My research paper will explore a reading of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf from the perspective of the experience of the pandemic within the novel. Clearly a much more subtle presence than the war, according to Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, the “era’s viral catastrophe has been hidden since its arrival, drowned out by its overwhelming scope, by the broader ways outbreaks of disease are often muted, and by the way the human-inflicted violence of the time consumed cultural and literary attention” (2). The cited author argues that deaths from disease are measured differently from casualties of war. This resonates strongly at present, when deaths each day from COVID 19 can equal the number of fatalities on the one day of September 11 although the numbers carry completely different connotations. It is only when pandemic deaths are compared to deaths in all recent wars combined that the gravity is felt. How are Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway more similar if compared in this context̅—one being a victim of an external enemy and the other a victim of an internal one? What is the connection between pandemic and modernism?
The Modernist Novel
ENGL 387, Professor Allred, Spring 2021
This is a creative and unexpected topic, Florencia, and of course a timely one. I like the way this approach links material questions to philosophical and narrative questions: how does modernist narrative model “viral” spread of pathogens, but also affective states, thoughts, ideologies, etc.? In addition to Outka, you might look at work on representations of “masses” and “crowds” in modernism, which has been a hot topic. As discussed, might be worth a peek at the slender PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER for a very different take on the pandemic.