The Mumpsimus

While canonical literary history has generally told the story of 20th Century British fiction as the story of men, with some exemplary women here and there, we have enough distance now to see that while the men were certainly the grabbers of headlines and awards, their canonicity was less a matter of merit than of their control of the culture industry. The men ate up all the air in the rooms of litchat. Meanwhile, by and large it was women who wrote the fiction that has survived the years the best, and which remains most readable and interesting today. This is especially true around midcentury, where we can speak of Rebecca West (1892-1983), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Stevie Smith (1902-1971 [best known as a poet, but author of 3 interesting novels]), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Doris Lessing (1919-2013) — and many others, both well-know...

My new book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. I don't mind if you don't buy it. The retail price is absurd. This hardcover is aimed at the academic library market, even though academic libraries (at least the ones I know) have shrinking book budgets. I've been told that in 12-18 months, a less expensive paperback will be released (though by "less expensive", something in the range of $40 is probably what we can expect — a price higher than the average trade hardcover). There is an ebook edition, but it's currently going for $99 at Amazon; Bloomsbury will sell you an ePub or PDF for $79.20. Those prices for an ebook are not ones anybody I've ever met would pay, and indicate a publisher that doesn't want people to buy ebooks. I don't point out the absurd prices because I am mad at Bloomsbury. I've had an excellent experience with them, ...

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.  —Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters Preface [update December 2018] The embargo period for my dissertation has passed, and so it is now available via the University of New Hampshire Scholar's Repository. It seems my doctoral dissertation has hit the ProQuest dissertations databases, so now is perhaps a useful time to say a few words about it here. First, the details for finding it, since there doesn't seem to be an openly accessible link: The title is  Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form , and it is Dissertation/thesis number 10786319 and ProQuest document ID 2056936547. (If you don't have access to any of those databases and would like a copy of the manuscript, feel free to  email me  and I will send you a PDF.) Here's the abstract: Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. Thi...

My academic essay "The Reader Awakes: Pedagogical Form and Utopian Impulse in The Years " has now been published in  Woolf Studies Annual  volume 24 in a special section devoted to the late Jane Marcus . Here's the abstract: This essay considers Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years as a text in which the aesthetic functions pedagogically to train the receptive reader’s imagination toward liberation from oppressive literary and social structures. This interpretation develops from implications within Jane Marcus’s reading of Woolf’s later writings and seeks an understanding of how we might continue to learn to read The Years . Marcus proposed that the form of Three Guineas , which required “much noisy page turning”, was key to the way it sought to teach readers to read and, thus, to think. This insight can be applied to The Years to develop an idea of the novel’s subversive pedagogy: the way it teaches readers to imagine new alternatives to old forms and exha...

Today is the anniversary of Virginia Woolf's death in 1941. Tomorrow, I defend a doctoral dissertation with a chapter on Woolf's 1937 novel The Years , and I have spent much of last few years studying Woolf's writings and life in the 1930s especially. Here, a few thoughts on that. Woolf's last decade is under-appreciated both by general readers and by scholars, although there seems to be growing scholarly interest in her final, not-quite-finished novel Between the Acts . ("Under-appreciated" is, of course, relative — Woolf is one of the most-studied writers of the 20th century, and many of her contemporaries don't have even a small percentage of the attention for their entire ouevres  that Woolf has for her least-read writings.) The relative lack of interest in Woolf's life and work after The Waves  has various sources, many of them having to do with why readers are attracted to Woolf in the first place. Her achievement with Mrs. Dalloway , To the...

1. I am writing this on Virginia Woolf's 136th birthday. Ursula K. Le Guin , who died a few days ago, was a lifelong reader of Woolf's work, and the trace of Woolf's writing and thinking can be found not only throughout Le Guin's essays, but also in her fiction, different as it is in style and substance from Woolf's own. Le Guin not only read the famous novels, but she also cherished some of the works that get less notice these days, including Three Guineas , a fierce critique of patriarchy and militarism, the Woolf book that I think most deserves a revival in our cruel, murderous era. It's likely that I started reading Woolf because of Le Guin. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, I had heard that Le Guin was among the greatest of science fiction writers, so I sought out her work, and the library had some anthologies with her short stories in them ( The Hugo Winners  volumes, Again, Dangerous Visions , etc.) as well as her essay collection  The Language o...

The Spring 2017 issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany  (issue 91) has been posted online as a free PDF. It includes a brief essay I wrote in remembrance of Jean Kennard, who taught a Woolf seminar twenty years ago that helped set me on a path I am still following. Here's a taste: We read all of the novels except Night and Day , plus Room, Three Guineas , and the essays in Michèle Barrett's Women & Writing anthology. I remember being so exhausted from reading that I could hardly keep up with my other classes, but it was a profoundly fulfilling exhaustion, because reading such a volume of Woolf made her words and images feel like a presence in my life, a sort of companion.

It is time for a capacious, authoritative one-volume selection of Virginia Woolf's essays and journalism. (Perhaps one is in preparation. I don't know.) The sixth and final volume of her collected essays was released in 2011. It is wondrous, as are all of the volumes in the series, but though it's a goldmine for scholars, the series isn't really aimed at the everyday reader; each volume is relatively expensive (though not to the extent of an academic volume, e.g. the Cambridge Editions ), and plenty of the material is ephemeral, repetitive, or esoteric. A one-volume Selected Essays  does exist, edited by David Bradshaw and published by Oxford World's Classics. It's better than nothing, but it's small and missing many of Woolf's best essays — including perhaps her single most-frequently-reprinted essay, "The Death of the Moth" . Bradshaw also slights Woolf's literary essays, perhaps because the two Common Reader  volumes remain in pri...

photo by  Black Cat Books Virginia Woolf, from "How Should One Read a Book" : We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field....

