Virginia Woolf is sexy

While reading Elbow’s “The Music of Form,” I tried to think of ways to explain the concepts of Itch, Scratch, Anticipation, Relief, Satisfaction, etc. to my students. Elbow’s ideas about what keeps a reader reading made sense to me, but it’s not much good to my students if I can’t explain these things to them. (And I suspect it wouldn’t be that productive to assign my students a 50-pg article to read.) I thought of the sex analogy of course…since isn’t sex all about anticipation and eventual satisfaction? But really, I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about all that with my students, even if it were only a metaphor.

The next thing I tried to do was find someone else’s language to explain Elbow’s ideas. It occurred to me that Virginia Woolf’s essays are an excellent example of dynamic nonfiction that is driven by an energy not contained in a Thesis Statement or linking techniques, such as topic sentences. I spent a month or so last summer reading through Woolf’s volumes of essays—an interest that surprised me, because I’m not usually so interested in nonfiction. I liked Woolf’s novels, so I suppose I was drawn to her writerly sensibility in the first place. The personality she projects into the page seems consistent, whether she’s animating one of her fictional characters, or writing about Coleridge’s journals. I think one of her essays on a literary figure or work of literature would be a great example of Elbow’s idea of the “voice” or “ethos” that can bind an essay together, even if the essay deals with several different ideas. Woolf’s essays are also an example of the “thought-narrative” method of organizing an essay, since Woolf as an essayist seems to work her way through a train of thought as she writes. Of course this impression is an illusion, as Elbow points out, since the essays were worked and reworked before publication.

But now another problem arises: how do I get my students to read Virginia Woolf? I think she seems inaccessible to at least half of my 20 students, because she’s Literature, but not someone my students would have read in high school. I’m not quite willing to give up on this idea, though. What if I went through just PART of a Woolf essay with my students, slowly? Perhaps some students would begin to like her, or at least realize she’s readable.