Patricia Laurence

THE READING EYE: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE (2010)

Reading is the subject of this course. The writings of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, among others, present a challenge to many readers schooled in the social and psychological realism of the nineteenth-century novel, more firmly anchored in a social and factual world. We will focus on ways of reading sometimes less accessible and resistant texts through an apprenticeship in learning to read signs. Through analysis of scenes of reading (and more) in twentieth-century literature (that includes modernism), we will discover new ground for reading and illuminating interconnections.

We focus on this topic not only because acts of reading preoccupy twentieth-century authors and theorists, but because of the evolving nature of reading and writing in the new millenium. Reading takes time, and we have devised many ways of avoiding it or reading and writing quickly: see the film, read it on Kindle or your i-phone, read the quick notes, scan a review, browse the comic book, make the story short.

What’s to be discovered then in focusing, for example, on scenes of childhood reading and adventure in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or early scenes of reading in Proust's Combray? Elizabeth Bowen’s childhood reading prepared her, she said “to handle any book like a bomb,” and led, eventually, to the “inventive pen.” How do we become inventive readers? What do Proust, Woolf or Freud say about reading? What do the theorists contribute—for example, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, deMan, Derrida—to our interpretation of literary scenes of reading and conceptions of writing?


VICTORIAN CONVERSATIONS. (2006, 2009)

Victorian novels offer us an area for thinking about the constructions of East and West, imperialism and colonialism and changing notions of class and gender in Britain. The reading of Victorian and Modernist novels will be paired in this course to illuminate these literary and cultural conversations.

For example, there is a conversation about British orientalism and colonialism in the shift from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim to E.M. Forster’s Passage to India to Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchables; another conversation between the rich and the poor in Victorian England in the paired reading of Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil and Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations; another about gender and narration in a paired reading of Mary Wollenstonecraft and Virginia Woolf.

Some of the questions that will organize this course are: What shift in sensibility, ideas and narration can be observed in these paired readings? What novels can be viewed as sites of exchange for international dialogues? How did English writers benefit from exposure to “oriental” cultures and literatures? How did other cultures and literatures benefit from contact with British culture and novels? Can we hear a “polyphony” of literary and cultural voices in the British novels to be read, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin? What kind literary dreamwork-- “imagined communities” (the way in which we imagine people, ideas and communities in other nations), as posited by Benedict Anderson—can be detected in these novels?

MODERNISM AND 'ORIENTALISM' (2007)

The “East” is in the news. How does the West imagine and invent the “East”; how does the East invent the “West”? Through the reading of colonial and post-colonial literary works—from India, China and England—as well as the viewing of art, bibelots, advertising and fashion, we’ll explore the complex ideas of “East,” “West,” “Orient” and “Englishness” during the modernist period, 1910-1941. During this time, the twentieth century saw the decline of the British empire, World Wars, the growth of nationalism in India, the Sino-Japanese War, and the civil war in China. The readings will offer new possibilities for thinking about these places through stories at the heart of these cultures: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable; E.M. Forster’s Passage to India; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; Ba Jin’s Family, and the stories of Ding Ling, LuXun, Zhang Ailing, Ling Shuhua, Shen Congwen and Lao She.

MODERNISM (2005)

The aim of this course is to explore the movement and history of literary modernism, 1890-1940, through the reading and analysis of classical, modern and post-modern journeys or odysseys.

Assuming your familiarity with Homer’s epic, The Odyssey ( 5 B.C.), the journey of Greek Odysseus who struggled for ten years to get home from the Trojan War to his wife, Penelope in Ithaca, we will embark on other modern and postmodern literary journeys. We will begin with T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, a journey through London and the emptiness and alienation of the “unreal city” of modernity; James Joyce’s Ulysses (1921), an epic of two races, Irish and Hebrew, in the characters of Stephen and Bloom in the city of Dublin; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, an interior journey of the mind of Mrs. Dalloway/​Clarissa during one day in June as she prepares to give a party; Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, a journey through the dark soul night of the soul of the lesbian, Robin Vote, who destroys those who love her; and Derek Walcott’s Omeros about a Black fisherman in the middle of the Caribbean sea, written in cultural counterpoint with Homer, an epic “where every line was erased” because of the history of colonialism in St. Lucia or Trinidad. Joyce connects the Irish and Jewish races, and Walcott connects African and Caribbean identity with Jewish suffering.
All of these works are about wandering and searching for something and finding (or not finding) it. All of these writers hear the voice of Homer and his myths across the sea,. Each writer contributes his lines or couplets to enrich the myth of the wanderer—the man or woman without a home in a state of “transcendental homelessness” --perhaps comparable to today’s immigrant or refugee, with modern meanings.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (2004)

