Syllabus

(Sensitive content is indicated with a 'CW' for 'content warning', with some brief indication of the nature of the content.)

Term One

Week One: Introduction

Reading:

Mrs Dalloway, up to page 80.

Extra resources:

You may like to read an article in the New Yorker about why people have been reading Mrs Dalloway during the pandemic, for a topical angle: Why Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to Mrs. Dalloway

Week Two: Time in Narrative

Reading:

Mrs Dalloway, to the end.

Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, "Introduction," "Order," "Duration"

Genette handout -- *key* preparation for Week 2 seminar

Woolf, Mrs Dalloway pp. 28-32

If you have time/interest to think about further questions:

Questions re. the Woolf passage re. psychoanalysis and narrative

Slides:

Some weeks I have included the slides of mini-lectures -- I will go through any essential material in the seminar, but if you need to have a look at some online resources ahead of time or afterwards, there are slides, and -- in weeks 2, 4 and 8, hastily made videos -- from my pandemic teaching:

Time in Narrative (Genette and Woolf) -- slides

Powerpoint videos -- Time in Narrative (week 2)

Week Three: Space and Time

Reading:

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, (UTP, 1981), pg 84-258.

Handout -- guide to Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope

Watching:

Christopher Nolan (dir.), Memento (2000)

Slides:

Space and Time (slides) -- Week 3

Week Four: Phenomenological Time

Reading:

Henri Bergson, from Time and free will: an essay on the immediate data of consciousness - Library Search (serialssolutions.com) pp. 75-139 (focus on pp.90-139: from 'It is advisable to' to 'give up its symbolical substitute.')

[or see Time and Free Will: section collected as 'The Idea of Duration' in Henri Bergson, Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (Continuum, 2002)]

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989): pp. 5-10, 18-24, 134-47 (see digitized PDF on TALIS).

Bergson and Deleuze -- questions to prepare for next week

Slides:

Phenomenological Time -- SlidesLink opens in a new window

Extra resources:

Bergson:

BBC Radio 4, In Our Time: Bergson and Time (particularly recommended as this is challenging material -- but don't worry if it's a bit baffling, we will draw out what's important and useful in the session).

(listen to particularly 05.08 -- 8.25; 10.42 -- 15.56; and 17.52 -- 25.18 but it's all good value. Around these sections on the philosophy, there are discussions of his theory of evolution (how new things come into being), and his clashes with Einstein and the new physics, for instance)

Rock Star Philosopher -- Emily Herring on Bergson

Emily Thomas on The Philosophy of Time and the New Thinking about Time in C20 (video) -- listen to 06.10 -- 08.50

Deleuze:

Slides on Deleuze, the time image, the chronotope and film (in particular Memento)

Slides AND VIDEO on Deleuze, the time-image, the chronotope and film (in particular Memento)

Slides AND VIDEO on The Shining, Bergson and Deleuze's Time-Image

Memento timeline

Week Five: Mrs Dalloway and other critical approaches

Reading:

Kimberly Engdahl Coates's 'Virginia Woolf's Queer Time and Place: Wartime London and a World Aslant', in Queer Bloomsbury (2016), pp. 276-293. Available on TALIS.

Woolf on how her contemporaries were responding to the shock and destabilizing impulse of World War One:

Woolf's How it Strikes a Contemporary (virginia.edu)

Woolf and mental health: Patricia Waugh, 'The novelist as voice hearer', The Lancet (2015); Michael Whitworth on Mrs Dalloway and mental health (critical survey)

Week Six: READING WEEK

Week Seven:

Reading:

Ali Smith, The Accidental

Week Eight: The Future

Reading:

Stephen Kern, 'The Future', The Culture of Space and Time: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)

Slides:

The Future (slides)

Heidegger, the Future and (Existential) Anxiety (video and slides)

Week Nine: Time and Non-Normative Mental States

CW: mental illness, trauma

Reading:

Eugène Minkowski, from Lived Time [1933], trans. Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern Press, 1970)

Matthew Broome, 'The Neuroscience, Psychopathology and Philosophy of Time', Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 12: 3 (2005), 187-194

Judith Herman, from Trauma and Recovery (1992)

Preparatory handout on Non-Normative Mental States and Time

Extra resources:

Non-Normative Mental States, Mrs D and The Accidental (ideas, exercises)

A bit leftfield, but a talk (slides and video) I have written on dementia, time and laughter -- tangential link to the Minkowski!

Week 10

Recap, informal feedback.

Other supplementary term 1 materials:

Talk on reading Mrs Dalloway via further Genette/Narrative Discourse material; Paul Ricoeur's section on Mrs Dalloway in his monumental work on time and literary narrative, and Mark Currie's book about time and narrative (which mostly covers contemporary fiction but touches on Mrs D), About Time.

From Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 2, 100-112

Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh, Univ. Press, 2007), introduction, chapter 3 and chapter 5

Others' Time (slides)

Powerpoint videos -- Others' Time

Term Two

Week One

CW: (terminal) illness, cancer, bereavement

Reading:

Marion Coutts, The Iceberg

Slides:

Time and The Iceberg (slides)

Week Two: Illness Time

CW: (terminal) illness, cancer, bereavement

Reading:

Sarah Lochlann Jain, 'Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics', Representations, vol. 98. no. 1 (2007), 77-92

Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. Body, Illness and Ethics. Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Slides:

Coutts and Illness Time (slides)

Extra resource:

A talk by Coutts about The Iceberg in the Medicine Unboxed series

Week 3: Grief Time

CW: bereavement; grief, sudden death

Reading:

Denise Riley, from Time Lived without Its Flow; poetry

Lisa Baraitser in Conversation with Denise Riley. Studies in the Maternal (2016), 8(1), p.5 Link to the article

Caroline Pearce, ‘Making Sense of Grief’, in The Public and Private Management of Grief (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 61-101.

Slides:

Grief Time (slides)

Extra resources:

A recent piece on grief, narrative time and Ali Smith (also referencing Denise Riley!)

Week Four: Time and Work

Reading:

E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism'

from Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work (chapters 1&2)

Readings from Ling Ma, Severance;

Extra resources:

Collection of online essays (Post 45 website) on Severance

Extra reading:

Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do -- an oral history by Terkel, a well-known broadcaster at the time, offering accounts of people's experience of work and what makes it meaningful for them. Written in 1974 but still fascinating and full of insight about the experience of work.