Cost and Registration Information
Early Registration Price (August 7 at 10 am – August 31 at 4 pm): $220
Regular Registration Price (August 31 at 4 pm – first day of class): $242
Members, seniors, and students get a 10% discount.
Mark your Calendar!
The Newberry Bookstore will re-open on August 14, and you will once again be able to find most of your assigned books for sale there.
Seminar Description
In her diary, Virginia Woolf wrote that it annoyed her when people asked her what the lighthouse in her famous 1927 novel meant: “I meant nothing by [it],” she asserted in response. What, then, is the lighthouse, if not a symbol? In her 1931 magnum opus, The Waves, it is even more difficult to say what the titular natural phenomenon “stands for.” We will consider what implications these apparently symbolic images have for an understanding of Woolf’s primary concern: the restlessness of the human psyche, its swings from mood to mood and from eros to the death drive. We will consider criticism and analysis of Woolf’s work, but we will primarily immerse ourselves in the novels themselves, their structure, their visual and musical virtuosity, their mystery and beauty, and the pure pleasure of their sentences.
Six sessions. E - $220, L - $242
Natania Rosenfeld has published a poetry collection, Wild Domestic (Sheep Meadow Press 2015), and a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton 2000). She is Professor Emerita of English at Knox College
Materials List
Required:
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, HBJ, 1989. ISBN: 978-0156907392
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves, HBJ, 1978. ISBN: 978-0156949606
- Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, Mariner Books, 2003. ISBN: 978-0156027915
Optional:
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Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, University of California Press, 1996. ISBN: 978-0520205048
First Reading:
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For the first class, please read all diary entries pertaining to To the Lighthouse.
This class is part of the Newberry’s Adult Education Seminars Program. Learn more about our registration procedures.