Professor Dame Hermione Lee - Virginia Woolf, Eccentricity, and the Essay
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- Опубликовано: 31 янв 2021
- Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. Her most recent book is a biography of the playwright Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: A Life. From 1998 to 2008 she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as a Trustee of the Wolfson Foundation and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What a wonderful talk. Glad to see Professor Lee still going. I loved her biography of Virginia Woolf, and this is only adding to my interest in her work. Much thanks for your tireless efforts and deep insights. All the best.
Wonderful .... Thank you Dame Hermione.
Not wonderful - A sham - You had better do a little reading of great writers - Read Richard Steel, Bacon, Swift, Plato, FR Leavis, 9:50 Lionel Trilling, Lamb, Not William Faulkner, Not Gore Vidal, Not J. Austin
Thank you for this Dame Hermione; much appreciated. I am a Birkbeck London University English graduate and studied Woolf in the early 1980's. I am also bipolar myself; you said Dame Hermione once on a TV programme ages ago that Woolf's novels aren't so great as many people consider them to be; and that Woolf had a profound insight into the creative imaginative mind; I totally agree. However, Woolf is too idealised politically as a writer to satisfy more and more people I now think. Professor Barbara Hardy of Birkbeck said in a lecture I attended that Woolf's novels were nebulous; this was probably almost a dismissal of Woolf due to Woolf's lack of societal structuring from multi-form angles. Virginia Woolf never escaped from the prison of her upper class ideas; she was a snob; she had a definite and profound aversion to ordinary people - especially the working classes. Her room of one's own was essentially her room and you needed a private income to live in that protected room. Woolf never managed to fuse body and mind - she had a near dread of her body and waste products. I was once totally a profound admirer of Woolf - but my views now have changed. I regard her novel To the Lighthouse as an exquisite work of literary art; and some of her essays interest me. Woolf is still I think held to be a feminist icon; I am a man - a well educated man - and I find the early Victorian writer Emily Bronte far more of a icon; Bronte did fuse mysticism with violence and the earth; she was not terrified of existence - but faced it bravely; Emily Bronte - if she had lived longer - would have become a major European writer; Virginia Woolf will never be this I think. This is not an all-out attack on Virginia Woolf; I am a male intense admirer of a limited amount of Woolf's creative work. One can stay in bed as Lamb and Woolf might have done if one is nursed and paid for by others - most people had to work and they did. I have experienced a bipolar illness since the age of 18 and I am now 73. And this little personal estimation of Woolf I have definitely condensed without looseness - or made the attempt to do so; nebulous being is self-being all-inclusiveness - one understands why Woolf drowned herself in the waters near her privileged home - for in many ways nothing is more totally one symbolically I think than the seas; I have listened to Woolf's vision of a language she could construct to suit herself - a speech is available from a radio programme that Woolf broadcast once - and it seems a somewhat grandiose vision at least to me. Sadly, I think Woolf's new language she would have pushed as the acceptable language of an elite. If only she had the dual world experience of Emily Bronte - Woolf may then have become a major writer; Woolf is not a genius; very brilliant; and not as original as most readers think.
What an excellent piece of writing you have shared with all of us. What must be an essential personal generosity is evident throughout the entirety of your post.
For whatever it is worth, I completely agree with your assessment of Emily Bronte.
Thank you for your writing's honesty and its bottom line Good Quality.
There can be no such thing as ‘bi polar’.
I do SO hope that Ms. Lee will one day turn her formidable attention to Emily Dickinson, another “eccentric”.
You had better do some reading of significant essayists - read Lamb - then wait a couple of weeks and re-read what you have read - the re-read it.
Read Swift - with care - read Lionel Trilling - Read FR Leavis - read Bacon - read Seneca - read Plato - find a couple of passages of Plato and read those passages over and over - Read Plato’s “Gorgias” - Read Henry Fielding - Read Collingwood - read FH Bradley’s “Ethical Studies”, particularly ‘Essay III’ - read Bradley slowly and carefully - and re-read him - read just one page of Bradley per day.
