to publication.

Her service to her profession and her subject was unstinting and inspiring. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and was a much-loved, passionately engaged supervisor and mentor of other scholars at all stages of their careers. As a Delegate at Oxford University Press for approaching ten years, Laura read and evaluated hundreds of proposals across the span of literary studies and music and had a shaping influence on the Literature list, working closely with its editors. Colleagues at all levels of the Press found her to be a wonderful and supportive adviser, full of warmth and of interest in their work.

Miles Young, Warden of New College says, “New College grieves for Laura Marcus: she loved this college which had been her Oxford home for over ten years, and we loved her. Continuing a distinguished succession of Goldsmiths’ Professors, she added a particular lustre to the title through the creative breadth of her research and writing. She will be missed as a colleague who represented the epitome of academic courtesy, conscience and companionship.”

Professor Isobel Armstrong remembers: “Laura was a friend for almost forty years. These are my memories of her when she taught at Southampton. She seemed born with a formidable archival knowledge, worn so lightly. Unique was her intellectual charm and generosity as interlocutor: she would listen intently to someone’s ideas and then give them back creatively transformed, expanded and deepened, a wonderful gift even at her most stringent. She was innately witty – ‘you have to love a book enough to begin writing it and hate it enough to finish it.’”

Dame Hermione Lee FBA, FRSL speaks for so many of us who had the privilege of knowing Laura Marcus: “Writing on autobiography, Laura quoted Katherine Mansfield’s idea of the self as a plant which comes to the light: ‘and – we are alive – we are flowering for our moment upon the earth’. That flowering self of hers was grand, vital and lavish, and gave colour and brightness to all who encountered it. ”

Laura Marcus will be sorely missed.

 

 

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In memoriam to David Bradshaw

Posted in in memoriam, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Monday 19 September 2016| 1 Comment »

David Bradshaw, professor of English literature at Worcester College at Oxford University and a plenary speaker at the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf held June 16-19 at Leeds Trinity University, died Sept. 13. He had been ill with cancer.

David Bradshaw at his plenary talk at this year's Virginia Woolf conference.

David Bradshaw giving his plenary talk at this year’s Virginia Woolf conference at Leeds Trinity University.

At the conference, Mr. Bradshaw gave a talk titled “‘The Very Centre of the Very Centre’: Herbert Fisher, Oxbridge and ‘That Great Patriarchal Machine’.” In his talk, he quoted Woolf as saying that her contact with Fisher “brought back my parents more than anyone else I knew.”

Vara Neverow, editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, invites those who knew Mr. Bradshaw to share their memories of him for that publication. “The publication of such recollections would be much valued by others, whether they knew David himself or knew only his scholarship,” she wrote in a message to the VWoolf Listserv.

Tributes to Mr. Bradshaw, who has been called “one of the great recent scholars of modernism,” prevailed on the list after news of his death was announced. Here are just a few:

I miss him already – Bonnie Scott

Just joining in the chorus of sorry over this sad news. I had heard he was ill but, I regret to say that I cherished the luxury of denial. I’m just so very very sad. He was such a funny, warm, silly, vital, brilliant, generous person. It was always a joy to see him and I learned so much from him. To this day, whenever I give a paper I remember his admonishment to himself once–“don’t get distracted, David,”–which he uttered aloud to great effect years ago. Sharing his digressive streak, I loved that so much. And, of course, almost every note of his Dalloway appears, with credit, in my edition. I owe him so much. What a terrible loss. – Anne Fernald

His plenary at Leeds was special. I have often and continue to teach from his considerable body of work. This is a terribly sad loss. My heart goes out to his family and many friends. – Jean Mills

Such an unbelievably sad loss. A superb scholar and wonderfully witty and generous man. – Maggie Humm

His colleagues in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project also posted their tributes on the Waugh and Words blog on the University of Leicester website.

Mr. Bradshaw specialized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and had written many articles on literature, politics and ideas in the period 1880-1945, especially in relation to the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and W. B. Yeats, according to the Worcester College website.

