On Virginia Woolf's Houses
Live online summer course, July 2022
Participant Diana Grosser reflects on an intensive week of study
The good thing about Literature Cambridge online sessions is that there is a lot to choose from, depending on personal preference. The problem with Literature Cambridge online sessions is that there a lot to choose from, and all of them fit the personal preference! So what does a time- and budget-conscious literature lover do in this case? Go for the option which provides the best value: the Virginia Woolf online summer course.
The 2022 Woolf’s Houses summer course picked up the Literature Cambridge tradition after a two-year break. I feel lucky to be one of the 27 participants who had the experience of a summer course in this novel format. One can’t deny there are disadvantages, but, as so often happened in the past 2 years, it’s impossible not to see the full half of the glass. I didn’t land at Heathrow after a 2-hour flight from Munich, but at my writing desk, in front of my laptop, after a 5-second flight up the stairs. I didn’t share thoughts on Woolf with other participants over breakfast, but I used the three hours each morning before the lecture to re-read passages of Woolf’s texts or quickly skim over the suggested bibliography.
Karina Jakubowicz lectured on Knole as Orlando’s haunted house
It was quite a challenge for me to frame the reading of the five works we studied around the idea of houses. In preparation for the lectures, I underlined passages of house and room descriptions in the physical texts, trying to see (or build) the house in the text. Each morning at 10 a.m., when logging into the Zoom virtual room, I was delighted to hear faint echoes of my own thoughts and thrilled to encounter entirely different readings. The Literature Cambridge lecturers each brought their own interpretation of ‘house’ to the text. Alison Hennegan, in her lecture on the houses in Woolf’s autobiographical writings, shed light on the writer’s early life and formation. Ellie Mitchell transformed the house in Night and Day, a novel as ‘traditional’ as critics make it to be, into a house of fiction, where the new mixes in with the old. Trudi Tate talked about the house of To the Lighthouse, a house in time, located in the impossible non-place of memory and imagination. Karina Jakubowicz suggested that the ghosts haunting Orlando’s family estate might be of a more material nature than one might think. Claire Davison helped first-time readers (such as me) of Between the Acts grasp its mechanics by likening the house and characters to the setting and figures of a play, the performing of which never stops.
In addition to the lectures, the supervisions, the talks and informal discussions with other participants helped refine my understanding of the works we studied. As James from To the Lighthouse says, nothing is simply one thing. 27 summer courses took place during that week online. This blog post is just one of them.
Diana Grosser
Munich
