ENGL 078C. Virginia Woolf

GSST
A defining figure of twentieth-century modernism, Virginia Woolf was a relentless and dazzling innovator in literary form, an incisive literary and cultural critic, and an unsparingly intimate memoirist. This course situates Woolf’s investigations of memory, intimacy, illness, loss, shame, and desire alongside the early-twentieth-century advent of psychoanalysis and contemporary queer theory. We will attend to the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in Woolf’s works, from her interest in the modernist cosmopolis as a site of avant-garde aesthetics and queer play to her critiques of empire and global capital. We will examine Woolf’s turn to nonfiction in the late 1930s as an attempt to diagnose the patriarchal violence endemic in institutions of governance, finance, and higher education-and, ultimately, in the rise of fascism.

Short secondary readings and investigative/reflective assignments will ask students to explore Woolf’s formative influence for generations of readers and writers-from fiction writers and memoirists to the newly-burgeoning fields of bibliotherapy and self-care-as well as contemporary queer engagements with modernist fiction.
Humanities
1 credit
Eligible for GSST
Spring 2026. Patnaik.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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