Meeting Needs, Making Room

This chapter accounts for a consistent feminist pedagogy across Woolf’s fiction, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) and Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), this chapter demonstrates a consistent attention in Woolf’s novels to the lessons girls and women must learn in order to survive their patriarchal world: the accommodations (or lack thereof) that the world makes available to them (financially, spatially, institutionally); the misogyny that structures the access boys and men expect to have to the attentions of girls and women as well as the system of punishments and rewards that polices the availability of these attentions; and the sources of love and independence that allow Woolf’s fictional characters to imagine feminist lives and worlds. The chapter carefully situates this account of Woolf’s feminist pedagogy with and against the rich tradition of feminist scholarship on Woolf.

Failing Students

This chapter develops an extensive reading of Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock (1911), in the context of his early career as an elementary schoolteacher. Though the novel itself does not take place in a school, the author reads the relationships among its main characters as literary expressions of three pedagogical problems, which Sedgwick’s meditation on “cats and pedagogy” helps frame: the mobility and asymmetry of teacher–student positions; the complicity of anti-pedagogical resistance in the intensification of pedagogical attachments and needs; and the pedagogical static that can result, for students, from the competing demands of multiple teachers. Undergirding these relational problems is a patterned, thematic link in the novel between misogyny and the failure of relationships, lives, and lessons.

Feeling Shadows

This chapter focuses primarily on “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), Woolf’s unfinished memoir, to reconceptualize the term “moments of being” as pedagogical accidents. The chapter also links Woolf’s pedagogical interest in the moment as a unit of present time to the development of her aesthetic ontology, her vocation as a writer, the importance of feeling and sensation to her thinking, and the critical sensibilities she and her sister Vanessa develop as young Victorian women. The author connects these features of Woolf’s sensuous pedagogy to her early experience teaching at Morley College, drawing significant correspondences between “A Sketch of the Past” and her early vivid report on teaching history at this institution.

Coda

The coda opens with a reflection on Barbara Johnson’s “Teaching Ignorance: L’École des femmes” (1982), which sets up a concluding retrospective on the author’s own readerly relationships to Woolf and Lawrence. He explores the implications of figuring the relationship between readers and writers as a relationship between students and teachers, wondering if individual readers become different sorts of students when they move from book to book, writer to writer: e.g., a disciple of one; a distracted troublemaker for another. The author suggests that a dual phenomenon of devotion and distraction structures his own approach to and volley back and forth between Woolf and Lawrence.

Orienting Desires, Guarding Love

This chapter expands the analysis of Chapter 2, turning to The White Peacock (1911), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) to redress an oversight in Lawrence’s reception: the absence of a queer Lawrence. The chapter reads three respective relationships in these novels as instances of what Sedgwick calls “queer tutelage,” a pedagogical relationship associated with care, protection, love, and deviation from reproductive and familial logics and norms. Though Lawrence’s characters never sustain their queer attachments or loves, these three exciting and painfully brief experiments demonstrate Lawrence’s careful narrative attention to sexual and processual (re)orientations that model three different problematics: sustaining an erotic friendship and mutual guardianship into adulthood; affirming a love that seems resistant to general models or norms; and maintaining a resilient resistance to the normal and an awareness of the pernicious / generative links among shame, sex, education, and the future.

Essaying Affects

This chapter intervenes in the critical reception of Lawrence’s literary studies, works that scholarship tends to mine for their insights into Lawrence’s metaphysics or psychology rather than insights into the critical study of literature. Reading his criticism as criticism, the author argues that Lawrence’s study of Thomas Hardy, his survey of American literature, and his return to the Book of Revelation near the end of his life model practices of reparative reading avant la lettre. Lawrence believes that novels can teach readers to live and feel. He mobilizes this belief into a method that identifies moments of tension or intensity in literary texts and models how readers can inhabit these tensions and intensities, trying them out, essaying literary affects as means to their own ends. Moreover, Lawrence’s literary studies attend to a range of needs: his own, his readers’, and those of the books he effortfully repairs.

Training Tastes

This chapter turns to both volumes of Woolf’s Common Reader series (1925, 1932) to develop an account of them as exemplary pedagogical projects that model private taste-training. Challenging a critical consensus that emphasizes values of conversation and community in the study of Woolf’s essays, this chapter argues that her (common) reading pedagogy privileges solitude and privacy as groundworks for the free and idiosyncratic development of readerly taste. Elaborating Woolf’s practices and theories of reading, the chapter surveys the wide variety of approaches her criticism takes to fiction, poetry, and life-writing. It concludes with an assessment of her repeated references in the Common Reader essays to death, ruin, and the question of what remains when writers die and centuries pass. When read within the context of the solitude and freedom of her reading pedagogy, this preoccupation with human remains motivates a mode of ethical and critical acknowledgement attentive to traces of the dead’s life and labor.

Introduction: Pedagogy, Feeling, and the Study of Modernism

This introduction presents the primary argument of The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence: namely, that Woolf and Lawrence worry a lot about teaching and learning and that they do so in languages of feeling, affect, or intensity. The introduction also surveys modernist studies scholarship that addresses pedagogy and education, elaborates the term “sensuous pedagogies,” details the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the methods and concerns of the author’s study, previews the respective significance of solitude and relationality to Woolf and Lawrence’s pedagogies, glosses the critical conversations in Woolf and Lawrence studies that the author hopes to join, and clarifies the role of the sixteen “assignments” he plots across the book.