Download HW 22

Tracy Mendham
HW 22: Responding to Virginia Woolf
for A Blog of One’s Own: Women and Authorship in the Digital Revolution
The purpose of this assignment is to actively read a challenging text, Chapter Two of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of
One’s Own, and understand an important element in it.
You have two options for this homework: “Irony” or “Patriarchy.” You only need to do one of them. You do not need
to do both options.
First, read the second chapter of Viriginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In the edition sold in the bookstore for our
class, this can be found on pages 25-40.
Irony Option
Why talk about irony? As you know from reading Jezebel, Feministing, and other feminist blogs, it’s hard to talk
intelligently about matters related to women’s role in our society without irony, and this was just as true in Virginia
Woolf’s time. Irony can sometimes be hard for students to identify, though, especially when it is subtle or appears in
the writing of an author with which they’re not very familiar.
What’s irony? The most common kind of irony is verbal irony, and that’s when a speaker means and one thing and
says something else. (E.g., “Yeah, having the stomach flu through all of Fall Break was just delightful.”) The second
kind of irony is dramatic irony, when the audience knows something a character doesn’t know. To learn more about
irony, look at Ted Nellen’s “Irony” page at http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/irony.html.

Please compose and post on your blog a response of 150-400 words in which you:

Identify four or more statements in Chapter Two that contain irony and/or sarcasm.

Include in-text citations that tell the reader what page to find the statements on.

Explain clearly why you think they’re ironic. Explain what you think Woolf really thought; irony
means there’s discrepancy between what her words mean taken at face value and what the reader
is really supposed to infer from the statement.

Your own reaction to the reading

Include “HW 22” in a descriptive title, for example: “Books About Women: Isn’t It Ironic? (HW 21)”
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Spellcheck
Patriarchy Option
“Patriarchy” means a society in which fathers are the powerful responsible heads of their families and households,
and by extension, a society in which men hold a disproportionately large share of power.
In Chapter Two of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf recounts; “The most transient visitor to this planet, I
thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is
under the rule of a patriarchy” (Woolf 33).
If you choose this option,

Please compost and post on your blog a response of 150-400 words in which you:

Explain why you think Woolf said the paper proved to that England is a patriarchy and what this
had to do with what else she said in Chapter Two

Include in-text citations that tell the reader what page to find the quotes and statements on.

Look at a major US newspaper (either in print or online) from today or the past week, and make
note of whether that paper would give a transient visitor to our planet the impression that the
United States is a patriarchy

Include “HW 22” in a descriptive title, for example: “Patriarchy is Dead...So the Manchester Union
Leader Must Be Written by Zombies” (HW 22)”

Spellcheck
The Mason Library has subscriptions to many newspapers, and you can find them in the Current Periodicals room.
Online editions of major newspapers include:

The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/

The Boston Globe at http://www.boston.com/

The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/