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First-Year Seminar, HONR 101A

“Ruin and Re-begetting”

Fall 2021

DePauw University

NOTES FROM PROFESSOR ANDREA SUNUNU

In the fall of 2021, the twelve enterprising students in my HONR 101A first-year seminar, “Ruin and Re-begetting,” undertook research that has led to our website, Bloomsbury and Early Hogarth Press Authors: Influences and Intersections. This website follows the Bloomsbury Group website produced by my HONR 101A seminar in the Fall of 2020: URL. The website produced by my Senior Seminar, ENG 451, "Subverters and Self-fashioners; Revisiting Shakespeare’s Sisters Nearly a Century After Woolf" ––URL–– served as a model for both HONR 101 websites. In all three seminars students began by writing a brief, non-digitized chronology; then, with invaluable help from Tenzer Technology Center at DePauw University, they transformed their chronology into an interactive timeline by using Timeline JS.

I’m grateful, once again, to Michael Boyles for guiding students through the process and creating this website, which features twelve names divided into two sections:

A. Some Core Bloomsbury Members

1. Sir Desmond MacCarthy (May 20, 1877 - June 7, 1952): Literary journalist, editor, and critic

2. E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster (Jan. 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970): Novelist, essayist, and critic

3. Leonard Woolf (25 Nov. 1880 - 14 Aug. 1969): Man of letters and political worker

4. Virginia Woolf, née Stephen (Jan. 25, 1887 - March 28, 1941): Novelist and essayist

B. Influences and Intersections

5. Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11, 1815 - Jan. 26, 1879): Photographer, great-aunt of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; the Hogarth Press published some of her photographs

6. Sir Leslie Stephen (Nov. 28, 1832 - Feb. 22, 1904): Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s father; critic, man of letters, first editor of the DNB (Dictionary of National Biography)

7. G. E. (George Edward) Moore (Nov. 4, 1873 - Oct. 24, 1958): Philosopher whose ideas inspired the Bloomsbury Group

8. T.S. Eliot (Sept. 26, 1888 - Jan. 4, 1965): Poet, playwright, literary critic, essayist

9. Katherine Mansfield (Oct. 14, 1888 - Jan. 9, 1923): Short-story writer (b. in New Zealand)

10. Arthur Waley (Aug. 19, 1889 - June 27, 1966): Translator of Chinese & Japanese literature

11. Roy Campbell (Oct. 2, 1901 - April 22, 1957): South African critic and war poet

12. Laurens van der Post (Dec. 13, 1906 -Dec. 16, 1996): South African author and journalist

I prefaced the prompt for the digital timelines with two epigraphs:

On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.

––Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924)

Bloomsbury group, name given to a coterie of English writers, philosophers, and artists who frequently met between about 1907 and 1930 at the houses of Clive and Vanessa Bell and of Vanessa's brother and sister Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) in the Bloomsbury district of London, the area around the British Museum. They discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) and by A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910-13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful and questioned accepted ideas with a "comprehensive irreverence" for all kinds of sham.

––Encyclopedia Britannica

CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO SEE THE INTERACTIVE TIMELINES