Reflections on Teaching Mrs Dalloway in Iraqi Kurdistan: An Interview with Steven Barfield (Part 2)

6 December 2021

Alan Ali Saeed, Sulaimani University, and Steven Barfield, London South Bank University

In Part I of this interview, published in our October issue, Steven Barfield and Alan Ali Saeed discussed the students of Sulaimani University’s interactions with Mrs Dalloway and with modernism more broadly. In this second and final part of the interview, the pair discuss the wider contemporary resonances of identity in Mrs Dalloway with transcultural perspectives, and the pedagogical methods which inform this.

Reflections on Teaching Mrs Dalloway in Iraqi Kurdistan: An Interview with Steven Barfield (Part 1)

8 November 2021

Alan Ali Saeed, Sulaimani University, and Steven Barfield, London South Bank University

The following is the first of two parts of an interview between Steven Barfield and Alan Ali Saeed. Steven Barfield was a British academic for most of his career, teaching principally at the University of Westminster, London. More recently he has been an educational consultant and has taught, mentored, and advised throughout the middle east. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at London South Bank University. Alan Ali Saeed, the interviewer, lectures in Modern English Literature at Sulaimani University and Komar University of Science and Technology (KUST), Iraqi Kurdistan. In this part of the interview, the two discuss Steven’s experience of teaching Mrs Dalloway in Alan’s city in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the students’ interactions with the text and with modernism more broadly.

Death Comes to the Party: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

01 June 2021

Charlotte Hallahan, University of East Anglia

In 1925, Woolf heard news of her friend Jacques Raverat’s death at a party. Afterwards, in her diary, she wrote: ‘I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips’.^[1] In Mrs Dalloway (1925), the solemn news of Septimus Warren Smith’s death interrupts Clarissa Dalloway’s party. But Clarissa sees Septimus’ death as a license to live, to return to her party (to, perhaps, ‘go out of the room talking’). In Woolf’s party, we see the curious meeting of life and death, where death holds the ability to give life order and meaning.