Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence
Winner of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America’s Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies
Though the differences in
style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and
1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College while
Lawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between
1902 and 1912. The Sensuous
Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence reframes Woolf and Lawrence’s later experiments
in fiction, life-writing, and literary criticism as the works of former
teachers, of writers (that is) still preoccupied with pedagogy. More
specifically, the book argues that across their respective writing careers they
conceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation,
emotion, or intensity. But the “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrence
depict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather,
they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces,
and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction,
for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playing
the student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models a
novel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom of
common readers (who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure). In
addition, Sensuous Pedagogies reads Lawrence’s literary criticism as
reparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and their
respective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogical
concerns.