In a new series of episodes, The Virtual Jewel Box will feature conversations about great books.

Scott Black and Jessica Straley discuss Mrs. Dalloway as a novel of thresholds: between past and present, sound and silence, intimacy and distance. Reading closely from the opening line through Big Ben’s leaden circles, they show how Woolf’s stream of consciousness turns a single June day, a walk through London, and a party into an inquiry into memory, war, love, and social life. They invite readers to consider how Woolf’s prose, down to its use of the semicolon, reflects on perception, privacy, and what it means to live with other minds.

Jessica Straley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah.

See also: Jenny Noice, “A Hundred Years of Mrs. Dalloway,” JSTOR Daily.

Episode art: Photo of Virginia Woolf, circa 1927. Virginia Woolf Monk's House photographs, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.

In this episode, Scott Black talks with literary scholar Joseph Metz about The Feeling of the Form: Empathy and Aesthetics from Büchner to Rilke (Cornell University Press), Metz’s cultural and intellectual history of empathy that traces the origins of the concept back to 19th-century German art theory. Drawing on close readings of Georg Büchner, Adalbert Stifter, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Metz shows how empathy originated as Einfühlung, a theory of bodily projection into objects and forms, before later becoming a model for interpersonal feeling.

They also discuss Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps, Kant and nineteenth-century neurophysiology, debates between vitalism and materialism, and the ethical limits of understanding others.

Joseph Metz is Associate Professor of German in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah.

Episode art: from Charles Le Brun, Expressions des passions de l’Ame, as a frontispiece to Henri Testelin, Sentimens des plus Habiles Peintres sur la Pratique de la Peinture et Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.

In this episode, Omi Salas-SantaCruz talks with Leandra Hernández about Queer, Women of Color, and Critical Approaches to Feminist Mentorship and Pedagogy (University of Illinois Press), co-edited by Hernández, Stevie M. Munz, and Jessica Pauly. Along the way, they discuss the power of feminist mentorship, the ecological webs of care that sustain scholars and students, and the forms of solidarity that help communities thrive even in times of precarity.

Leandra Hernández is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, and Omi Salas-SantaCruz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Culture and Society, at the University of Utah.

See also:

• Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender
• Feminist Mentoring in Academia (Lexington Books)

Episode art: Detail from Yreina D. Cervántez, Mujer de Mucha Enagua, PA' TI XICANA, 1999 Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.