Discuss the ways in which Woolf’s writing engages with questions of materiality and/or spirituality.

The essay should make substantial REFERENCE to TWO or more texts by Virginia Woolf [possibly chosen from this reading list: The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays].

TOPICS LIST:

1. ‘Why, since life holds only so many hours, waste one of them on being lectured?’ (Woolf, ‘Why?’). How does Woolf’s writing respond to figures of authority and power?
2. Discuss the ways in which Woolf’s writing engages with questions of materiality and/or spirituality.
3. ‘Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us’ (Woolf, Orlando). What significance does the natural world have in Woolf’s writing?
4. ‘The terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ were useful to Woolf and are useful in reading her, as they speak to so many concerns which were foremost in her mind’ (Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations). Consider the ways in which Woolf’s writing engages with the public and private spheres. Was one more important than the other to her?
5. To what extent, and in what ways, does Woolf’s writing challenge conventions of genre?
6. ‘It is precisely in her insistence on the sexual inflection of all questions of historical understanding and literary representation that Woolf is a feminist writer’ (Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations). To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?
7. Discuss how Woolf’s writing relates to an important development in either the philosophical, political or scientific debates of her time.
8(Woolf, The Waves). With reference to narrative style, discuss how Woolf explores the relationship between stasis and movement.
9. ‘One of the important connections between Woolf’s fictional and nonfictional writing is her persistent interest in how people – real and imagined – have negotiated the conflict between what they want and what is expected of them’ (Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World). In what ways does Woolf’s writing explore the relationship between individual desires and societal conventions.
10. ‘Though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other’ (Woolf, ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’). Discuss how Woolf’s writing influences and/or is influenced by visual art.
11. Discuss how any two of the following issues intersect in Woolf’s writing: race, class, sexuality, animality.