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The Hours

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1989: White Angel, The Best American Short Stories' 1993:Guggenheim Fellowship ... diary wrote 'Love-making after 25 years can't bear to be separate...you see it is ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The Hours


1
The Hours
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Michael Cunningham

2
(No Transcript)
3
Michael Cunningham
  • 1. Life
  • Born in November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio,
    growing up in Pasadena California.
  • B. A. of English literature at Stanford
    University Master of Fine Arts degree from the
    University of Iowa

4
Michael Cunningham
  • 2. Awards
  • 1989 White Angel, The Best American Short
    Stories
  • 1993Guggenheim Fellowship
  • 1995 the Whiting Writers Award
  • 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

5
Michael Cunningham
  • 3. Work teaching at the Fine Arts Work Center in
    Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative
    writing MFA program at Brooklyn College a
    producer
  • 4. Novel
  • 1984 Golden States
  • 1990 A Home at the end of the World

6
Michael Cunningham
  • 4. Novel
  • 1995 Flesh and Blood
  • 1998 The Hours (establishing Cunningham as a
    major force in American writing awarded Pulitzer
    Prize for Fiction, 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award,
    1999 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered
    Book Award, 1999)
  • 2005 Specimen Days (not well received by
    American critics)

7
Michael Cunningham
  • Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered
    for 18 years, he dislikes being referred to as
    only a gay writer, because while being gay
    does greatly influence his work, he feels that it
    is not (and should not be) his defining
    characteristic.

8
Virginia Woolf
  • 1. Early life
  • Raised in an environment filled with the
    influences of Victorian literary society
  • Father Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor, critic,
    and biographer connection to William Thackeray
  • Mother Julia Stephan, descended from an
    attendant of Marie Antoinette, coming from a
    family of renowned beauties who left their mark
    on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite
    artists and early photographers

9
Virginia Woolf
  • Parents association Henry James, George Elliot,
    George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron, and
    James Russell Lowell
  • 22 Hyde Park Gate classic and English literature
  • St Ives in Cornwall childhood memories, a place
    for the Stephan family to spend summer until 1895
    (the Talland House, the Godrevy Lighthouse
    informed the fiction she wrote in later years,
    notably To the lighthouse)

10
Virginia Woolf
  • Nervous Breakdowns led by
  • 1. Family members death
  • 1895 mother died of influenza
  • 1897 half sister Stella died
  • 1904 the death of her father provoking her most
    alarming collapse and her being briefly
    institutionalized

11
Virginia Woolf
  • Nervous Breakdowns
  • 2. the sexual abuse by her half-brothers George
    and Gerald (recalled in her autobiographical
    essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park
    Gate)
  • 3. bipolar disorder, a posthumous diagnosis, an
    illness which coloured her work, relationships,
    and life and eventually led to her suicide

12
Virginia Woolf
  • 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury
  • Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner,
    Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf, forming the
    nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the
    Bloomsbury Group
  • The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual
    exclusivity

13
Virginia Woolf
  • 2. Personal life
  • Marriage married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912 (a
    penniless Jew) a close bond but never fully
    consummated Virginias diary wrote Love-making
    after 25 years cant bear to be separateyou see
    it is enormous pleasure being wanted a wife. And
    our marriage so complete.
  • Hogarth Press

14
Virginia Woolf
  • Sexuality women directed
  • A Lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West
    through most of the 1920s (In 1928, Woolf
    presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a
    fantastical biography in which the eponymous
    heros life spans three centuries and both
    genders the longest and most charming love
    letter in literature

15
Virginia Woolf
  • Other intimate friendships Madge Vaughn (the
    daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for
    the character of Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet
    Dickinson, composer, and Suffragette Ethel Smyth
    sister Vanessa Bell

16
Virginia Woolf
  • 3. Death
  • Events that caused her death
  • 1. mental depression
  • 2. the ongoing war and the destruction of her
    homes in London during the air raid
  • 3. the cool reception of her biography on her
    late friend Roger Fry

17
Virginia Woolf
  • On 28 March 1941, rather than having another
    nervous breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by
    weighing her pockets with stones and walking into
    the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not
    found until April 18. Her husband buried her
    remains under a tree in the garden of their house
    in Rodmell, Sussex.

