Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) December 28, 2011: I found Theodore Koulouris' book HELLENISM AND LOSS IN THE WORK OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (Ashgate, 2011) to be a wonderfully engaging study. However, I did not find Koulouris' writing style to be wonderfully engaging, to put it mildly. He does not write short sentences very often.
In any event, Koulouris ably contextualizes Virginia Woolf's life and work in her times. Virginia Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf. Her maiden name was Virginia Stephen. Her father was Leslie Stephen, an agnostic. Virginia Woolf is often regarded as a feminist writer among a group of feminist writers known as first-wave feminists. From the 1970s onward, second-wave and later feminist scholars have enriched our resources for understanding Virginia Woolf's life and work. Koulouris ably draws on the scholarly resources now available about Virginia Woolf.
However, he also manages to find previously unexplored angles of her life and work to explore in his new fascinating study, most notably her study of ancient Greek. But of course Virginia Stephen undertook her study of ancient Greek within the larger historical context of British Hellenism in her day. (There has not been an American counterpart to British Hellenism.)
Koulouris mentions and briefly discusses Virginia Woolf's 1937 published eulogy for Janet Case, who had been her first tutor for her private lessons in Greek years earlier (page 65). As a result of her early lessons in Greek with different tutors over the years, Woolf could read Greek with relative ease, but "she was unable to compose in Greek" (page 37).
From the time of Erasmus and Thomas More and others, including Peter Ramus, in the educational movement that we refer to as Renaissance humanism onward, formal education in Great Britain and in the American colonies involved cultivation of Latin and Greek, and the veneration and emulation of ancient Greek and Latin works.
During the roughly thousand-year period known as the Middle Ages, Latin had been the lingua franca of educated people and of formal learning. And Greek was not unknown. But the style of medieval Latin authors did not compare well with the style of Cicero.
But Erasmus and Thomas More were concerned with style in their Latin writings. For them, Cicero was understandably the great exemplar of style in Latin. But Cicero's decidedly rhetorical style was kind of long-winded and windy -- or, in the word that Koulouris dwells on in his engaging study of Virginia Woolf, voluble (volubility arises as the result of cultivating what Erasmus refers to as "copia"). Incidentally, Koulouris, who mentions Erasmus and Thomas More only in passing and doesn't mention Cicero at all, writes skillfully precise but nevertheless lengthy sentences that are not unlike the voluble style that he painstakingly delineates, the voluble academic and public style that Virginia Woolf reacted against.
Virginia Woolf's reaction against voluble people reminded me of Emily Dickinson's short poem "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" She compares being nobody to being somebody. In Virginia Woolf's terminology, those people in the world who think they are somebody tend to be voluble. I understand that educated men may be over-represented in the group of voluble people. I understand that voluble people can seem unduly self-important and overbearing at times, especially to the group of people who would agree with Dickinson that they are nobodies in the world. For the nobodies, private conversations can be wonderful. I-thou communication can be memorable. In addition, academics who make classroom presentations and all variety of people who speak in public, including people who talk in public on television and radio talk shows running the risk of loving to hear the sound of our own voices. But it strikes me that being voluble is probably always going to be part of public speaking, as distinct to speaking in a private conversation that is not being broadcast on radio or television or being recorded for broadcast or for the purposes of oral history.
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