Benjamin D. Hagen – författare

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance explores the intersection of two fundamental interests of Virginia Woolf, offering to feminist modernist studies cutting-edge readings of primary works, comparative studies of Woolf and other modernist professionals–performers, and fresh accounts of Woolf’s relationship to women’s professional and public labor. The eleven chapters demonstrate the double valence of the volume’s key words: “performance” conveys acts of staging as well as occupational work while “profession” encompasses careers and occupations as well as staged declarations. Moreover, “performance” evokes a sense of the “performative”: speech acts, gestures, and other signifying behaviors that make something so, accomplishing and avowing lived realities as well as ethical values, socio-political positions, aesthetic preferences, and life-securing identities and hopes for the present and future. Beyond this semantic play, the stakes of the entanglement of profession and performance in Woolf’s life and work are far-reaching. Centering a concern with modernist networks, this collection explores women’s labor in literary and other aesthetic fields (e.g., publishing and photography), labor which professes new values and models new methods. Several chapters develop clarifying critiques of gender politics that reward the reproduction of professional status quos, highlighting subversive performances that threaten to unmoor, modify, or discard these politics.

Winner of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America’s Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College while Lawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between 1902 and 1912. The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence reframes Woolf and Lawrence’s later experiments in fiction, life-writing, and literary criticism as the works of former teachers, of writers (that is) still preoccupied with pedagogy. More specifically, the book argues that across their respective writing careers they conceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation, emotion, or intensity. But the “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrence depict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather, they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces, and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction, for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playing the student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models a novel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom of common readers (who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure). In addition, Sensuous Pedagogies reads Lawrence’s literary criticism as reparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and their respective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogical concerns.

Winner of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America’s Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College while Lawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between 1902 and 1912. The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence reframes Woolf and Lawrence’s later experiments in fiction, life-writing, and literary criticism as the works of former teachers, of writers (that is) still preoccupied with pedagogy. More specifically, the book argues that across their respective writing careers they conceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation, emotion, or intensity. But the “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrence depict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather, they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces, and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction, for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playing the student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models a novel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom of common readers (who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure). In addition, Sensuous Pedagogies reads Lawrence’s literary criticism as reparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and their respective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogical concerns.