Close Reading The WAves 2027
Close Reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves with Ellie Mitchell
Wednesdays, 5 May-9 June 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm British Summer Time
Live online
The Waves (1931) is very often described as Virginia Woolf’s most difficult novel. Evading any definitive ‘reading’, it is both elusive and allusive, replete with patterns of sights and sounds and sensory experience. Reading The Waves can feel very similar to being among actual waves. The text advances and retreats; its movements can break, unexpectedly, both exhilarating and exhausting its reader as it rushes back to rise again. It is difficult to catch up with The Waves, to pin it down and shore up its several voices as they move in and out of the text, speaking themselves into and out of being.
The Waves therefore rewards close and attentive reading. Over the six weeks of this course, we will study the novel together in its entirety, moving slowly through six sections. Guided by an expert close reader and Woolf scholar, we will pay close attention to the workings of the text. We will, in Woolf’s words, ‘trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’. Working in the Cambridge tradition of close reading, we will attend to and analyse Woolf’s use of language, rhythm, imagery, repetition, analogy, and voice. How precisely does Woolf craft the reader’s experience of The Waves? What kind of attention does the novel reward? And what can be gained from a close and collaborative reading of the text?
Sessions will last 2 hours. Prompts for reading will be circulated a week in advance and attendees will be expected to have read the relevant section of the text for each session. We recommend using the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, edited by David Bradshaw (2014), to which the page references below refer. Wednesdays, 5 May–9 June 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm British Summer Time, live online.
Week 1: Childhood
1st interlude, episode 1, 2nd interlude, episode 2 (pp. 3-41)Week 2: Early Adulthood
3rd interlude, episode 3 (pp. 42-62)Week 3: Percival’s Farewell Dinner
4th interlude, episode 4 (pp. 63-85)Week 4: Adulthood
5th interlude, episode 5, 6th interlude, episode 6 (pp. 86-106)Week 5: Reunion Dinner
7th interlude, episode 7, 8th interlude, episode 8 (pp. 107-140)Week 6: Bernard’s Summation
9th interlude, episode 9 (pp. 141-177)
Further Reading
• Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant (Princeton University Press, 2025)
• Modernism and Close Reading, ed. by David James (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Gillian Beer, ‘The Waves: The Life of Anybody’, in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 74-91
If possible, please buy your course books from your local independent bookshop (in person or online), or from one of the online sellers who support independent bookshops, such as uk.bookshop.org (UK) or the US equivalent.
Course Fees (six sessions)
£260.00 Full price
£240.00 VWSGB members
£240.00 CAMcard holders
£240.00 Students on a low income
Notes
• Because this course is mainly group discussion, the sessions will not be recorded.
• We cannot usually refund course fees if you cannot attend. But we might be able to move the booking to another course if you contact us in advance.
Click on the image below to book.
