English 776-001
Women Writers: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
Instr: Nardin, Jane
Office: CRT 423; 229-4637
e-mail: jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office Hours: TBA
Course Information: M&W; 11:00am-12:15pm; CRT 466
Course Description
Recognizing the similarities between their artistic goals, Mansfield and Woolf became friends, but their friendship was always tinged with mistrust and rivalry. Both suffered from serious illnesses, mental illness in Woolf's case, physical illness in Mansfield's. Perhaps as a result of this, both view the world as a place of great beauty and great danger, easier to apprehend in intense moments of vision than to comprehend as a coherent whole. Both tried through various innovations to capture their visions in new forms of fiction. Mansfield is generally credited with "inventing" the modern short story, which eschews plot in the conventional sense almost entirely. Woolf's experimental novels reject conventional notions of characterization, as well as conventional plots, in favor of "choral" effects and radical disruptions of the time dimension. Yet both writers had a sharp eye for socially significant detail and a keen sense of the historical moment.
Woolf is more frequently admitted to the pantheon of modernist writers than Mansfield; indeed, until recently, she was the only woman fiction writer to be regularly included. But both women were intensely aware of modernism in all its forms and responded critically to the work of such male contemporaries as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, as they sought to create a kind of modernist fiction that could do justice to women's experiences.
In this class, we'll be reading some of Mansfield's best stories; short fiction and novels by Woolf that span her entire career as a writer; and some essays in which both writers grope toward a definition of their artistic aims.
Requirements: Each student will write two papers, one short one long, of which the first must be revised in response to my comments. Students will also be asked to give an oral report on a critical essay about one of the authors.
Readings:
Katherine Mansfield: STORIES
Virginia Woolf: THE COMPLETE SHORT FICTION
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
THE WAVES
BETWEEN THE ACTS
Coursebook of selected essays by Mansfield and Woolf
