Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence

Winner of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America’s Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies Though the differences instyle and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College whileLawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between1902 and 1912. The SensuousPedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence reframes Woolf and Lawrence’s later experimentsin fiction, life-writing, and literary criticism as the works of formerteachers, of writers (that is) still preoccupied with pedagogy. Morespecifically, the book argues that across their respective writing careers theyconceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation,emotion, or intensity. But the “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrencedepict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather,they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces,and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction,for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playingthe student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models anovel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom ofcommon readers (who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure). Inaddition, Sensuous Pedagogies reads Lawrence’s literary criticism asreparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and theirrespective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogicalconcerns.