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WORKSHOP IN POETICS
Workshop in Poetics: Emily Kopley: “The Waves as Lyric Poem”
Wednesday May 30, 2012 | 06:00 -08:00 PM | Boardroom

Please join us on Wednesday May 30 for a workshop entitled "The Waves as Lyric Novel," a presentation of dissertation research by Emily Kopley (English).

Emily has provided us with this abstract of her research project, which nicely situates the section we will be discussing:


My dissertation, currently suffering from the simple paratactic title “Virginia Woolf and Poetry,” argues that Virginia Woolf enjoyed a lifelong rivalry with poetry that
motivated and informed much of her fiction and nonfiction. Woolf, primarily a prose writer, considered poetry patriarchal yet conducive
to conveying the inner life and creating community. Pursuing a chronological approach, I trace Woolf's attitude towards poetry from
childhood to writerly maturity, as the attitude evolved from avoidance to competition to nostalgic collaboration. Woolf wrote of “the novel,
that cannibal,” and she cannibalized poetry with her own prose, vaunting prose above poetry in explicit critical essays, making many
hitherto unnoticed allusions to poetry, and experimenting with techniques of poetry such as soliloquy, metaphor, and rhythm. I also
uncover Woolf’s reception as a poet-by-another-name by Auden and other British poets who were young in the 1930s. The project aims to clarify Woolf’s oeuvre,
authorial anxiety about genre, and the gender-vexed relations between prose and poetry in the British interwar period.

This selection is part of my 4th chapter, on The Waves. I have previously written about Woolf's rivalry with and reception with the
1930s poets (Ch. 5) and on Woolf's mockery of contemporary women poets in Orlando (Ch. 3). (I have not yet written my first two chapters,
the first on Woolf's beginnings as a writer and the second on To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own.) While Chs. 3 and 5 are largely
concerned with Woolf's anxiety about poetry and trumpeting the novel, this chapter is largely concerned with Woolf's absorption of poetic
technique into prose so as to create a new kind of novel. This is my first chapter to focus on form. I will be very grateful for any and
all your thoughts on it. Thanks for reading.


We hope you can join us for our final workshop of the year - as usual, dinner will be served.