When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, b... more When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind-the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read Clarissa Harlowe, for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of Anna Karenina. At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson's qualities-his verbosity, his obliqueness-are contrasted with Tolstoi's brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this.
What I want to do is to share insights about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in the p... more What I want to do is to share insights about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in the process to offer new readings of this canonical text. By gentle degrees, by looking at names and intertextual references to Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Howards End and The Odyssey, I want to make To the Lighthouse new again. I want to share the fun and exhilaration to be found in repeated rereading. At the same time, fun and exhilaration do not preclude deeper, more painful considerations. Ultimately, what I want to do is to think about To the Lighthouse as an antiwar novel, and to make the case that it is one of the greatest books ever written about the causes and consequences of war. World War I, in particular, and all wars, in general, permeate every line of the book. Behind domestic activities and the pastoral pleasures of a family summer holiday broods the constant horror of war, a horror so numbing it can only be approached indirectly and by suggestion.
Ever since Edmund Gosse published Father and Son in 1907, father memoirs have caused a kind of Li... more Ever since Edmund Gosse published Father and Son in 1907, father memoirs have caused a kind of Linnean unease. In talking about Gosse’s book in The Development of English Biography (1927), Harold Nicholson said it is not "a conventional biography; still less is it an autobiography. It is something entirely original; it is a triumphant experiment in an entirely new form." Almost seventy years later, Mary Gordon, at work on The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996), wondered if she wasn't writing "some non-fiction genre whose proper name has not yet been found." More recently, Michael Frayn, speaking of My Father’s Fortune (2010), said that "it's not really autobiography; it's a memoir of my father." This paper will argue that critical father writing is distinct enough, numerous enough and good enough to merit genre status. Neither memoir nor biography, personal father writing is a unique hybrid, a hybrid worthy of scholarly attention, a hybrid for which I propose the name of patremoir. In the following discussion, I will consider why the patremoir emerged when it did, and why Gosse should be given credit for originating it, even if it took more than fifty years for other writers to follow his example.
This paper will first glance at Virginia’s public criticism of Edmund Gosse, criticism in which s... more This paper will first glance at Virginia’s public criticism of Edmund Gosse, criticism in which she came dangerously close to posthumously outing him as homosexual. It will then go on to briefly look at some of what she had to say about him in her diaries and letters, before exploring the possibility that Virginia used elements of Gosse in both Orlando (1928) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The paper will then conclude with speculations about why Gosse was so important to Virginia.
While writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf took time out to give a talk to a group of Hayes... more While writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf took time out to give a talk to a group of Hayes Court schoolgirls. In “How Should One Read a Book?” (1927), the first of three essay versions of this talk, Woolf suggests comparing Clarissa Harlowe to Anna Karenina. Among other things, she asks “And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator?” In effect, what she is doing is to ask readers to use their reading as an anthropological tool. Measuring books against each other, she suggests, is a way of questioning society and of recalibrating our standard of values.
Unsurprisingly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby illustrating and putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, and the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay owes a lot to Dolly and Kitty. In both novels, a Grimms’ fairy tale is used to deepen characterization and to explore thematic concerns. On the motherhood front, Woolf accepts, expands, and sometimes contradicts many of Tolstoy's ideas. By probing parallels between the two novels, and by questioning how Woolf’s ideas about motherhood compare to Tolstoy’s, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel as a vehicle to challenge ideas of motherhood in popular culture.
When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, b... more When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind-the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read Clarissa Harlowe, for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of Anna Karenina. At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson's qualities-his verbosity, his obliqueness-are contrasted with Tolstoi's brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this.
What I want to do is to share insights about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in the p... more What I want to do is to share insights about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in the process to offer new readings of this canonical text. By gentle degrees, by looking at names and intertextual references to Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Howards End and The Odyssey, I want to make To the Lighthouse new again. I want to share the fun and exhilaration to be found in repeated rereading. At the same time, fun and exhilaration do not preclude deeper, more painful considerations. Ultimately, what I want to do is to think about To the Lighthouse as an antiwar novel, and to make the case that it is one of the greatest books ever written about the causes and consequences of war. World War I, in particular, and all wars, in general, permeate every line of the book. Behind domestic activities and the pastoral pleasures of a family summer holiday broods the constant horror of war, a horror so numbing it can only be approached indirectly and by suggestion.
