Guest Lecture Prof. Dr. Anette Pankratz: „Fun, Fantasy and Caricature: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando“

(as part of the „Textanalyseseminar“, Group 3, taught by Gerold Sedlmayr)

On 7 November 1928, Virginia Woolf remarked about her latest novel Orlando: “I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value” (7 November 1928). Mission accomplished: the novel tells the fantastical story of someone who lives from Elizabethan to modern times and changes sex in between; it gallops through history, caricaturing learned biographers and eminent geniuses. The guest lecture will contextualise Orlando as an example of (high) modernist writing – and hopefully demonstrate that both modernism and Virginia Woolf are nothing to be afraid of.