Thank you Dame/Dr. Hermione Lee for taking time out of your busy schedule in dwelling on "life-writing" and the associated angst being perceived as "eccentricity". After all *normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from*. Let's foster this spirit to live life fully now, as also read and/both write it. Perhaps, "genius" is the inexhaustibly capacity to do what one wants to and let our "genii" not be "affear'd" in pursuing the same. Was it Biddulph Martin? I'm forgetting the names as well. If we see the her/history of Theory and the her/history of Ideas as the her/history of shapes, "eccentricity" is not a bad shape of thought itself. One is always tip-toeing around the kernel, until one collapses in an inter-stellar manner to the centre.
Personally, one of my greatest self-achievements have been very strong and vivid dreams. During the second year of my college, Professor Lee, I would have very long dreams and I preferred them over attending the morning 9:05 to 9:50 am classes. I would then clean everything spic and span on and off and seek the sublime in the domestic. I gazed at the woody furniture and penetrate itself visuality through the "polysaccharide" signifier floating in my literary imagination. During this time, I was not Woolf-literate and had only so much as heard about it deploying the "stream-of-consciousness" technique.
The "subterranean" and the submarine often recur as objective correlatives of any Woolf-afterthought as one sub/un/consciously lives her "life-text" while walking out on the market and saying to the first acquaintance: "Hi Kenta!" and "awful! awful!" in self-consciousness if anything goes awry or is set askew. But O.C. is not the fitting lexicon to "describe" Woolf. That's why a Norton Woolf, is well-nigh implausible since "describing" Woolf is being prescriptive. "Clinical" almost for someone who patronized the former, binding and printing with her bare hands and her dear husband in the Hogarth House.
As an aside, in the Sex and The City "text", in "The Domino Effect" episode in Season 6, I believe, the convalescence become the locus of contemplating the authenticity of relationship between Big and Carrie. Things heat up as Carrie doesn't know if Big will succumb to the angioplasty he'd been supposedly undergoing, evoking a "the gradual isolation of the human subject from the need for human contact" (Mukhopadhyaya, Priyasha in "Death and the Automobile). The article published in HU is crucial since it retains its modernity to the 21st century reader despite being imbricated strictly within the inter-war years and the associated techno-philia/phobia. The un-missable paralleling, complementing of the avian and the airplane in Mukhopadhyaya's short but interesting article, reminds one of the airplane which everyone looks up to. Flight is seen as the harbinger of good times and "prostheses" is seen as being "extra-linguistic" by returning to the body, en-shaping it through the technological. Perhaps, this is the wedding of the technical sciences in theory for now, also exemplified in Geeta Patel's highly inter-textual "Techno-intimacy", that, however, "may I just say thank god", eschews the Futurist perfection.
I'm also inclined to think of the lack of fear of death which is Futurism's obsession with a personal masculinist quest to conquer if not pursue speed, exemplified by Chris Hemsworth's exceptional portrayal of James Hunt in "Rush" (2013). I am afraid of the dangers of inflecting the techno-tachyic with the masculinism in this regard, "but deader than dead", is a continual MOB for the masculinist journey, although I could be erroneous in generalizing my specific stand-point.
The article's reference to "guillotine" I think underscores the revving up of the spirit as the verve of the masculine life one so misses. I miss it when I see a bike whoosh past me for instance, or if I see a plane take off while still tangential to the tarmac. "Guillotine" is the proverbial death-card in the Tarrot. Haha. And I if I were to cherrypick the "political subject" here and rather pursue my unity, I would say James Hunt was also pursuing the personal is the political project in his own way by making passionate love with the nurse. He seems to have a life of his own, aware of but not at all influenced by his family. He imitates Samantha Jones in being able to have a passionate moment with the air-hostess/female-cabin-crew aboard his flight and it is a sorry state that patriarchy overdetermines the lack of such life-style choices to very few. And indeed, futurist morality is sexual which incorporates the national, the fiscal, the environmental, the social, the personal-political. The re-birth of the Futurist Subject was announced, methinks by the Samantha Character who exercises choices both on/off-screen although the context is pretty pink and not the timbre of the metal, not the "violent jolt of the capital". I'm now inclined to think of myself as Futurist who foresees life, not death. :))
Yes, l agree.Just started reading Emily Dickinson- a real Challenge.
Phoney - Superficial - Devoid of Sentiment - Enotionally immature- Incompetent - Lackey - Petty
Oxford has been a wasteland for 20 years
Read someone competent! This is shallow commentary! Empty! Immature! Think for yourself!