His current projects included an edition of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (CUP) with Stuart N. Clarke and a monograph “in train” that he said “will examine the ways in which Woolf, Waugh and Huxley challenged the culture of their time through their provocative engagement with the obscene.”

His books related to Woolf include:

  • (Ed.) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, `Oxford’s World’s Classics’ series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
  • (Ed., with Stuart N. Clarke) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
  • (Ed., with Ian Blyth) Virginia Woolf, The Years, Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
  • (Ed.) Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, `Oxford’s World’s Classics’ series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  • (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I also contributed the chapter on `Howards End’ (see below).
  • (Ed.) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, `Oxford’s World’s Classics’ series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
  • (Ed.) Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches (London: Hesperus, 2003). Incorporated into the 2nd, rev. ed. ofA Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Pimlico, 2004).
  • Winking, Buzzing, Carpet-Beating: Reading `Jacob’s Room’, 4th Annual Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Birthday Lecture (Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2003).
  • (Ed.) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, `Oxford’s World’s Classics’ series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

His articles related to Woolf include:

David Bradshaw (center front) with colleagues at the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held June 16-19 at Leeds Trinity University

David Bradshaw (center front) with colleagues at the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held June 16-19 at Leeds Trinity University

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Woolf conference news includes paper proposal deadline extension

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, call for papers, tagged , , , on Thursday 29 January 2015| Leave a Comment »

25th annual conferenceNews from the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which will be held June 4-7 at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa., includes the following:

  • Extension of the deadline for submission of paper proposals to midnight Saturday, Jan. 31.
  • Clarification that proposals focusing solely on Woolf are welcome.
  • A call for entries in a juried exhibition of small works on paper that is fittingly woolf_callforentriestitled Mark on the Wall. The entry deadline for those is April 20. The international call for works on paper was inspired by visual artists who focus on Woolf, such as Elisa Kay Sparks, and Bloomsburg University’s new art gallery, according to conference organizer Julie Vandivere.
  • An announcement that Cassandra Laity, who will start a new journal on modernist women writers, will be at the conference to talk about the project and recruit a variety of voices for the new venture.

Get the conference highlights.

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“Keep calm and carry on”: War propaganda and Virginia Woolf

Posted in The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf, World War II, tagged , , , , , on Friday 16 March 2012| 4 Comments »

The slogan “Keep calm and carry on” is now appearing on everything from coffee mugs to note pads. I have both. But where did it come from?

As this PBS video shows, the slogan originated on a propaganda poster during World War II, but the poster itself was never displayed publicly.

Watching this video led me to think about Virginia Woolf and propaganda, and that thought led me to Mark Wollaeger’s book Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative From 1900 To 1945 (2006). It  provides an excellent discussion of Woolf’s views on the subject — and the ways she struggles with propaganda in her novels.

As Wollaeger puts it, Woolf thought of modernism as antithetical to propaganda, and her goal was to steer clear of it. He mentions, for example, that while writing “The Pargiters,” she wrote that “this fiction is dangerously near propaganda, I must keep my hands clear” (D4 300).

Woolf avoids polemic when she explores the subject of war in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), but in his book, Wollaeger focuses on a seemingly unlikely choice for an exploration of Woolf and propaganda, her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). In this novel, according to Wollaeger, Woolf is engaged in a developing struggle between her own emerging modernism and “the propaganda of everyday life,” also known as the “propaganda of conformity” (73). It is a struggle in which Rachel Vinrace engages as she endeavors to discover a pure native culture in South America while still being mentally immersed in the colonial culture — and popular culture — of England.

Wollaeger explains the difficulty Rachel would have had in thinking for herself — and differentiating between national identity as reinforced by her community and calculated manipulation as perpetrated by powerful institutions — after having grown up in an environment saturated by the propaganda disseminated by mass media. In this category he includes picture postcards, which became a craze at the turn of the twentieth century, along with ads; cigarette cards; newspapers and posters.

So while Woolf directly engages with the idea of war propaganda in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in The Voyage Out, she does something different. She explores the subtly intrusive ways that modern propaganda invades everyday life in ways one does not consciously recognize.

 

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