Department of English

It seems counter-intuitive to pair Woolf and Eliot given the usual impression of the American poet as being conservative and religious, whereas the British author was a feminist, an atheist, and much more on the left. However, for two decades, they were close friends who saw each other regularly and respected the other’s judgments. Woolf printed two of Eliot’s books herself and often deferred to his literary pronouncements. They met at the end of the Great War in 1918 and kept their dialogue open and dynamic until the untimely demise of Woolf in 1941. However, even if she deferred to Eliot’s esthetic pronouncement, Woolf never shared his views on a “dissociation of sensibility” that would have been brought about by the English revolution. Her own historiography of England resulted in a different effort at rewriting subjective positions, which entailed pushing against gender boundaries. After a comparative biographical introduction, the class will focus on major texts by Eliot such as Prufrock and other observations, The Waste Land, Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, Murder in the Cathedral and the Four Quartets, and by Woolf such as Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and the posthumous novel Between the Acts. We will compare their abundant output in literary criticism and assess their fundamental philosophical tenets while surveying the main themes they treated, like memory, desire, war, cities, neurosis, history, gender and sexuality.