It is far too early to tear down the barricades. Dancing shoes will not do. We still need our heavy boots and mine detectors. —Jane Marcus, "Storming the Toolshed" 1. Seeking Refuge in Feminist Revolutions in Modernism Last week, I spent two days at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. I hadn't really been sure that I was going to go. I hemmed and hawed. I'd missed the call for papers, so hadn't even had a chance to possibly get on a panel or into a seminar. Conferences bring out about 742 different social anxieties that make their home in my backbrain. I would only know one or maybe two people there. Should I really spend the money on conference fees for a conference I was highly ambivalent about? I hemmed. I hawed. In the end, though, I went, mostly because my advisor would be part of a seminar session honoring the late Jane Marcus , who had been her advisor. (I think of Marcus now as my grandadvisor, for multiple reasons, as will be...

When interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal regarding Thomas Ligotti , Jeff VanderMeer was asked: "Can Ligotti’s work find a broader audience, such as with people who tend to read more pop horror such as Stephen King?" His response was, it seems to me, accurate: Ligotti tells a damn fine tale and a creepy one at that. You can find traditional chills to enjoy in his work or you can find more esoteric delights. I think his mastery of a sense of unease in the modern world, a sense of things not being quite what they’re portrayed to be, isn’t just relevant to our times but also very relatable. But he’s one of those writers who finds a broader audience because he changes your brain when you read him—like Roberto Bolano. I’d put him in that camp too—the Bolano of 2666 . That’s a rare feat these days. This reminded me of a few moments from past conversations I've had about the difficulty of modernist texts and their ability to find audiences. I have often...

The new school year has started, which means I've officially ended the work I did for a summer research fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Graduate School , although there are still a few loose ends I hope to finish in the coming days and weeks. I've alluded to that work previously, but since it's mostly finished, I thought it might be useful to chronicle some of it here, in case it is of interest to anyone else. (Parts of this are based on my official report, which is why it's a little formal.) I spent the summer studying the literary context of Virginia Woolf’s writings in the 1930s. The major result of this was that I developed a spreadsheet to chronicle her reading from 1930-1938 (the period during which she conceived and wrote her novel The Years and her book-length essay Three Guineas ), a tool which from the beginning I intended to share with other scholars and readers, and so created with Google Sheets so that it can easily be viewed, updated...

The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares ,  about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth , based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas. I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares  offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much;  Testament of Youth  is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance.  The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're...

I recently bought a miscellaneous set of Virginia Woolf books, a collection that seems to have been put together by a scholar or (in Woolfian parlance) a common reader during the 1960s and 1970s. The set included some volumes useful for my research purposes, as well as all four of the old Collected Essays  that I have long coveted because though they have been superceded by the six-volume Essays of Virginia Woolf , they are far more elegantly designed and produced (alas, copies in nice condition rarely seem to go up for sale at a price a normal person can afford, even on a splurge). At about $6 per book, it seemed like a deal I'd likely never see again. One of the joys of giving books a new home is that they sometimes share glimpses of their history. This is for me the primary impetus to own an old book. They become tools for imagination, not only through the words on their pages, but through their physical presence. I have lived with books my whole life, and have come to ima...

Hogarth Press first edition, cover by Vanessa Bell Published in 1937, The Years was the last of her novels that Virginia Woolf lived to see released. Coming more than five years after the release of the poetic and, to many people, opaquely experimental The Waves , The Years seemed like the work of a totally different writer — it looked like a family novel, something along the lines of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga , the sort of book a younger Woolf had scorned.   The Years became a bestseller in both the UK and the US, and garnered some good reviews — in the New York Times , Peter Monro Jack declared it "Virginia Woolf's Richest Novel". Its fame quickly faded, however. After Woolf's death, her husband Leonard claimed he didn't think it was among her best work, though he'd been afraid, he said, to tell her that, given how long she had worked on it and how hard that work had been for her. As Woolf's reputation increased in the 1970s and 1980s, part...

Forced by some reductive power to declare a single favorite essay, mine would be "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf . It is a marvel of concision, and yet it contains the universe. It is an essay both personal and cosmic, material and spiritual. Whenever I teach writing, I use "The Death of the Moth" as an example of the interplay of form and content. (While I have seldom met a pairing I didn't want to deconstruct, the form/content binary is one I continue to find useful. Yes, the separation is problematic — what, in language, is content without form or form without content? — but I also find it a valuable way to talk about concepts that are otherwise invisible or easily muddled.) Usually, I take one sentence, scrawl it out on the board, and pick it apart. It's not always the same sentence, but recently I've been using this one: Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and drivi...

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it — it went on increasing in his experience. -- Virginia Woolf , Mrs. Dalloway Today is Virginia Woolf's 129th birthday. Woolf is one of my touchstone writers, a writer I've been reading for the majority of my life (really, I first tried to read Mrs. Dalloway in middle school -- I didn't get too far, but I found the first pages of the book utterly entrancing, and by the time I read it fully for the first time eight or nine years later, I had those pages nearly memorized). I've read all...

It ain't healthy to get too metacommentarial, but sometimes the zeitgeist blows such urges your way, and you neglect to duck. Or I do, at least. Thus, I have managed to get into some good conversations with a few different friends recently about our particular preferences when it comes to how we write and read book reviews, criticism, blog posts, etc. (out of laziness and a general aversion to taxonomy, I'm going to use the word "review" here to mean almost any commentary on books and other stuffs). Some of the conversations were sparked by thoughtful posts by Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen (e.g. here and here and here ), some were sparked by reviews that annoyed one or both of us who were interlocuting (I know you and your friends just talk, but if you had the sorts of friends I have, you, too, would interlocute), and some were sparked by just saying to each other, "So what do you do when..." The ideas have caused me to keep thinking all week, and so...