Virginia Woolf’s Chapter Three of A Room of One’s Own

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John Guillory “Canon” Pages 233-239.

Virginia Woolf’s Chapter Three of A Room of One’s Own

Please save your document as LASTNAME_RQ#Canon and Wolf so I know which one is your assignment.

1 of  these questions must be answered as a comment in Voice Thread presentation in Module 1

Read the questions first, then read the essays with intention, and then type concise answers to the questions. Please send me an email if you have trouble with the assignment.

“Canon”

  1. The texts in the Bible were chosen according to which rule?
  2. how beautiful the texts were.
  3. how universal their appeal was.
  4. how the texts measured against the standard of the religious community
  5. all of the above.
  6. Even though the essay starts with the example about the Biblical texts that make up the Biblical canon, the subject of the essay is the “literary canon.” After reading the essay explain briefly what is the “literary canon”.
  7. Elaborate on this: What is the disturbing and indisputable fact that has prompted the reaction of the “critics of the literary canon”? What is your opinion in this regard?
  8. From page 234 on, Guillory is going to look into the process of exclusion from the canon. He imagines different hypotheses.  Read pages 234 to 236 and describe briefly the following positions:
    1. The liberal critic of the canon
    2. The defender of the canon.
  10. What is YOUR position? Are you closer to the liberal critique or the conservative position?  If you don’t have an opinion about literary text, imagine we are talking about music, or film… Explain your answer.
  11. On page 238 Guillory dismisses the way canon formation has concentrated on the issues of democratic representation on one side, and the issue of individual worth on the other. Instead, he suggests the following: “The problem of canon-formation is one aspect of a much larger history of the ways in which societies have organized and regulated practices of reading and writing (it is perhaps an illusion of our own age to believe that we are free to read and write whatever, whenever, and however we wish)” (my emphasis). After reading pages 237-239 explain his argument briefly.
  12. This question MUST be answered also in the VT.What is your reaction to the statement in parenthesis in the previous quote? Do you think we (as people living in the western hemisphere in 2020) are free to read and write whatever, whenever, and however we wish? If not, what are the limitations, where do they come from? Please use Guillory’s arguments to support yours.

 Virginia Woolf’s chapter.

  1. Do you think that the essay you just read by John Guillory explains this statement from Woolf?

“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written   the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

  1. Pay attention to this quote: “Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. ” Why would she hide them or set fire to them?
  2. Pay attention to this quote (always in the context of the essay) ” When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.” Explain what is Woolf’s reasoning to think this way.
  3. Think and comment on the point Woolf makes in this final passage. “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? …To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper. Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. ‘See what Mr Oscar Browning says,’ he would say; and there so was not only Mr Oscar Browning; there was the SATURDAY REVIEW; there was Mr Greg [….] there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work.” EXPLAIN WHAT IS THE POINT THAT WOOLF IS MAKING IN THIS PASSAGE.