Literary Interpretation: Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare
This MIT seminar pairs Virginia Woolf's major novels and essays with the Shakespeare plays that shaped or haunted her writing. Readings include Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale alongside Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Discussion tracks how a twentieth-century novelist reworks material from three centuries earlier across genre, media, and gender, drawing on literary criticism to place both writers in their historical and artistic contexts. Materials consist of the full reading list, session-by-session discussion topics, and written assignments as published on MIT OpenCourseWare, with no enrollment fee and no certificate offered. Best suited to readers already comfortable with close textual analysis and seminar-style discussion of literature.