COURSE DESCRIPTION
Our class will examine Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography as our primary text to understand how genre functions and allows Woolf to transcend the limitations of her era. In our course, we will examine the ways Woolf satirizes the style. of a classic biography giving her audience a story that is fantastical rather than historical and factual. We will discuss how Woolf contributes to revolutionizing the fantasy genre and thus expands the possibilities of identity and relationship to time.
Orlando’s immortality and gender transformation challenge conventional notions of identity and gender roles and the novel is considered Woolf’s great love letter to the writer Vita Sackville-West, in a time when lesbian affairs were taboo and socially and culturally punished. We will read Woolf closely to identify the ways her stylistic choices aid in her exploration of the fluidity of gender and desire. Through our discussions, we will formulate claims about how Woolf's use of genre facilitates her message and how rhetorical choices allow her to traverse publishers’ censorship and public critique. Throughout the ten weeks, we will come to decide how subversion of genre conventions can provide new futures and better realities for marginalized persons and provide greater possibilities for identity and self.
In the midterm paper, you will examine Woolf’s rhetorical choices and the way use or subversion of genre conventions allows her to critique the traditional biography, Victorian social mores, and gender norms, while presenting her readers with more radical possibilities for literature and gender fluidity. In the second half of the course, we will apply what we’ve learned to crafting our own creative and contemporary social critique.