Ever since Edmund Gosse published Father and Son in 1907, father memoirs have caused a kind of Li... more Ever since Edmund Gosse published Father and Son in 1907, father memoirs have caused a kind of Linnean unease. In talking about Gosse’s book in The Development of English Biography (1927), Harold Nicholson said it is not "a conventional biography; still less is it an autobiography. It is something entirely original; it is a triumphant experiment in an entirely new form." Almost seventy years later, Mary Gordon, at work on The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996), wondered if she wasn't writing "some non-fiction genre whose proper name has not yet been found." More recently, Michael Frayn, speaking of My Father’s Fortune (2010), said that "it's not really autobiography; it's a memoir of my father." This paper will argue that critical father writing is distinct enough, numerous enough and good enough to merit genre status. Neither memoir nor biography, personal father writing is a unique hybrid, a hybrid worthy of scholarly attention, a hybrid for which I propose the name of patremoir. In the following discussion, I will consider why the patremoir emerged when it did, and why Gosse should be given credit for originating it, even if it took more than fifty years for other writers to follow his example.
This paper will first glance at Virginia’s public criticism of Edmund Gosse, criticism in which s... more This paper will first glance at Virginia’s public criticism of Edmund Gosse, criticism in which she came dangerously close to posthumously outing him as homosexual. It will then go on to briefly look at some of what she had to say about him in her diaries and letters, before exploring the possibility that Virginia used elements of Gosse in both Orlando (1928) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The paper will then conclude with speculations about why Gosse was so important to Virginia.
While writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf took time out to give a talk to a group of Hayes... more While writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf took time out to give a talk to a group of Hayes Court schoolgirls. In “How Should One Read a Book?” (1927), the first of three essay versions of this talk, Woolf suggests comparing Clarissa Harlowe to Anna Karenina. Among other things, she asks “And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator?” In effect, what she is doing is to ask readers to use their reading as an anthropological tool. Measuring books against each other, she suggests, is a way of questioning society and of recalibrating our standard of values.
Unsurprisingly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby illustrating and putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, and the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay owes a lot to Dolly and Kitty. In both novels, a Grimms’ fairy tale is used to deepen characterization and to explore thematic concerns. On the motherhood front, Woolf accepts, expands, and sometimes contradicts many of Tolstoy's ideas. By probing parallels between the two novels, and by questioning how Woolf’s ideas about motherhood compare to Tolstoy’s, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel as a vehicle to challenge ideas of motherhood in popular culture.
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Papers by Andre Gerard
This paper will argue that critical father writing is distinct enough, numerous enough and good enough to merit genre status. Neither memoir nor biography, personal father writing is a unique hybrid, a hybrid worthy of scholarly attention, a hybrid for which I propose the name of patremoir. In the following discussion, I will consider why the patremoir emerged when it did, and why Gosse should be given credit for originating it, even if it took more than fifty years for other writers to follow his example.
Unsurprisingly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby illustrating and putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, and the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay owes a lot to Dolly and Kitty. In both novels, a Grimms’ fairy tale is used to deepen characterization and to explore thematic concerns. On the motherhood front, Woolf accepts, expands, and sometimes contradicts many of Tolstoy's ideas. By probing parallels between the two novels, and by questioning how Woolf’s ideas about motherhood compare to Tolstoy’s, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel as a vehicle to challenge ideas of motherhood in popular culture.
This paper will argue that critical father writing is distinct enough, numerous enough and good enough to merit genre status. Neither memoir nor biography, personal father writing is a unique hybrid, a hybrid worthy of scholarly attention, a hybrid for which I propose the name of patremoir. In the following discussion, I will consider why the patremoir emerged when it did, and why Gosse should be given credit for originating it, even if it took more than fifty years for other writers to follow his example.
Unsurprisingly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby illustrating and putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, and the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay owes a lot to Dolly and Kitty. In both novels, a Grimms’ fairy tale is used to deepen characterization and to explore thematic concerns. On the motherhood front, Woolf accepts, expands, and sometimes contradicts many of Tolstoy's ideas. By probing parallels between the two novels, and by questioning how Woolf’s ideas about motherhood compare to Tolstoy’s, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel as a vehicle to challenge ideas of motherhood in popular culture.