There are many Virginia Woolf’s: E.M. Forster’s “invalid lady of Bloomsbury”; Louise de Salvo’s “abused child”; Jane Marcus’ “guerilla fighter in a Victorian skirt”; Michael Cunningham’s brilliant and suicidal Virginia; and now, a new international Virginia Woolf who looks to the next century with Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes,” a metaphor for other ways of seeing.

This course will explore the writings of Woolf: some of her Essays, parts of her brilliant Diary, and the novels, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway. Peripherally, we will note the images that surround her today in criticism, dramatizations and movies (“A Room of One’s Own,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “The Hours,” “Orlando”).

We will also focus upon the questions of genetic criticism, how writing begins through an examination of the earlier drafts of The Hours or Mrs. Dalloway with comparisons to the finished novel. Or character sketches written by Woolf when she was an aspiring writer of twenty-seven found in 2004 in a desk drawer in Wales. Or a comparison of her Diary entries on the 1925 Miner's Strike and the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse.


READING GROUPS

VIRGINIA WOOLF READING GROUP, MERCANTILE LIBRARY, NYC (2005)

Virginia Woolf in her essay, “Hours in a Library,” distinguishes between people who read because they love learning and people who read because they love reading. With this distinction in mind—for Woolf always honored “the common reader”-- I propose a Woolf Reading Group at the Mercantile with the suggested list of readings below.

Though a Woolf and Bloomsbury specialist who reads as Woolf says, “on a system” and in search of “some particular grain of truth,” I have taught readers, young and old, over many years (as a tenured professor at City College and now, adjunct professor, Brooklyn College) who are motivated by simple curiosity about this brilliant, and now popular writer who has become a literary icon. For these “true readers,” Woolf would say, reading is like taking “brisk exercise in open air” not like reading in a study cubicle.

If we add the element of gender, we note in A Room of One’s Own that Woolf was unable to enter the Trinity College Library to look at Milton’s ms. of “Lycidas” because she was not accompanied by a college fellow or furnished with a letter of introduction. She asserts in that essay “that a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.” Woolf, of course, was an avid reader in her father’s library (all the education she had), and was a contributor to the Millicent Fawcett Library, the oldest library of women’s writings in London. She said that she supported this library, and had a private subscription to the London Library, because “books have always been so prolific in my life that I can’t help being shocked that there are those who go without.” It’s particularly appropriate then that such a course be offered at the Mercantile Library to enhance a women’s tradition here with a course open to all readers.Since some of Woolf’s writings are more accessible than others, I propose the following tentative reading list for 2005-2006:

September 2005: Women/​Reading and Libraries: Room of One’s Own and selection of essays, “Hours in a Library,” How to Read a Book”….

October: Autobiographical sketches from Sketches of the Past, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, and selections from A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf.

Nov.-Dec.: To the Lighthouse

Jan.-Feb.: Jacob’s Room

March-April: Mrs. Dalloway

May-June: Orlando

July: Three Guineas

August-September: Between the Acts

Throughout the course, excerpts from Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, Essays, Letters, and short stories will be offered as a supplement.

PROUST'S SWANN'S WAY (2009-2010)

A Reading Group that explores the themes of memory, character and change, moral complexities, the illusions of love and narrative time in Proust's first volume of A La Recherche due Temps Perdu.

ADD COURSE DESCRIPTIONS: Spring, 2005: Telling Stories, Telling Lives: An Introduction to Oral History Graduate Center, External Programs.

Fall, 2004: Modernist Women Writers: Space and Place.