English 685-002
Honors Seminar: Bloomsbury and Modernism
Instr: Roberts, Sheila
Office: CRT 423; 229-4637
e-mail: svrob@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: TR; 11:00am-12:15pm; CRT 466
Course Description
Our enterprise here will be to discover how a group of intellectuals who gathered regularly at the London Home of Thoby and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) became a force of stimulation for artists working in various media.
The home of Thoby Stephen and his siblings was located in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury: hence their later identification as the "Bloomsbury Group." Members of the group included Clive Bell, an artist and, later, the husband of Vanessa Stephen; writers such as E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot; and critics such as Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. In due course, virtually all of London's artists and thinkers found themselves attending the Stephen's "open house" gatherings.
When the French Post-Impressionist exhibition was mounted in London (1909-1910), Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that "human nature would never be the same again" (a statement worth analysis in class). Post-Impressionism strongly influenced British artists such as Clive Bell and Augustus John, and encouraged James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to experiment with stream-of-consciousness techniques in their novels and T.S. Eliot to create a fragmented stanza-form in his poetry.
Class time will be spent in examining and discussing a portfolio of photocopied Post-Impressionist prints; on reading and analyzing a selection of novels and poems; in listening to the music of Stravinsky and others, and watching films relevant to the period.
- Grades will be apportioned as follows:
- Six response papers, 2-3 pp. 30%
- A class presentation of 20 minutes 20%
- A mid-term paper, 5-6 pp. 20%
- End-of-semester paper, 6-8 pp. 30%
Regular lateness and absences will certainly lower grades.
Required Reading:
Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
