Mrs Dalloway in Johannesburg: Reconceptualizing Literariness in Woolf’s Novel after #FeesMustFall1

Abstract

This article describes my experience teaching Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as part of a third-year English Literature course during the #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa and the calls for curriculum transformation across the academy that ensued. In particular, it discusses students’ heightened awareness of “the social function of difficulty” (Diepeveen 30) and the critical doubt to which activist readings of Woolf’s aesthetic were subsequently subjected. It then explains how the introduction of recent neuro-cognitive approaches to Woolf’s writing provided a surprisingly enabling approach to the novel in this context by illuminating both the intuitive and “transforming” (Miall and Kuiken 125) version of literariness that Mrs Dalloway explicitly promotes, as well as the specialized and arguably elitist one that Woolf’s difficult and “multiply embedded” (Zunshine 279) aesthetic implicitly inscribes. My conclusion is a largely speculative one: I propose that the cognitive approach had some efficacy in this context because it helped students translate their intuitive and affective responses to Woolf’s difficulty into analytical terms and, moreover, legitimized the feelings of alienation that her work often engenders.