Tag: english department
Prof. Elizabeth Abel Talks Odd Affinities and Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts (website) got there first, nonetheless I’m thrilled to share the news that Prof. Elizabeth Abel released Odd Affinities : Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies with the University of Chicago Press this year.
Prof. Abel (faculty page) teaches with the UC Berkeley English Department. They teach courses on Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group as well as broader overviews of 19th and 20th century English literatures. This fall, they are leading courses “Memoir and Memory” as well as on graduate readings and special study.
In Odd Affinities, Prof. Abel discusses Woolf’s influence beyond a female tradition, looking at echoes of Woolf work in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. Looking at those “odd affinities,” Abel looks at how “Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy was constituted by her elusive and shifting presence.”
You can access Abel’s book through the UC Library Search, where you can access it online and download the fulltext.
Fun with the Library Collection: The EUA’s Student Book Club
by Taylor Follett
Calling undergrads! We all use the Library for study and research, but the collections are bursting with popular novels, collections from local poets, YA, graphic novels, and everything you might need for a cozy weekend of pleasure writing. The UC Berkeley English Undergraduate Association’s book club, EUA Reads is indulging this semester by reading and discussing three wonderful works pulled from Library bookshelves. Whether you want to follow along on your own or join the EUA for their fortnightly book club, please join us in reading these picks!
Maggie Nelson
Mary Ruefle
Claudia Rankine
Continue reading “Fun with the Library Collection: The EUA’s Student Book Club”
Weike Wang’s “Chemistry” and Asian-Anglophone Narrative Voices
Jane Hu, a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s English Department, recently published “The “Inscrutable” Voices of Asian-Anglophone Fiction” in The New Yorker. Hu considers the narrative deftness of the new novel Chemistry by Weike Wang before embarking on an extended meditation of the construction of narrative voicings within influential Asian-Anglophone works, drawing on interviews with Wang and other important figures. She notes a pattern in which many of these novels “feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access.” An informative read for anybody interested in contemporary fiction, Asian-Anglophone works, or narrative voice, Hu’s article sheds new light on the works she discusses.
Check out the novels at the Berkeley libraries!