18
Virginia Woolf
  • 4. Contribution
  • 1. One of the greatest innovators in the English
    literature
  • 2. stream-of-consciousness, the underlying
    psychological as well as emotional motives of
    characters, and the various possibilities of
    fractured narrative and chronology
  • 3. E. M. Forster she pushed the English language
    a little further against the dark.

19
Virginia Woolf
  • 5. Critics against Woolf
  • 1. epitomizing the narrow world of the
    upper-middle class English intelligentsia,
    lacking in universality and dept, without the
    power to communicate anything of emotional or
    ethical relevance to the disillusioned common
    reader.

20
Virginia Woolf
  • 5. Critics against Woolf
  • 2. an anti-Semite and a snob
  • In her diary I do not like the Jewish voice I
    do not like the Jewish Laugh.
  • In her 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth How I hated
    marrying a JewWhat a snob I was, for they have
    immense vitality.

21
Virginia Woolf
  • 6. Work
  • Novels
  • The Voyage Out (1915)
  • Night and Day (1919)
  • Jacob's Room (1922)
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (1927)
  • Orlando A Biography (1928)
  • The Waves (1931)
  • The Years (1937)
  • Between the Acts (1941)

22
Mrs Dalloway
  • Characters
  • 1. Clarissa Dalloway based on Woolfs childhood
    friend, Kitty Maxse
  • 2. Richard Dalloway
  • 3. Elizabeth Dalloway
  • 4. Peter Walsh
  • 5. Sally Seton/Lady Rosseter
  • 6. Miss Kilman
  • 7. Septimus Warren Smith

23
Mrs Dalloway
  • Characters
  • 8. Lucrezia Warren Smith
  • 9. Dr. Holmes
  • 10. Sir William Bradshaw
  • 11. Lady Bradshaw

24
Mrs Dalloway
  • Themes
  • 1. The sea as symbolic of life The ebb and flow
    of life. When the image is portrayed as being
    harmonized, the sea represents a great confidence
    and comfort. Yet, when the image is presented as
    disjointed or uncomfortable, it symbolizes
    disassociation, loneliness, and fear
  • 2. Doubling Septimus as Clarissas doppleganger,
    the alternate persona, the darker, more internal
    personality compared to Clarissas very social
    and singular outlook.

25
Virginia Woolf
  • Themes
  • 3. The intersection of time and timelessness
    Woolfs prose has blurred the distinction between
    dream and reality, between the past and present.
  • 4. Social commentary the flimsy lifestyle of
    Englands upper classes at the time of the novel

26
Virginia Woolf
  • Themes
  • 5. The world of the sane and insane side by side
    Woolf portrays the sane grasping for significant
    and substantial connections to life, living among
    those who have been cut off from such connections
    and who suffer because of the improper treatment
    they, henceforth, receive.

27
The Hours (novel)
  • 1. The book concerns three generations of women
    affected by Virginia Woolf
  • A. Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923
    and struggling with her own mental illness.
  • B. Mrs. Brown (the name from Woolfs short prose
    Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown), wife of a WWII
    veteran, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as
    she plans her husbands birthday party.

28
The Hours
  • C. Clarissay Vaughn, a lesbian, who plans a party
    in1999 to celebrate a major literary award
    received by her good friend and former lover, the
    poet Richard, who is dying of AIDS.
  • 2. Written in the stream-of-consciousness style

29
The Hours
  • Themes
  • 1. LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender)
    issues To some extent the novel examines the
    freedom with which successive generations have
    been able to express their sexuality freely, to
    the public, even to themselves.
  • 2. Mental illness Cunninghams novel suggests to
    some extent, perceived mental illness can be a
    legitimate expression of perspective.
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